As I have previously mentioned in my Lost Recipes review, one of the beauties of VR gaming is being able to turn something that would have been beyond mundane in a normal console into a much more enjoyable experience, all thanks to the gargantuan level of immersion provided by shoving a visor two inches from your eyeballs. Upon hearing about MarineVerse Cup, a VR sailing simulator, I was somewhat intrigued. Were this a game released for the PS4, the Xbox, or the Switch, I would have avoided it like the plague. But being able to sail away in VR? Without having to worry about falling into the ocean, or more obviously, not having to worry about spending a fortune on a yacht? Well, sign me up!

You boot MarineVerse Cup up, and the game does its best to try to teach you a modicum about sailing. A friendly narrator teaches you about the parts of a boat (don’t ask me, I’m not good with names), and makes you sail for a while in a calm, soothing, but hideous environment. Yeah, this might be a VR simulator trying to fool your brain that you’re the next Ben Ainslie, but the graphics don’t look much better than freaking Wave Race 64 from 1996. The boats sure look nice, though. Being inside them made me feel rich for a minute or two.

Sailing, unfortunately, feels a bit undercooked. I don’t even blame the tutorials, for there were a trillion of them. Seriously, this game has more tutorials than actual, competitive content. The problem is that the controls just don’t feel immersive enough, and the physics and lack of excitement provided by the fact you’re literal miles away from a competing boat makes everything feel stale. To make matters worse, despite featuring motion controls and various gimmicks to make you flip around your boat in order to properly control your sail, you actually don’t need to do any of that; all meaningful commands, such as turning around your yacht/dingy, can be done via button prompts or the analog sticks. Poof. There goes the immersion.

Sadly, MarineVerse Cup is also severely lacking in content. There is no career mode, for instance. What you get here is a paltry amount of courses and modes, as well as some online multiplayer functionalities. You can also explore a few boats inside a showroom, if you want to learn a bit more about them. The free sailing mode ended up being my favorite of the bunch, namely because I could just sit back, put on some Boz Scaggs and pretend I was enjoying the seas of St. Martin or any other spot the oligarchs like to spend their weekends at. Listening to some music while sailing was also helpful to make me avoid listening to that stereotypical AI internet voice everyone uses during gameplay.

 

In short, MarineVerse Cup is a game developed with good intentions, but severely hindered by poor production values and a shameful lack of content. It can entertain you for a few minutes because, as I’ve previously mentioned, VR can make anything amusing for a while, but you’ll quickly realise there’s not a lot to do in here. The immersion will also quickly fade away due to the poor visuals and subpar physics. It didn’t exactly make me want to pursue sailing as a hobby (thank goodness, as I’m broke), but hey, it allowed me to sail without making me feel seasick at the very least…

 

Graphics: 4.0 Boats look great. Everything else, namely the horrendously stale sea, looks like something you’d see in a Nintendo 64 game.	Gameplay: 6.0 The usage of motion controls is neat, but the game is a lot easier to control with its myriad of button prompts and shortcuts. To make matters worse, its physics are subpar.
Sound: 5.0 Tutorials are well-narrated by people who know their stuff. The rest of game features the voicework of Daniel, that one computer voice used in every single video on YouTube.	Fun Factor: 5.0 Sailing can be fun, even a bit relaxing, for a few minutes. The tutorials are ungodly long, but actually quite informative. The rest of the game is pretty disappointing, however, due to its sheer lack of content and cheap presentation.
Final Verdict: 5.0

MarineVerse Cup is available now on Oculus Quest 2 and PCVR.

Reviewed on Oculus Quest 2.

A copy of MarineVerse Cup was provided by the publisher.