Sodium One's Not Only An Environment With Bags To Do But It's Also Super Detailed To Look At.

I urge anyone who's still got negative impressions of Sony's virtual world to visit Lockwood's meta-game space and pick-up the gear you need to access the full game. Sodium One is a complete experience tied into the PlayStation Home engine — there are multiple mini-games, a complete arena shooter game with procedural unlocks, achievements and a currency system with Home rewards. It's about as complete as games get in PlayStation Home, and it opens a window on Sony's ambition for the service.

For this week's There's No Place Like Home I dropped by Lockwood's Sodium One space to give it the full once-over. I'd visited the space on numerous occasions before, but I'd yet to actually spend a meaty length of time in it. The space is super pretty, with stylised neon-lights and flashing objects adding colour to the environment. There's an anime vibe to the space, as a robotic lady called Vickie guides you through the environment.

There are three core features to the Sodium One experience: the Desert Quench mini game, in which players work as a bartender to serve other players futuristic drinks; the Scorpion Stomping mini game, in which players don futuristic stone boots to stamp out the threat of scorpion infestation; and the Salt-Shooter game. The latter is the key component of Sodium One - it's essentially a futuristic third-person space shooter, in which you take out waves of enemies in a high-powered space craft.

While all the games can be sampled for free, you'll need to buy some Home accessories to get access to the Salt-Shooter game. Lockwood give you access to a training mission and five full stages of the main game before you spend a dime — but you'll need to buy a pilot's outfit to get access to the full thing. It's £3.99, which is a little steep for my liking, but there's obviously been a lot of work put into the space. I picked up a pair of animated sneakers while I was there - what? they looked cool.

Salt-Shooter really gives you an idea for the potential of meta-games within Home. Upon entering the arena, you're warped to menu which gives you access to various elements of your ship. You can edit a whole manner of areas of your craft, and even upgrade the parts with experience you pick up on the battlefield. When you're ready to go, you select a level and hit the launch button.

This blasts your space-craft away from the Home space (with the hub being a distance object on the horizon) and drops you into the action. The game controls pretty much as you'd expect it to — there's low gravity so your craft has the tendency to slip and slide around the sandy ground. You hit the L1 and R1 buttons to initiate attacks on a range of different opponents. Destroyed opponents will drop minerals on the ground, which can be traded for finances or used to upgrade specific parts of the craft.

It's all very detailed, sometimes a little too much so. The menu structure can be a little cluttered. But there's a surprising amount of depth. The game could have done with a little more variation (you're largely shooting the same types of opponents), but the shooting feels solid and it's genuinely enjoyable in short blasts.

What's most refreshing about Sodium One is just how worthwhile it feels. It makes Home feel like something bigger. It makes it feel like the virtual world is filled with unique sub-experiences and meta content. It's also impressive that it's all actually possible within Home's engine. And it begs the question - why haven't we seen content like this before?

Hopefully this is the end of spaces with nothing to do, and the start of full content experiences within the Home world. It was clearly Sony's ambition all along, and if they can populate the world with worthwhile, profitable ventures like Sodium One, then there's clearly a big future for the service.

The question still begs — can they win back the people who've already dismissed Home as an empty world with nothing to do? After seeing Sodium One, I know that's not true. But the average joe on the NeoGAF forums ain't quite convinced yet.

“There’s No Place Like Home” is PushSquare’s bi-weekly letter from PlayStation Home, penned by virtual world newbie Sammy Barker.