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| - Divrge is something else entirely - in a great way. I've done the The Rec Room VR (toronto location) and IMAX VR (Scotiabank theatre location) but they are incomparable to Divrge. If you're reading this for a recommendation, then YES - GO TO DIVRGE, I guarantee your VR experience will be nothing less than phenomenal. So why 4/5 stars you may ask? The VR experience is great however I dock a star because the entire experience from start to finish wasn't perfect (read more below):
Gameplay (5/5): Again, huge advocate for the in-game experience. I was truly impressed with the HTC Vive set up and I found it incredibly accurate (unlike the horrid accuracy of the The Rec Room VR) which I feel is one of the most important features of a VR experience. My group of 4 that I came with ended up playing Smashbox Arena, Arizona Sunshine and another title that I can't seem to find on their website. All great multiplayer titles and had no problems with motion sickness on these FPS games. For some titles we didn't get to play exclusively with our group, we had others popping in and out which in some cases elevated the experience and in others took away from it. I'll talk more about that below. So overall, when you're in the game, the VR is engaging and most of all really enjoyable.
Cost (5/5): ~$34 bucks for 1 HOUR of the best VR experience I've ever had? What a great deal. For comparison - I paid $24 for 15-20mins at the Rec Room and then $12 for 10 mins of gameplay for IMAX VR. A minor note, The Rec Room is a slightly more immersive experience in that its 4D (with smell, touch, and you're actually walking around) but honestly it's not worth it. I'd rather have an accurate system then have to smell or feel heat - lame money grab imo.
My biggest criticism (-1 star): Gameplay Coordination. So how it works at Divrge is that each person gets their own booth. There is a host that takes you through how to use and wear the equipment then you go through a tutorial. Now imagine - your booth is a 64 sq ft (a fairly large space) and our 4 booths were side-by-side. Not in any kind of cluster but along a wall. Once you have the equipment on (head gear and headset) guess how the host coordinates with you to help your group choose a game? He yells at you across a total space of 256 sqft. And guess how we communicate with each other when we're not in a game - that's right we try and yell across the booths to each other. Outside of the actual game itself there is no kind of clear communication method with your group or the host. Now imagine this - it's a Saturday night and the floor has 14 other booths filled with people. There are hosts shouting over hosts and people trying to yell over other groups to get their own friends into a new game. Luckily I had a friend who has a loud distinct voice and we were *with some difficulty* able to coordinate everyone into new titles, but this was by far the MOST frustrating part of the experience. I've got all this high tech equipment on me yet when I'm out of a game I can't use my mic to speak to my friends? There is definitely room for Divrge to improve haha. Although I am going to emphasize again, when you are finally coordinated into a game with your friends you easily forget about those difficulties... until you want to switch to another title HAHA.
Other small criticisms: As a first time Divrge player and still being relatively new the VR space you can't really tell by the game image which ones are multiplayer. So our group was constantly yelling to our host, "CAN WE PLAY THIS ONE? WAIT WHICH GAME IS MULTIPLAYER?" I think there may have been some kind of sort function as our menu was showing all games available (and there were ALOT of games) but we couldn't get ourselves familiarized fast enough with the gameplay selection settings as the time was ticking. One more thing - when we joined games that had more that just the 4 of us we found that 1 - 2 other players were able to customize their in game name. That would've helped tremendously if we had a choice to do that from the start instead of being divrge11, divrge 12, divrge 13, and divrge 14. Eventually you figure out which ones numbers are your friends so this is just a small thing :)
The Entire Experience from the door to leaving (4/5): With the difficulty in communicating outside of a game I've got to say that the hosts were very patient with all of us and friendly throughout the whole hour. It can get really loud as you hear more experienced players yelling and cheering and basically coordinating attacks for whatever games they are in. The space itself was pretty clean and I would come back again and again because I had an amazing time :)
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