Dodgeball. It’s a high school gym class sport that we all used to either love or hate, but we’ve all had the experience of getting beaned by those rubber balls. Smashbox Arena is a virtual reality game that lands somewhere squarely between dodgeball and paintball, a bizarre mix of an arcadey shooter with the evasion based physicality of dodging those red balls that made gym class such a terrible time for me. It’s execution is sheer simplicity, but the gameplay holds a surprising amount of intensity that makes it fun to come back to.
Pitting players against each other in a variety of 3v3 arenas, players pick up balls scattered around the playing field and shoot them at their opponents. One hit is an elimination, and the first to eliminate the other three wins the round, with five round wins completing the match. Gameplay is handled using two guns, so you will need two Move controllers (sorry DualShock 4 only players!). These guns are used to suck up the nearby energy projectiles and shoot them at others, along with allowing you to hold the balls as pseudo deflector shields against other players’ shots. In the original Vive release these balls were actually represented by the same textured rubber dodgeballs that have pummeled so many kids, but for some reason they were updated to these energy spheres and that’s the model that made it into the PSVR release. This leaves it more generic feeling and much less like you’re playing a huge crazy...