Crash-landing on Isla Nublar after the fall of the Jurassic World theme park, you'll find yourself trapped in an abandoned research facility when the mission to recover valuable information goes disastrously wrong. To survive, you’ll need to explore and solve puzzles while evading a menagerie of ferocious dinosaurs, including ravenous Pteranodons, cunning Velociraptors and the terrifying T. rex. Will you escape Isla Nublar...?

The developers opted for a cartoonish look with a bright colour palate

Jurassic World Aftermath Collection comes as a bundle allowing you to play the game on either the original PSVR or PSVR2. To gain an understanding of the updates and improvements on the new system I first played the game on the original PSVR.

The first issue, which threw me, was that for some unfathomable reason the game only allows you to use the PS4 DualShock controller. The game would have been so much more immersive and intuitive if the move controllers had been an option.

Graphically the game looks fine enough, however the developers opted for a cartoonish look with a bright colour palate. It looks and feels like a child's game and any jeopardy or suspense is rather muted because of this design. The environments are fairly bland and if you look closely at some of the details in the rooms you can clearly see how they are flat elements just pasted onto the 3D structures, and this makes it look and feel a little cheap.

Explore the facility and avoid the dinosaurs that are running amok

The gameplay is also rather limited. It's simply a case of exploring the facility after the dinosaurs have run amok. But there's no real sense of being able to explore the environment, as the game has very strict set parameters. This means that you constantly feel like you're being shepherded around until you get to the next dinosaur encounter.

I'm not a great horror lover in VR - I truly am the biggest scaredy cat. I almost had a heart attack on Everybody's Golf when the caddie found a spider in the golf cart and threw it towards the screen. It took me ages to stop freaking out at the jumping spiders in Farpoint. And even in Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted I had to watch a video tutorial so I knew where the jump scares were. But Jurassic World Aftermath Collection didn't phase me in the slightest, and I couldn't help feeling that the game would have been so much more engaging if the developers had gone for a more realistic approach when it came to the graphics.

Dinosaur fans will find this a fun, yet slightly limited, offering

Jumping into the PSVR2 edition the introduction of the sense controller made the game instantly more immersive. It was also much easier to open and close cupboard doors to hide from any roaming beasts. Everything seemed to be a lot darker, helping to create a much more intense experience. I also noticed that the flat, pasted on, elements seemed to have been removed in a lot of instances and in general it just looked and played a lot better.

Having said that, it's still really only the younger players, who are not that familiar with VR, that will really get a kick out of this game. For seasoned gamers this feels a little on the shallow side. There's only about 5 hours of play here. But for a new PSVR2 launch game it's fairly cheap and is quite enjoyable.

For those wanting a truly nail biting Jurassic World experience you may be ever so slightly disappointed that this doesn't quite deliver the goods. However, dinosaur fans will find this a fun, yet slightly limited, offering.

7

Darren Rea