Home Sports delivers a collection of mixed reality sports games, though it’s a little too simplified at times. Read on for our full review-in-progress.
Collections filled with original games are a hard thing to get right. Focus too much on one particular game and it becomes uneven, while dividing your resources can end up stretching you thin. While Home Sports from Resolution Games delivers entertaining mixed reality support with an appealing presentation for Quest 3, that can’t hide its varied but ultimately shallow gameplay.
What is it?: A collection of five sports games in mixed reality; pickleball, hockey, bowling, mini golf, and badminton.
Platforms: Quest 3 family (reviewed on Quest 3)
Release Date: Out now
Developer: Resolution Games
Price: $19.99
Home Sports offers three standard modes at launch, covering both solo play and multiplayer across five sports: pickleball, hockey, bowling, mini golf, and badminton. Single player lets you go solo or in a versus mode against a bot, and there’s also a decent range of drills where you win trophies. Landing your golf shot in a specific area for more points adds a decent challenge.
With mixed reality, Home Sports integrates with your home environment by extending beyond your walls while centering gameplay within your designated area. I’m reminded of the optional MR support in another Resolution title, Racket Club. Being able to easily adapt your play area size and rotate it is particularly useful thanks to five pre-determined size settings, and that’s boosted by the vibrant art style on Quest 3.
With the individual sports, each of these include drills that offer different challenges. Pickleball stays true to the real-life version as you play across a court or do drills where you’re hitting targets against a wall. It’s sometimes difficult to judge how much power is required when swinging, which is an unfortunate limitation of VR hardware, and it’s making me take a more conservative approach to shots after numerous fouls. In turn, this made return serves particularly easy for the AI in Pickleball.
It’s making me miss the glass box approach used in Racket Club where your court is surrounded by transparent walls, though I accept Resolution creating an all-new sport gave them a freer hand over a more direct adaptation. That said, drills have been enjoyable as they focus on precision and maintaining control. Keeping the ball in play to build up rallies slowly earns more points, which feels rewarding.
Badminton is another racket sport that uses a shuttlecock over a normal ball, and the first to seven points wins. This requires a more delicate touch that I personally prefer, and taking out bubbles with a racket makes for a fun challenge in drills. Functionally though, it’s not that different otherwise from Pickleball.
Mini Golf gameplay clip captured on Quest 3 by UploadVR
Mini Golf uses traditional rules. The play space centering around where your shot has landed works well, seeing your virtual opponent alongside you offers a good sense of presence. My biggest gripe is that once you’ve picked up the putter, you can’t let it go, and this caused me to accidentally hit my ball before I intended to on several occasions. If there was a way of avoiding this, like pressing A to confirm you’re ready before taking a shot, that would save some frustrations.
Hockey is my highlight from the collection; it feels like a mix of ice and air hockey and doesn’t deviate from the core tenants of the real-life games as you shoot pucks into the opponent’s goal. A handful of challenges like blocking try to keep this interesting, as does the increasing puck speed during matches, and I like how taking the two-handed approach with the hockey stick gives more power. Drills like ‘The Gauntlet’ where you dribble the puck to avoid the red zones and collect coins add a nice challenge, though Save ‘n’ Strike simply tasking you with blocking shots isn’t that exciting.
Last on the list is bowling, a basic but enjoyable recreation of an old pastime. Throwing the ball down an alley functionally responds well, and getting a strike on my very first shot was unexpectedly pleasing. Seeing the ball cannon return my ball into my living room adds some good physicality, too. The assist mode provides a welcome addition that raises the barriers up like real-life lanes offer, letting you avoid guttering if you so wish.
Bowling gameplay clip captured on Quest 3 by UploadVR
Home Sports walks a fine balance between each game, and I wouldn’t say any particular sport feels less developed than another. However, the evident trade-off is that Resolution doesn’t dive particularly deep into any of them. Like sure, you can choose the practice modes or drills to expand this, but I’m rarely compelled to choose them. The selection here is fine, it’s functional, accessible, clean… it’s just not that exciting. Even if they added cosmetic stuff like unlockable new designs for rackets or bowling balls, that’d help.
As a mixed reality title, Home Sports doesn’t need the usual comfort settings often expected from a fully immersive VR game.
Home Sports places aspects of the virtual environment all around you, while remaining centered on your play area. Five size settings can be selected for your play area, which you can also rotate and leave the area outline on for. An assist mode is available for each sport, gear outlines and focus arrows can be turned on, and haptic feedback is optional.
With other gameplay modes, Career Mode offers over 50 different challenges that are held together by a serviceable narrative that gradually introduces you to each coach. It’s mainly an excuse to loosely link together these challenges, not that Home Sports really needs much more beyond that. Events like ‘Underdog Challenges’ certainly add a competitive edge, letting you start with slightly less or more points than the opponents to spice this up.
Multiplayer support is also available both locally via co-location and online. I couldn’t test either of these during the pre-release period, so I can’t comment on these modes yet. Considering Resolution Games describes this as a social experience, it’s premature to offer a star rating until I’ve had that chance, hence why this is currently a review-in-progress. We’ll aim to update this review in the coming days.
Home Sports Review-In-Progress – Current Final Verdict
By offering a compilation of sports instead of going all in on one, each game in Home Sports ends up feeling shallow. There’s still fun to be had, it’s visually appealing on Quest 3, and the mixed reality support works well. Hockey aside, every included sport has arguably been done better elsewhere, though the comparative convenience of being in one package helps.
Ultimately, it’s a decent collection of games that I can see appealing to a family-friendly audience; just don’t expect anything particularly deep. I’ll return to this review soon with my multiplayer thoughts.
UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines. As a review-in-progress, this is currently unscored until we’ve assessed the multiplayer support. We’ll revisit this Home Sports review soon.
This article was originally published on uploadvr