Pierhead Arcade 2 Reviews

My only regret is not buying this sooner. I would imagine like many others I held off picking this one up due to negative reviews, big mistake. This game is fantastic and I really cannot recommend highly enough, very well made, great fun with a ton of replayability and with 8hrs in I have not experienced any of the bugs mentioned in other reviews. I think there must have been a few updates as we have smooth locomotion and teleport option, snap turning and a button to lower your body to insert coins/collect prizes and all working just fine and ..no bugs. I really cannot recommend this game highly enough, if Pierhead 1 gets Index controller support I will be grabbing this also, my one recommendation to devs would be to implement a smooth turning option also but otherwise big thumbs up on this one! Cant wait for new additions to this game.

This game doesn't synchronize the state of the world to other players. It's as if you're both playing single player but you can see each others avatars. You can't watch someone play a game. My brother was on the Oculus Rift and was unable to use the trigger, which meant that many of the games were unplayable for him. Many of the games were totally broken for one player or the other. Many of the games can be cheesed for a high score. I'm on Index and I had four hands, two in the place of one and they would animate differently. The index controllers did not synchronize to the other player, it looks like I'm making gestures to me but I'm not to others. Going back to the main menu doesn't work. The prizes you can unlock with tokens were uncollectable or just disappeared. I was looking forward to this game, had real potential to be a virtual Dave & Busters. It should not have been released in this state.

You don't need that strong of a PC to run the game its not too laggy or buggy lots of games to play sound is pretty peaceful graphics are nice you can find special items to change the color of your hands which is nice I dont really understand the hate this game gets, i think its great and for a price of 10 dollars, i'd say you should get it 8.5/10

I enjoy the game ! I have the first edition and enjoy both . I have many hours logged in the game, a few bugs to work on in both ver. Thanks for adding more features to version 2. 😊

If you like the original, you'll like this. There are 30 games right now, so, at $9.99, this is a steal. If you don't have the original, buy these in a bundle together. Part 2 has Valve Index support built in. Index controllers will work in the original, but many games, especially gun games, have bad gun angles in the original. https://youtu.be/_TYV5-a1bso

I know it's early access but it's loaded with bugs. Not as fun as the original. Only a handful of games are worth playing. This would have made a better DLC than a full game. I got a refund.

It's a great little game with dozens of different arcade games to play. Most of them feel just right, but some are jankier than others. There are many achievements to get, but some are super difficult. That being said, the multiplayer is terrible. Many games, even with relatively low latency playing over the Internet, are unplayable due to laggy physics for the other player. It even changes based on which player starts the game. Worse yet, some games are completely unplayable in multiplayer. As long as you are there to play alone, the game is great to play in short bursts.

I will start out by saying that I loved Pierhead Arcade 1. It was (and still is) one of my favourite VR games. It was a very polished experience and all games were accessible and a joy to play. I spent hours trying to better my scores and collect tickets to get all the prizes. When I saw this pop up I immediately purchased it and proceeded to don my goggles for more pierhead goodness. Oh boy...where do I start? Immediately I notice that I can no longer rotate the view so I am forced to turn around to face each game in my play area. This is a major omission and a feature which was present in PA1 and needs to be added. (edit - I notice this feature has been added in a recent update since this review was written) Secondly I have to collect tokens from a machine to play...no biggie I guess but then I find have to bend down and physically put tokens in the slot for every single game (in the original you could do it from a distance, very handy for taller people). Another minor gripe is you can no longer swipe/spin the leaderboard cube thingies...it seems everything is optimised for index controllers now (I am on vive with the original controllers). Now onto the actual games....I just do not know what they were thinking with this collection. They are all just so boring...for example one has you dropping drips of paint into some cans as they spin around (?!?) and another has a couple of robotic sumo wrestlers picking up balls with horrendous joystick controllers...most of the other games are highly forgettable some of which being clones from PA1. I was so disappointed with PA2 after loving the original so much, I quickly refunded through sheer disgust. With a heavy heart, I cannot recommend this one at all sadly. If a Pierhead Arcade 3 ends up being made, I think they need to take a look at what made the original so great and start from there. It seems like this was rushed out to coincide with the release of the Index and could have easily been released as DLC for PA1 instead of being a separate product. PS I did not mention the bugs as I believe they will be ironed out in time so I wanted to focus on the games and overall VR experience.

Back when this game first came out, I bought it immediately expecting it was going to be at least as good as Pierhead Arcade 1. Instead it was trying to do too many new things and did them poorly so I refunded. Eventually I saw that enough updates had gone by to make a second attempt at it and I bought it again. Since the original release on Early Access, they've addressed a majority of the complaints; However I don't even remember all of what my complaints were since it seems like my old review got blasted when I repurchased it. I know I didn't like the token system since it was an unnecessary extra step to play the games. I think maybe the UI was a lot worse off somehow too. In any case, it's greatly improved, but still not perfect. Since I owned the first game, they've added the arcade games from the first one into a separate hall. I think some of the physics feels a tad bit different but I'm not sure if the older game used a different game engine or what. There's also full support for the index controllers, though it may mostly be cosmetic. I think the only time I really noticed the index controller support was on bowling (more about that later). So as I said before, all the old games were added into this one, but there's a few new games in PA2 that are very similar to PA1 anyway. For one thing you've got the same style of claw machines, and there's a whole 4-lane bowling alley now instead of just one lane. I'm assuming there's 4 player multiplayer now so that's why they'd add more lanes. Just a few of the different types of games available: "coin pushers", Claw machines, Shooting galleries, curling/shuffleboard type games, Whack-a-mole(frog actually), skee-ball, various "beer pong" type games (minus the beer), Bowling, basketball (free throw type games), ring toss, milk-bottle type carnival games, archery, air hockey, and other weird contraptions that are hard to classify. I've never played multiplayer on either game (just try to find someone who has the game AND wants to play when you do), but I assume they've made multiplayer much easier. At the very least they've made it possible to find others without having to tell them your IP to connect. My only complaint with the game as it is now is that releasing items when you want to throw it SHOULD be easier. I mean, with the index controller you just let go and you drop the item. The problem I usually have is that it seems like most games are either "maintain death grip to hold item/slightly relax hand to drop" or else it's "gently caress controller grip to hold/make damn sure no fingers are touching the grip anywhere to drop". In this case, it's the latter. This is particularly annoying in bowling since there's no weight to the ball, and yet if you don't adequately release the ball in time, it either makes the ball go straight for the gutter, or else it drops at your feet and rolls slowly forward (and also toward the gutter). I feel like it should be an option to use the trigger to grip/release some items. Like maybe finger on the trigger + trackpad would be a "pinch grip" or could be used to grab the ball better. Either that or maybe give an adjustment in-game so I can tweak it to be more realistic with the release. Also, it seems like if you use your tickets to purchase a prize at the prize counter, it's only good for that session and then it's gone. It would be nice if you could save at least a couple of items for later use instead of having to use tickets on them every time. In any case, this game has majorly improved since its initial release and if you've avoided it or refunded it previously, you should probably give it another chance. This would probably be a cool game to play with friends (if I had any friends with VR).

The negative reviews are rather old and since then the sequel to Pierhead Arcade 1 has improved tremendously especially with the addition of all the prequel's content if you own it. The dev is very responsive towards bugs and fixes so i can only see it getting better over time. I really enjoy coming back to this every other weekend to get my arcade fix and honestly it's the only game right now that even comes close to replicating that experience in VR. It's good enough for me to enjoy in singleplayer and multiplayer is just a nice icing on the cake. The game has been consistently worked on in regard to overall polish and i can't wait to see more machines being added.