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Sairento VR is a power fantasy. A frantic, neon-drenched assault on the senses with the most complex, fluid and satisfying combat system I’ve yet to encounter in VR. While the game’s storytelling functions largely to contextualize your actions, the sensation of slicing, shooting, wall-running and sliding your way through its vivid vision of a near-future.
After running the tutorial in, I fired up the first campaign mission. Still a little unclear on how the controls would handle, I was hoping that the game would start a slowly so I could get the hang of things. It turns out that a bit of action was just what I needed.
Sairento VR Brings The Action ImmediatelyI took a tentative step into the simulated cyber-enhanced streets of future Japan and looked around in wonder. Neon signs dotted the street in front of cheerful storefronts. A digital grid overhead indicated that yes, I was indeed in the Matrix.
Across the street, two shrouded figures were walking on patrol. Assuming them to be enemies, I glanced about for a way to get the drop on them. Spotting a streetlamp halfway between us, I took a leap into the air, arcing gently down to perch atop it. Neither enemy spotted me, but it was clear that the path of the guy on the left would take him right beneath me. As he approached, I readied myself for what I assumed would be an intense battle.
Dropping from my vantage point, I pulled both of my katanas from their sheaths on my back.Letting out a savage cry, I bore down on him with my blades crossed, cleanly severing his head from his shoulders in a spurt of crimson. Turning towards the second guy, I leapt across the way with one katana held out by my side. As I slid past him in slow motion, my katana sliced his legs from his body, torso flying up into the air and blood spraying in all directions. I would say that you should get ready to taste steel, cyber-ninja, but necks don’t have taste buds! On a side note, in this position, I would pop into slow motion, murderize the guy in front of me, then leap over those incoming projectiles while firing hot lead at the silver guy.Wheeling around to survey the damage I had done, I realized that I had just taken out two enemies in less than five seconds.
“Oh,” I thought to myself. “I didn’t realize that this game was going to be AWESOME.”. Get Ready To Do Some DamageBefore you start playing Sairento VR, I have some advice. The first thing you want to do is clear the room.
This is an extremely active game for a, and you will certainly be flailing around. If you have small children, shoo them out of the room, as you will probably clobber them in your attempts to behead enemy ninjas. You also don’t want anyone listening to the stream of delighted profanity that is about to burst from your lips.You may want to consider turning down the forgettable techno that pulses behind Sairento, and constructing a high-energy playlist to run in the background while you bounce around virtual Japan, taking out armies of enemies. I won’t bore you with mine, but Beastie Boys’ Shake Your Rump and Nine Inch Nails’ Wish are in heavy rotation. Now I rock the house party at the drop of a hat, and I beat a biter down with an aluminium bat! Shake your rump-a!
Hooooooooo!Find a load-out that you are comfortable with. I ended up playing through the majority of the campaign with a katana in my primary hand and an over-powered pistol in my off-hand. This allowed me the flexibility to slide into a room and hack at baddies while simultaneously popping off headshots at distant enemies.Finally, get comfortable with the idea that you are about to cackle like an insane person. Think of the best action sequences in John Wick, and how much they amaze and surprise viewers. Through a combo of tight controls and amazing bullet-time slow motion, Sairento VR allows you to pull off similar moves, putting you at the centre of your own over-the-top action film. Sairento Pushes PSVR To Its LimitsIt is a marvel that any human is able to play Sairento VR without spewing vomit all over the room, but somehow the devs at Mixed Realms have pulled off some voodoo magic that keeps things nice and comfortable. Through a combination of leaps, slides, and wall runs, players are able to dash across battlefields with minimal difficulty and almost no VR discomfort.Battles are typically fought in sizable arena-type areas, with tons of verticality built in.
Movement is controlled primarily with the left Move controller, with the player indicating where they want to go by holding down the Move button and pointing. Double jumps are enabled from the beginning of the game, and through the extensive skill trees, I quickly added a third. You ever see that part in Final Destination 2, where the stoner dude gets chopped into little pieces by the barbed-wire fence flying through him, and he kinda slides into little pieces? Or that part in Cube where that guy gets that laser grid that runs through him, and he falls apart into little cubes?
Yeah.that’s what’s about to happen to this nice lady.Though there is a learning curve involved in playing Sairento, after some practice, movement becomes second nature. The two top face buttons on the Move controller handle turns, and a button is devoted to kicking in the bullet-time slow-motion effect.Picture this: You enter a large room and leap straight up in the air over the head of an enemy. Sliding into slow motion, you whip around in mid-air in order to pop off headshots on bad guys that are perched in the rafters above you, before descending with your blade to cleave the original bad guy in half. Taking flight again, you wall run past two more enemies, shooting and slicing the whole way.
A ninja materializes behind you, and you fire a shot over your shoulder, knocking her head clean off. The room is cleared in seconds, proving that you are a badass.
The PSVR pulls it all off somehow. The action never slows down, and the controller tracking is 100% on-point. None of the usual PSVR limitations seemed to be present. Sairento VR maximizes the PSVR like few games I’ve experienced. Like I said, this is voodoo magic. But What Is Sairento VR About?Sairento VR is about dashing into groups of enemies and gleefully hacking them into pieces, that’s what it’s about. Not good enough for you?
With action this intense, do you really care about the story anyhow?There is a story in Sairento VR, and while serviceable, it is nothing to write home about. It’s never 100% clear what’s going on.
You’re in a simulation, and maybe other people are also in a simulation. The implications are vague. Somehow someone is hacking everyone’s stuff and changing what they see, turning people against each other.
I don’t know. Some cyber-ninja stuff. Doesn’t matter.What you really need to know is that Sairento is positively soaked in Japanese neon-sci-fi atmosphere.
While the graphics can sometimes be decidedly low-res feeling, the subtle visual details still come shining through. This is a game where the look and feel matter far more than narrative. Is Sairento VR Worth The Price?Sairento VR is one of the most fully featured games I’ve played on PSVR. Running through the campaign is a great way to get familiar with the controls and the world, but it is really only the start of what is on offer.
As you dig deeper into the somewhat murky menu system, you quickly discover that Sairento is a very fleshed-out game – which is kinda extraordinary in the VR space.If you think that buying Sairento is just going to purchase you a short campaign, you are dead wrong. This is the sort of game that rewards you with daily goodies just for logging in. This is the sort of game that you can go back to endlessly for months.
All jokes aside, these guys are kinda tough. Best bet – don’t try to get fancy. Slam into slo-mo, and defeat them with the VR-sword-waggle.There are various missions and challenges that you can take on outside of the campaign (my favorite is the “run through the endless train and see how far you can get” challenge). There are also PVP and PVE online multiplayer levels that you can participate in.Doing any activity earns you skill points to customize your character and an enormous number of perks and artifacts to enhance your loadout. Starting Sairento, I had no idea how customizable the experience would be, but once I figured everything out, my jaw dropped a little bit. There are a wide variety of weapon types, each with their own customization options.
Additionally, the player is equipped with a six-piece armor set, with multiple slots that allow for further enhancement. Do you want to be a stealth sniper, firing off ranged shots and finishing off bad guys with ninja stars? Or would you prefer to be an acrobatic death-monkey, bouncing off of walls and hurling shotgun slugs in every direction? Or you could be like me and go with the default/Deadpool loadout.
Perfectly viable and fun.The only real grievance I can leverage against Sairento VR is that the menu system is a little clunky and seems strangely unresponsive. Everything else in this game is top-notch super-balls-out incredible. Sairento VR is a burst of stylized, violent action straight to your cerebellum. If you are an action-junky, this game is screaming for you to buy it. Sairento VR rocks and rolls like an out-of-control carnival ride. No hyperbole, Sairento is a must-buy for PSVR owners. I would go so far as to say that non-PSVR owners now have another reason to buy a PSVR.
If this isn’t the best game on Sony’s VR system, it’s damn close.Sairento VR is available in the EU in both physical and digital formats. North America receives the physical version on August 13 for $39.99, through retailers including,.
- Platforms: PC |
- Developer: Mixed Realms
- Publisher:Mixed Realms
- Release: February 06, 2018
It’s not easy being a ninja. In addition to having a mastery of all weapons across all weapon types you also need to be ridiculously acrobatic, all while moving so fast that you basically control time. It’s nice work if you can handle the requirements, but for those of us who can’t spend every waking moment since birth in a laser-sharp focus on the killing arts, the ninja is simply a fantasy. Or you can strap a VR headset on and go to town in Sairento VR, choosing an arsenal and developing a play style that transforms you into the lightning-fast embodiment of death.
One day in the subway a secret ninja was going about her day like any normal person when the station is destroyed by an unspecified disaster. A voice on her radio implant explains there have been multiple attacks taking place simultaneously all across the city, so she instantly stops pretending to be anything but one of the most skilled warriors the world has ever seen and flips out like a ninja, cause that’s what ninjas do. The game has already opened up with an optional tutorial before the first mission is even available, meaning you can jump straight to trashing the horde of cyber-baddies waiting ahead. Swords, pistols, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, throwing knives, bow and arrow, and many more tools of carnage are at her disposal, and while you can’t carry them all a weapon loadout of four different items means you’ve got plenty of flexibility in your options.
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Weapons are nice, but ninjas are also nimble, and in a VR game that can spell trouble. Sairento handles this amazingly well by the simple use of a jump button, which acts kind of like the targeting in standard teleport-style VR movement except you fly towards the landing spot rather than blink there. Hold down the jump button and a targeting reticle appears to show the landing point, and you can adjust it as necessary. Keep the angle low to dash forward, or point the controller at the ceiling for major air-time. Ninjas can double-jump, of course, so you can correct your trajectory mid-air, and the jump-counter is reset if you spring off a wall. Jump up, jump a second time into a pillar, spring off the pillar for more height, then jump again while targeting the pillar’s top for a perfect vantage point to scout the room. Oddly enough, while double-jump is incredibly useful, it’s still second place to the time-freeze that happens when the jump button is held down.
Ninjas are supposed to be fast and deadly, and while you can’t speed up your perception of time Sairento is more than happy to slow things down to a more reasonable pace. Hitting the jump button doesn’t slow time down to near-imperceptibility like SuperHot but it’s pretty close, and you can use this at almost any point to do whatever you need. Jump into the air with machine gun in hand, slow down time, and drop down while raining a shower of bullets on the enemies below. Spring towards a giant armored samurai with sword at the ready, slow time as you land, take three or four good swings, then spring on out of there before he’s completed his counterattack. Time isn’t so slow that you can ignore all threats but it’s still an incredible advantage once you get used to its tempo. Using the jump to spring from wall to pillar and back again all while raining down gunfire in slow motion on the enemies below (while being careful to swat away any stray return fire with the katana, of course) simply never gets old.
Every enemy you take out drops an item of some sort, whether it be health, cash, or some other power-up. Health and ammo are the only useful in-mission items, but back at home base you can leaf through the mission’s haul and play with your loadout. Each of the weapons has four slots to fill, one of which is assigned to color and the rest being for perks, while each of the five pieces of armor has between one to three perk slots. You can use the cash from missions to buy perks, or just use what you can scavenge from the battlefield. One of the pickups is a little radar-dish icon called a Beacon you can use to bump up the difficulty level, resulting in better loot to go with the higher challenge. That challenge also comes with a good opportunity to gain experience, with each level earning a point you can spend on a good number of tech-trees. Upgrade the double-jump to a triple, add a ground-stun move performed by putting your hand on the floor when landing, or just increase ammo capacity and damage for the machine guns. Both flashy and utilitarian upgrades have their place, and you can experiment as you need. The worst thing that happens with a bad move is you hit the Respec button on the specific upgrade tree and re-do it from scratch, getting back all your points and trying again.
While you’re powering up with better weapons and skills, the enemies aren’t going to sit back and let you trash them. Once you’ve been one-shotted by a cyber-sumo you quickly learn to keep your distance, and while kunoichi go down with a single arrow or sword-slash they’re cloaked until they choose to attack and can easily get behind you. Even the simple foot soldiers pack a punch when you’re paying attention to the big cyan mecha-samurai, and a sniper-shot to the head is as deadly from a peon as it would be from someone more imposing. Put a few difficulty beacons on a high-tier side mission and you’ll feel you’ve earned every point of exp and rare loot drop that may come your way, but even if it takes a few times to get through it still feels great to do it.
Sairento VR is simply a fantastic ninja-simulator, and the only thing holding it back is a few technical issues. Putting your head through the ceiling during a high jump is common, and some maps have nooks that can drop you through the floor. In the game’s favor it’s smart enough to set you back to the starting point when this happens, but it would be nicer if the level geometry was shored up. While the gameplay flows smoothly, the menu system is a bit of a mess, with options all over the place and certain important features easily missed. I had no idea about level-up skill points until I hit level 6, and didn’t realize armor had upgrade slots until roughly the same time. It’s not that the options are hidden so much as there’s a lot of them presented all at once on a screen that’s part of home base, and I still sometimes accidentally jump at the monitor instead of activate a menu function. Scrolling through menu options also uses the same stick that turns you, and it can be disconcerting to be looking at a menu one second and turned 90 degrees the next.
Closing Comments:
While it’s a bit creaky around the edges at times, Sairento VR‘s ninja action is truly fantastic when it gets moving. Hopping from wall to wall while picking off headshots then diving to earth in a slide that ends in decapitation feels amazing, as does holding the high ground and raining arrows down for stealth kills. You can pull out the guns and go in blazing or pick your way carefully and be sneaky, although once one enemy has seen you, all enemies always know where you are so you need to be ready if things go wrong. There’s a huge amount of depth in its gameplay and every moment can be dealt with in whatever way makes you happiest. Dive in with the sword, dual-wield pistols, break out the sniper rifle, toss kunai around or machine-gun everything that moves. If you can combine speed, grace and firepower, there’s not an enemy out there that can stand against your ninja might.
James Cunningham
Sairento VR
Version Reviewed: PC
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