Tumble VR Review (PS4 / PSVR)

Ah, humble Tumble – the underrated PlayStation Move title that really proved the power of Sony's motion wand. A little dull on paper perhaps, virtual reality revisit Tumble VR stands taller than the sum of its parts, using three dimensional motion tracking to turn tower building into world beating entertainment. You may just have to take our word for it.

Spread across a series of meticulous trials, you must use surgeon-like precision to place blocks on a ceramic plinth. Sometimes you'll need to build a tower as tall as possible, other times you'll need to pack all of your bricks into a designated space, with the consistent theme being that you'll need a steady hand and a plan if you want to earn the highest awards.

You'll need to complete different criteria in order to earn the top gongs, with a Bronze medal generally available without much thought. It's those all-important Golds that will tax your grey matter, of course; bricks are made up of different properties, forcing you to think about the various weights and surfaces of the components that you're placing down.

Rubber, for example, has a grippy exterior, and can be used to form foundations, but it's light and squidgy nature means that it won't absorb tremors quite as well as, say, glass – which can be prone to slip. You'll need to weigh up all of these things as you arrange your blocks in the optimal order, aiming to fulfil the conditions laid out by the wise-cracking drone who plots your progress.

The motion tracking, as was the case on the PlayStation 3, is the star of the show here, and the added depth enabled by the stereoscopic image of PlayStation VR only enhances things. It allows you to precisely judge exactly where you're going to place a brick, and this is essential when you're trying to balance perilously poised towers – or even just slot a block beneath a laser or limbo stick.

You can play with either the PlayStation Move or the DualShock 4, but we actually came to prefer the latter. Where the former uses its PS3 control scheme – seeing you flicking objects in order to rotate them in your hand – the DS4 employs the analogue sticks, reserving the motion tracking for the more finicky task of placing your blocks on the stage.

We did encounter some issues when reaching to the top of our tower, presumably because the lightbar on the controller was blocking out the lights on our headset, but this is something that we could have solved by standing or re-positioning the camera. You can also move the tower up and down in front of you, should you need to work in a smaller space.

There's much more to the campaign than just building towers, though. Some stages tax your explosive skills, tasking you with finding the structural weaknesses in a pre-assembled building and blowing it to smithereens. Other times you'll need to use coloured glass and mirrors to direct laser beams around small shelf-like stages. There's a lot of variety across the campaign.

Which is all polished off with an asymmetrical multiplayer mode. This takes advantage of PlayStation VR's social screen, and sees one player assume the role of a drone, attempting to collapse the tower that the headset wearer is trying to build. Playing as the drone isn't all that much fun to be frank, but it's a good demonstration of how virtual reality can be used for unique competitive experiences.