Pipe Dreamin' VR: The Big Easy

A clever combination of VR puzzle games and VR climbing games.

Pipe Dreamin’ VR: The Big Easy is very much like the classic pipe games of old, only in VR. The idea of this game is sound, you play the role of a New York plumber trying to fix huge sinkholes in the street. To be fair graphically the game is OK and some work had been put into it. But boy does this game have issues. Several times the pipe attached and wouldn’t let the water flow through, the game crashed more times than I care to mention and some pipes that you need to finish the levels simply don’t exist! But the final nail in this game has to be the £11.39 asking price for only ten levels. I would want ten times that much for the same price! At the moment I simply can’t recommend this game at any price, but if the issues do get fixed and the price dropped I would give it the thumbs up.

I was a fan of the old 2D puzzlers Pipe Mania and Pipe Dream, and this is a worthy VR successor. If you can tolerate a few minor imperfections and you are driven by steam achievements then it's a fun 2.5 hours of 3D puzzling. For some strange reason it started as a slide show and I had to turn my SteamVR resolution down to 1700 x 1700 before my RTX 3060ti would make 90 fps on my Vive Pro 2, yet it still looked full resolution.

As a New Orleans local, I have to applaud the devs dedication to realism on how New Orleans plumbing is put together and S&WB skill at just slapping random shit together and hoping it fixes a problem. All jokes aside, if you like the classic pipe dream type games, you'll like this.