We were at ICON park last month and ran out of time, so we were unable to secure a spot at any of the activities in the Max Action Arena. What's cool about ICON park is if you purchase the Play Pass it is good for a month. Well, here we are a month later using up the last items on several tickets we bought with a group. If you do buy the play pass, I highly recommend coming to the Max Action Arena first to secure your time slot especially in the VR arena because they fill up quick. Its best to get this out of the way before too many people show up since the line to sign up takes forever. You might sign up at 12pm for a 3pm arena time.
Since we had several passes remaining, we were able to try our hand at the Krazy Darts game, and the VR Arena. The Max Action Arena also offers Axe Throwing and several escape rooms as well.
The dart game was a great way to kill 25 minutes while we waited for our spot in the VR arena. There are multiple themes to choose from such as holiday, western, carnival, tic tac toe and more. The Halloween themed, and western themes were my favorite. You basically throw darts at an interactive projection on cork board wall. At first, it's fun, but I can see how it would get boring after a while. I'm sure it would be a lot more fun if we were drinking and had two more in our group. Two things I wasn't crazy about is how the dart station is situated - you feel like your closed-in and you only get three darts to play with, so you're constantly returning to the dart board after every play. The settings allow you to increase the number of darts between play, but staff only provide three.
As for the VR area, this was the highlight of our visit. This was my first time actually doing anything VR related, it was quite exciting and more fun than I thought it would be. The Max Action Arena boasts about having zero latency with their VR system and if it's not, it's pretty darn close to zero latency as far as I can tell. Nancy and I chose "Engineerium" two times, which is like fighting a Zombie Apocalypse inside an industrial engineering plant with moving platforms and elevators. The first time Nancy and I completed it alone, the second time around we had another family of three fighting with us. The goal is to not die, which you can die multiple times and keep playing, and to kill as many zombies by head shot as possible because that is what increases your overall score. When you get to the second floor the game, it separates you from everyone else. I found it is best to get over to your partner as fast as you can so you can cover each other's backs. The Zombies come out of multiple directions and the ones with football helmets on are much harder to kill. My heart was racing and when we got out of here, I was sweating because all this moving around killing zombies. If you are someone who has a heart condition or becomes dizzy easily, I highly recommend avoiding this game.
All-in-all I would definitely return to try out the VR area again. The Axe throwing might be fun and I would even attempt one of the escape rooms. The biggest downer about our experience was (1) it takes too long to sign up for one of the activities, (2) the staff member providing training and setting us up with the VR area just doesn't seem like he wants to be there. We could barely decipher what he was saying during the training and when Nancy couldn't see her weapon and kept calling for assistance, he just left her standing there wandering around with unfamiliar equipment, WTF!? (3) the last issue we had is our character names were never uploaded into the system, so when we were playing no one knew who players 1 through 5 were for several minutes, so I am rubbing up against people I just met when I thought it was Nancy, whoopsie! Regardless, we still all had fun. read more