Horizon Call of the Mountain review: Gripping stuff

The PS VR2 exclusive launch title is a climbing and archery simulator set in a spectacular VR world

PlayStation is having another crack at virtual reality – read our full PS VR2 review – and here to help convince you it’s worth while is the platform’s killer app, Horizon Call of the Mountain, a game that deftly demonstrates the new hardware’s power while promising the kinds of experiences that might come next.

Standing out in a launch line-up largely comprised of short demos, ports of games from other VR headsets, plus a few updates to PS5 games you might already own, Horizon Call of the Mountain is a genuinely new thing: an exciting PS VR2 exclusive and a full-length, “proper” game.

Unlike the main Horizon games, this isn’t a free-roaming quest. Instead, it’s a directed, level-based adventure through the same lush post-apocalypse, designed to naturally showcase what the virtual reality headset is capable of. What it turns out the PS VR2 is capable of is dropping you eyes-first into an impressively detailed and beautiful world of ancient ruins, dense forests, snowy ridges and sun-beaten cliffs.

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Horizon Call of the Mountain is an unrelenting series of VR spectacles both epic and small. There are showstopping vistas, such as a series of skyscraper-tall waterfalls plunging hundreds of feet into the mist. Then there are the small details for those who are curious enough to look, such as the thousands of individual strands of fur trim that line your character’s gloved hand, which you can hold up to your own face and investigate from an inch away.

Condensing an open-world, third-person adventure into a seven-hour VR experience necessarily means changing things up a lot, but it’s impressive how much Horizon Call of the Mountain feels like a coherent part of the Horizon universe, and not yet another on-rails VR themepark ride.

Horizon Call of the Mountain: £59.99, Playstation.com

There’s a challenge area for perfecting skills and topping leaderboards (Sony)

While levels pretty much proceed in one direction, you’re free to run around the environment by swinging your arms by your side like a speedwalker, finding secrets, exploring hidden areas, or just positioning yourself closer to a chest so you can reach its handle. You feel present in the world, an actor rather than a spectator.

It’s strange that the game feels restrictive in some other ways. As the title suggests, by far the biggest part of the experience is climbing, which you do by reaching out with the sense controllers to find a handhold, then pulling yourself upwards or sideways towards the next bit of cliff you can grip on to. This is the core of the game, and you’ll spend a lot of time doing it.

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Back in the real world, your physical body is obviously standing still. Your hands and arms, though holding on for dear life in the game, aren’t supporting a single gram of your bodyweight. This makes climbing in Horizon Call of the Mountain feel bizarre, floaty and nauseatingly weightless at first.

It must be how astronauts feel when they scramble around outside the International Space Station. The mismatch between what you’re seeing and what you’re feeling is biologically unpleasant, and the action of repeatedly reaching and grabbing for the next rope or ledge ends up feeling less like a thrilling test of high-stakes endurance and more like a seniors’ aerobics class.

A special safari mode acts as a VR theme-park ride (Sony)

The fixation on climbing as a game mechanic feels like a hangover from traditional third-person action games, where scaling a sheer cliff was a relatively simple set-piece to implement, and could be loaded up with as much dialogue and as many tightly controlled and choreographed action sequences as the designer wanted.

When climbing in virtual reality, you’re necessarily facing forwards. So, you’re mostly staring at nothing but rocks and dirt. The artists behind Horizon Call of the Mountain know this too, because the game has the most graphically detailed moss of any game ever made. Individual rope fibres can be made out, as can the individual glinting flecks of shiny minerals embedded in the stone you’re holding on to. Call of the Mountain makes rocks as fascinating as possible to look at, because, for a large part of the game, they’ll be hovering inches from your face.

The chalk-outlined ledges that define what can and can’t be gripped feel like another overly safe design choice – a traditional gaming trope forced into a fresh VR perspective. It’s not unenjoyable, and probably necessary, but certainly unimaginative. It’s all too easy to be bamboozled by virtual reality, and so, Call of the Mountain treads this line between complexity and accessibility – arrows are basically homing missiles, the way forward is always obvious, and you always know which ledge to grab next.

You can spend a lot of time marvelling at your own hands (Sony)

Your mileage will vary, but I finally got used to the sensation of climbing after about an hour – my tolerance for VR tomfoolery is high and I don’t suffer from motion sickness. The game uses some clever techniques to mitigate woozy gut-feelings too, such as narrowing your field of vision during fast movement. There are also options to teleport from point to point rather than walk, which is a lot more comfortable for some players.

Encounters with the game’s animalistic robot enemies are a highlight, and archery is your main tool when fighting them. You retreive your bow by reaching over your shoulder and grabbing with the R2 button before bringing your arm back down in front of you, then plucking an arrow from your quiver by reaching back with your left hand. To fire, you slot the arrow into the bow, pull back the string and release. It’s a series of physical actions that you become better and better at as you play, until you’re deftly switching between ammunition types mid-combat and launching flurries of arrows at enemies while their weak points are exposed.

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It’s a shame there aren’t more encounters with baddies. Call of the Mountain dishes them out sparingly, and while they feel like the most arcade-y part of the experience, they’re thrilling and superbly designed set-pieces that leave you feeling sweaty and triumphant. The best aspects of combat from the main Horizon games are borrowed – you can target individual parts of the enemy and reduce their defences with status-altering arrows – and the pace of the fighting presents a real tactical challenge.

There are a few combat modes to choose from, depending on how athletic you want to be. Swooshing your arms left or right will strafe or dodge in that direction. You can also physically duck or swerve out of the way of some incoming projectiles, which slows down time to give you an opportunity to counter-attack.

It’s a gratifyingly complex combat system, one that’s rare in VR games, in that it’s not afraid to make you work hard to improve your skills – though I’m certain it drops the difficulty by at least 50 per cent if you die even once.

Eye-contact in VR is eerily convincing (Sony)

The verdict: Horizon Call of the Mountain

Horizon Call of the Mountain is an essential purchase on PS VR2, given the headset’s relatively paltry selection of new games. Immersive, spectacular, and intelligently designed, it feels like a showcase of what the new hardware can do visually, but only a taster of the kinds of novel experiences VR might eventually offer.

Because it’s been specifically designed as an enticement to VR gaming it tends to pander to the unconvinced. It keeps one foot firmly in the genre of conventional third-person action-adventure, leading to some overly simplified systems and a fixation on climbing up stuff for absolutely ages. Less easy to forgive are the consistently arbitrary fetch quests and an entirely unremarkable plot and characters.

But the VR experience is inescapably captivating, the world a joy just to look at, and the frenetic pace of combat ’n’ clambering better than any Jane Fonda workout VHS going. Horizon Call of the Mountain is a fine introduction to the PS VR2’s potential, and leaves us wanting more.

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Want to know what other games are coming out this year? Read our guide to upcoming PS5 games