7VR Wonders

I figured this might be a cool, educational program about the Seven Wonders of the ancient world and a chance to pretend you could go see them before they were destroyed (by fire, earthquake and enemy attacks). Unfortunately this is a very early VR style, and it's not 2016 anymore so nobody is gonna be that impressed by this program now. Even in 2016 it would have been pretty lackluster but the novelty of VR would have given it a bit of a boost. I put up with so many crappy programs in 2016 just because it was in VR and it was cool and new.

So anyway, this one starts out on a bad foot. I launch the program and it doesn't let me use my controllers. I have to use the headset gaze method of selecting things and letting a bar fill up to finalize the selection. Basically it now feels like a phone VR game. Strike 1.

I go ahead and start on the first wonder on the left (The lighthouse of Alexandria) and it's not that impressive. It's narrated decently, but I have no idea how accurate any of the stuff was. Dude could have been reading a wikipedia page for all I know (and that would have been a good thing) or maybe they got their info from a 30 year old Encyclopedia Brittanica (that would have been bad). I start taking screenshots and later find out that they're all missing (they got pushed off into "app 0" instead of the proper app number). Strike 2.

Anyway, the scene was dark, you were in a boat and the whole thing was mostly forgettable. I wasn't impressed. I figured after the narration was over they'd send me back to the menu to select something else, but instead it just sorta waited around for a few minutes and then you'd hear a faint voice announcing the NEXT wonder and then it would load it up.

It did this pretty much every time. Start up the scene, push you around in it so you can see stuff while dude talks, and then wait at the end for what felt like at least a whole minute before they decide to move on to the next one. Most of the textures are horrible and some of them look like a Playstation 1 game, or maybe Playstation 2 if you're being generous (to this program, not PS2).

All in all after spending 20 minutes hearing about 7 wonders, there's not a whole lot left to do. You saw/heard it all... now what? You want an achievement? Worst of all, there's no quit button, the controllers do nothing (except allow me to take screenshots) and so to exit I have to quit the whole thing from steam's menu (strike 3), and the I went back in and tried the "Free roam" option.

Free roam? What a joke. You can teleport around a small section of the scene, but you can't really control how the game rotates you around, so you might wind up teleporting back and forth because the program will stop you from teleporting too far in one direction and may turn you around when you get to the edge.

All in all the graphics would get a C- in today's standards... but even for 2016 this would have been a B- at best. The textures are bad, the models have a lot of sharp angles to them, they have some NPCs walking around here and there but they mostly just pace back and forth and don't add much. The narration would also be a B-. It's not bad, it just doesn't really captivate me, and it doesn't even go much into detail about stuff. You'd be better off listening to someone else read the wiki pages.

Controls (when you CAN control anything) feel like your arms are on the ends of a stick and you just gesture vaguely where you want to go and they plop you down there. There's not a whole lot of value added in being able to do this. If you could fully explore the Great Pyramid or the lighthouse or whatever, it would have been cool, but it's just a crappy scene you can teleport around.

For full price ($8?!) This is pretty expensive, since like I said, 20 minutes is about all you get. There's not much reason to go back unless you wanted to show this off to someone new to VR, but even then you're not showing anything really impressive. It felt like a phone VR app ported to PC and that's probably what it is. Save your money and just get a viewmaster with some 7 Wonders of the World reels to view.

Hmm. I cannot solidly recommend these experiences. When I first bought it, it was almost completely non-functional. I gave it about 4 years to get better, and although you do now get 7 functional experiences, they are, to be honest -- meh.

The store video and photos are much more brightly lit than what you get in the game. In actuality, the Temple of Artemis and the Statue of Zeus were in almost complete blackness, so I felt more like I touring Odysseus' storage shed rather than witnessing a Wonder of the Ancient World.

For the other exhibits, there just was no -- wonder. Perhaps it was the cheap textures or perhaps the scale was off, but none of it felt epic. Instead of feeling like I was standing beneath a towering structure, it felt more like I was simply very, very close to a tiny building prop in a video game. The Lighthouse At Alexandria, the Pyramid of Giza, even the Colossus Of Rhodes (!) felt... miniscule. The sensation was as if I had clipped through an invisible wall (oh, and if you choose Free Roam, you'll hit invisible walls aplenty -- I mean about 85% of the landscape is blocked off from any roaming) and sneaked into the background scenery where my character wasn't supposed to be.

For absolute VR newbies, and for at least half-price, you might get something out of it; it doesn't feel worthy of the $8 price tag. You can skip it with no regrets.

I got this app on sale for $1.59 USD in a recent steam sale. Is this app worth that much? I think so, but just barely. The main problem with this app is that the graphics / cinematic experiences are very low quality. These are PS2/ Xbox 360 level graphics. It really takes away from the experience.

Each of the 7 experiences did load for me without any problems (although exiting was another matter, I had to quit the app to get out of each experience). Each experience lasted from 2-3 minutes each. So there isn't a lot of content here. The narrator gives some interesting factoids, but even the backstories for each of these 7 wonders is very limited.

So if you're really curious about the 7 ancient wonders, then I think I can recommend this app. Honestly, nobody will probably recreate this experience. So it's the only game in town, even if it's not particularly well done.

Sale Price Rating: 5/10 buy for the educational experience on sale only if you're really interested in the subject matter

Very interesting experiences! The narration complements the experience very well

I really think this is a great concept for VR, but currently it is unusable. As another review mentioned, only one of the experiences worked but it had major graphical glitches as was extremely low resolution. I had to ask for a refund in its current state, but I will keep my eye on it and will re-purchase if the problems can be resolved.
As an ancient history buff this could be one of the best uses for VR I could think of, if it were in better shape graphically and had a better control scheme. I would love to come back and give this a positive review in the future, please keep working on it, there is some great potential here.

Only the lighthouse woud load and work, the other 6 just flashed you right back to the lobby. the rowboat ride as nice for 3 seconds then got dull. Got a refund. not a keeper in my library. sorry...