With massive queues choking up our airports, how about booking an alternative trip away to an island packed full of impossible adventures where you’ll feel the wind in your hair, the sun on your face and the rush of adrenalin as you fight off zombies, go bowling with bunny rabbits and dance like nobodies watching to pumping house tunes in a futuristic cityscape and all without leaving the city. Sound good? Then it’s time to start planning your trip to OTHERWORLD on Bennetts Hill.
OTHERWORLD is a virtual island paradise with portals to sixteen unique VR experiences, accessed only from the very white, very bright departure lounge / cocktail bar with moving pixel walls staffed by crew in futuristic avatar inspired uniform.
When it’s time to take off, you and your friends are led downstairs to a chamber filled with personal virtual reality pods: a private space that combines an advanced VR headset with dynamic heat, wind and rumble effects to give users a fully immersive virtual reality experiences.
You may be in your own pods, but once you put on your headset, headphones and mic, you are instantly reunited with your friends as avatars with handy name tags, ready to explore the island and any of the 16 VR games and experiences that lie ahead.
And this is where thigs can get a little confusing on your first visit as working out where to go, how to do it and keeping all of your team together for the experience can take some time which can be frustrating when on a 50-minute time slot. Once you do manage to get everyone to the correct place to play your chosen game then the next challenge you face is getting used to the controls for that game as they do differ – each game does start with an avatar explaining the controls, but you try stopping excited friends from talking all the way through it! Fear not though as there is a help button to press and a real person will come onto you headset and talk you through what you need to do.
Games can be fast and furious or just plain silly with skill levels categorised by the seasons; spring for easy, winter for hard. We were obsessed with Zombie shoot em up Arizona Sun and danceathon laser battles Synth Rider where we discovered one of our party had quite the groove going on by scoring almost four times as many points as the rest of us!
One of the nice things about Otherworld is that when your experience ends and you go back upstairs to then bar, you can convert the points won in the games into drinks discounts which you can redeem at the self-pouring bar which is well stocked with craft beers and cocktails. This earned currency can be stored for your next visit on your OTHERWORLD app where you can also view pictures from your VR experience, keep tally of your scores and look up leaderboards.
Despite a couple of teething problems we loved our OTHERWORLD experience and would definitely recommend it. It does take a little time to get used to though so we think the more you visit and explore, the more satisfying the experience.
We can’t wait to book our next trip!
