I poke fun at physics objects above, but that’s a big part of it-the point is removing barriers between player and game so they forget they’re in VR, that it’s all fake, even if only for a second.An odd choice for VFR is to include hacking, a minigame where a cursor moves quickly back and forth over a display. We’re nearly two years into VR as a consumer product and while many aspects still feel like ongoing experiments, developers have nailed down some of the fundamentals as far as building an interactive and believable world. Even Doom’s menus feel weird-I’ve never ever seen a game map “Accept” to the right trigger and “Back” to the left trigger. Other games have better guns, better environments and environment-based storytelling, more creative arenas, better controls. It feels like other games have solved a lot of Doom VFR’s problems though. Two 60-plus hour RPGs? VR might not be the optimal way to play those, but it’s certainly an impressive showpiece.īut when it comes to Doom VFR, it’s hard not to look at this and think “Okay, well smaller developers have done this, and better.” Not the speed, maybe-that really is Doom VFR’s most interesting quality, dashing around arenas at superhuman speed, hitting a cacodemon in the face with a shotgun blast, pivoting to telefrag a staggered imp, tossing a grenade and then teleporting back out to a safe distance.
And I suspect Fallout 4 VR and Skyrim VR will be somewhat more impressive, if only because the scope is so much larger than anything we currently have on the platform. It’s funny-everyone wanted bigger publishers to get involved with VR. Why? Why would you put a Newton’s cradle, literally an object that exists purely to show off physics, into your game and then not let players mess with it? As far as I could tell it’s just a static prop, entirely decorative. I reached out to touch it and set the balls swinging back and forth and…nothing. A notable example: In the second or third mission you’ll pass a desk with a Newton’s cradle conspicuously on top. There’s also a bizarre lack of physics objects, given that most VR devs cram them into every corner like Half-Life 2 on steroids. Hopefully the optimization end can be smoothed out in the coming weeks. I also had some flickering texture issues.
I didn’t run into that issue, but Doom VFR is incredibly demanding even on my GeForce GTX 980 Ti, and frequently dropped frames while loading in assets (resulting in Steam being visible for a brief period as the Vive tried to mitigate any discomfort). Note: Many people are reporting crashes on Steam. I kept reaching out to touch things to no avail. Apparently that version has three different control schemes to cover the Move, Aim, and DualShock controllers. I imagine this was a compromise we can lay at the feet of PlayStation VR. Grab a gun out of the corner? You’ve got it-magic laser pointer finger. Need to interact with a computer? Laser pointer finger. Game asks you to pick up a keycard? You aim your laser-pointer index finger at it and it teleports into your hand. Other oddities: You can’t grab (or punch) any object directly. That’s a make-or-break problem on occasion, and resulted in more than a few unfair deaths. Oh, and there’s no collision on guns that I can tell, so many times I whipped out my shotgun in close quarters situations only to fire through an enemy, both barrels unloading harmlessly behind its head and into a wall or whatever. Get ready to aim directly at an imp’s head, pull the trigger six times, and see rounds fire six different angles. Not that it would matter if you could-apparently to compensate for the lack of recoil, the devs at id put a random spread pattern on most fast-firing guns. The Vive wands don’t have analog sticks though, and thus aren’t well-equipped for smooth movement either. Given that it’s a fast-paced (the fastest paced) shooter, pure teleportation would feel sluggish. Doom VFR uses a pretty unique system that I actually kind-of enjoyed. Which I guess brings us to the most important part of this review: Controls.
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I came across a few computers that seemed like they had supplemental text files and audio logs I should be able to listen to, but if that is possible I couldn’t figure out how to activate them. Doom VFR is weirdly empty apart from his ramblings. It was basically just set-up for whatever arena came next, many of which are tied to locations reused from the original game (like Samuel’s office). I quickly found myself just tuning this player-narrator out, because none of what he had to say was very interesting. “The last actuator is embedded in that Cyberdemon” is almost word-for-word a line from Doom VFR, uttered with almost zero sense of irony or wink-wink-hey-we-know-this-is-dumb to the audience. That in mind, your character here isn’t given much to work with.