Zero Latency VR review

VR games are becoming more common in the gaming space these days. Many people have either a VR headset connected to their PC rigs or might have a PlayStation VR unit connected to their PlayStation 4. While these devices do a really good job at bringing you into the gaming world, they are very limited in what they can do, especially since many of these devices are still connected by cords.

Well, there is another way to experience this phenomenon: Thanks to the people at Zero Latency VR, a company with over 50 venues in 22 countries, you can go into a full dive experience with VR games, something that will test your mind and your senses.

Name: Zero Latency VR
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Session Price: $59 per person (Maximum 8 people)
Session Length: 30 minutes
Available Games: Singularity, Outbreak Origins, Zombie Survival, & Undead Arena (More coming soon)
Website: Zero Latency VR

Thanks to a hook up from one of the lovely PR companies I have a good working relationship with, I attended a session at Zero Latency VR in Melbourne, Australia. Originally it was going to be an invite to the newly opened Sydney location, but unfortunately, an outbreak of that damn virus from 2020 popped up in the area, which caused the borders to get to that location to close down. Thankfully, we were able to get the invite changed to the Melbourne location instead.

After gathering 7 other people together by Facebook, I was able to get everyone into a single session of one of the games that Zero Latency VR provides at this venue. As appealing as it was to play FarCry 3 in VR, that game was not available for our group, so instead, we were given the game known as Singularity, a game that the staff highly recommend for first-time players as it gives you the best experience that Zero Latency VR’s free-roaming setup has to offer.

To give you a quick breakdown of the Singularity game, it’s a Sci-Fi based shooter game (all Zero Latency VR games are shooters) where you are a group of soldiers sent into a derelict spacecraft where all the crew has gone missing, leaving only AI-controlled robots on the ship. Your mission is to evaluate the situation, eliminate all the aggressive robots, and solve the mystery of what happened on the ship. While the plot isn’t too much in terms of lore, what really gets you into the game is the atmosphere and situations you are drawn into, with a very predictable plot twist at the end, but it was still a lot of fun to play.

Before you jump into any game at Zero Latency VR, you need to get geared up. As you can see in the photos and video from our playthrough (Yes, that’s my fat ass in the black outfit with my belly sticking out the bottom of my T-Shirt), you are given quite a lot to wear to do these games. The first thing we had to put on was the backpack itself, which houses a small computer system that remotely connects to the main game server to stream all the files needed to play. We have the usual interface items used in most VR setups: A VR headset and a set of headphones.

My friends over at Razor would be happy to know that many of the newer VR rigs are using Razor headphones, so as you know, this means quality sound at all times. Finally, we got the custom-made controller guns. These weapons were designed with right and left-handed players in mind, so no awkward handling of the gun at all. As you can see, there are tracking balls on the top of the gun, which helps track movement and displays your main weapon interface in the game. Once all this gear is strapped uptight (and I do mean tight!), then you are ready to jump into the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny05AYGxm4Q

Singularity’s in-game experience is pretty much what you would expect if someone made an excellent Sci-Fi version of Alien Isolation. Instead of one big scary alien chasing you down, you got wave after wave of robots coming to smash you in the face. Since it is your job to destroy as many robots as possible, you have a few options available in the weapons you use: A normal blaster, a machine gun, shotgun, and railgun. Flipping between these is very easy as you press a single button on the side of your gun. Reloading is easy, too, as there is a button on the bottom of the handle where a cartridge would go, which you can either press with your opposite hand (recommended by staff) or using your pinkie finger if your hands are large enough.

Where things get intense is in the way Singularity presents its experience. You move (slowly so you don’t bump into anyone) through very tight corridors of the spaceship, moving from one lift to another and getting caught up in situations where you will have robots attacking you from all different directions. Sometimes this will be from corridors around you. Other times you will get floating robot drones that will come from above, below, and everywhere else, attacking you from all angles, forcing you to take cover, use your shield (done by holding your gun sideways across your chest), and communicate with teammates to cover your flank, sides, etc.

But Singularity does more than just give you enemies to shoot. Singularity will also test your mind and your senses through a couple of exciting set pieces that will make you think you are walking down a slanted corridor, walking over a tight ledge bridge with an endless drop under it, and even play with your sense of gravity using angles and different effects. These moments are some of Singularity’s highlights that will really get you to address some fears or just want to try something different. In one of these sections, one of our players went backward up a corridor that curves up the side of a wall, mentioning afterward that he was fighting his body’s natural reaction to falling back against the wall to stabilize itself.

As much as I enjoyed and would recommend Zero Latency VR to many people, it’s not a perfect experience. You have to remember that a lot of the technology used to bring you these experiences is still a work in progress, and glitches, errors, and mistakes will happen. In our play-through, we experienced a backpack dying due to a low recharge, guns desynching or disappearing, and entire player dropouts at random times. But it’s at these times that Zero Latency VR staff really shine in their service.

The second anything goes wrong, you just put your hand up, and the game master will pause the game for everyone and get another staff member to attend to the problem. A lot of these problems that we experienced only cost us a few seconds of game time, extending our whole playtime to 36 minutes, so a 6-minute loss of time out of 30 minutes is ok I guess, though it was close to a third of our total playtime. The worst one of these problems happened to my pack, which somehow managed to despawn my gun and required a complete reset of my pack to fix it. While this was annoying, it gave me a background look at the Windows UI environment that the pack uses, showing me more things to come with these VR experiences.

We did have a couple of negative experiences with the whole VR experience in Singularity, one that involved me having to address my crippling fear of heights by crossing a bridge that was about as wide as my two feet next to each other that hung over an endless fall. So yeah, I was having a tough time trying to convince my brain that there was flat, stable ground under my feet at all times during that section as my vertigo kicked in so badly that I was about to cry, piss myself, pass out, and lose all leg function all at once. Safe to say, I wasn’t impressed that I wasn’t warned about this when the game was explained to me.

The second negative experience came from a combination of things. The first being that if you wear glasses, you’ll either choose to either take your glasses off and not see correctly or keep them on and possibly cause warping to your frames and have a lot of pressure on your skull through the whole game. We had over half our group (including myself) having to take their glasses off, reducing the visual experience a bit (luckily, I’m long-sighted, so I didn’t lose clarity that much). Having glasses off really did have a bad effect on my partner Rachael.

During the boss fight of Singularity, she tried turning to get behind some boxes, and due to not being able to see her foot position, she tripped on her own feet and crashed onto the floor, with the gun device jamming into her ribs. While the staff paused the game and took outstanding care of her, the effects of that fall have caused her to be in pain almost 2 weeks after it happened, possibly a hairline fracture in her rib. It was tough for her to have to drop out at the end due to that injury, but the staff took good care of her and have tried contacting her a few times afterward to check up on her condition. But there needs to be some sort of safety precaution undertaken to protect players who fall in their venue… and a waiver is not the way to do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA8uIMGSLMU

Overall, Zero Latency VR is one amazing experience, and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough for people to go down and play. As soon as our group was done playing, many of us realized that while we were really out of shape, we already wanted to book another session to play some of the other games to see what they had to offer.

I cannot thank the staff enough for their kindness and attentiveness when it came to Rachael’s fall and the experience they provided to us for that 36 minutes that actually felt like over an hour. If your country has a Zero Latency VR venue, I recommend getting a group together and giving the games a try. Singularity is the best one to start with. Then I’d say give some of the zombie modes a try. Personally, I can’t wait to go back and give more games a try with my friends and see how well we do.

Review Disclosure Statement: Zero Latency VR: Singularity was organized for us by Double Jump Communications for review purposes. For more information on how we conduct and handle reviews here, please visit our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info. Thank you