The F stands for "Fun," right? right?!
I'll be honest, I tend to shy away from frantic shooters, but I own the game so why not give Doom VFR a shot . . . BANG!
Taking down a ground pound-y dude in Doom VFR
The game was originally made by Bethesda in 2017 for the Vive and for the Playstation VR. It was a big splash at E3 when they revealed their trailer, and let's be honest, they've made some of the most well known and best games in the business (VR or otherwise). Going into this, I expect to have a blast, but I also know I'm going to die a lot. It's Bethesda. It's Doom.
For some reason I decided to go into the game on normal mode instead of easy mode. Perhaps that was a mistake. Perhaps I shouldn't think I'm good enough for this nonsense. Perhaps I'm a glutton for punishment. Who knows.
Anyway, Doom VFR starts out easy enough, but I was struggling with the controls quite a bit in the tutorial. I'm using a wired Oculus Quest 2 to connect to my PC to play. To teleport, you have to actually press down on the control stick and move it around, which may not seem difficult, but my sore thumb right now begs to differ. I guess I don't understand why they made me press down and not just push forward and release?
The most important part of the game
I'm sure it has something to do with the way the touch pad on the Vive controllers works, and this game was never really made with the Quest 2 in mind. Alternatively, I imagine playing with a game controller on the PlayStation would be a superior experience all around for this reason.
It's pretty cool though. Lot's of neat touches in this one. For example, teleporting, as it turns out, is a key element of game play in that if you stagger an enemy with gun fire, they begin to flash blue. When they're flashing, you are supposed to teleport inside the demon and rip them apart from the inside out.
They're blue! Time to Telefrag!
Telefraging -- guts go flying everywhere and you feel like teleporting has an actual reason to exist in the game rather than to just get the heck out of a tight situation (something it's also good for, but feels slow since you have to click down, then move . . . I digress).
I don't quite understand yet how to cycle through my weapons, and I think that's part of my problem. I keep ending up on a slow shotgun and just hoping to run out of ammo so I can auto-switch to something more powerful. Um, I need to figure that out.
Basically campaign game play switches between puzzle solving quests and tense enemy after enemy combat ala Doom style, and they don't go easy on you at all. Typically in VR games, the difficulty lightens up a bit knowing that people naturally react a little slower than in regular games, but not Doom VFR. It's super intense.
When they bring out the flaming, flying skulls of death, you know it's bad.
The puzzles themselves are relatively simple so far. Things like, grab a missing teleporter piece and bring it back. Find a missing door key and bring it back. Twist some locks around to open a door. Stuff like that. I almost wish the puzzles were more intense and the action was a little less intense. Or, yeah, I just need to turn down the difficulty . . .
Anyway, it's pretty fun. I hear it's only a few hours long if you don't keep dying over and over like me, but there are three save files, which ups the replay value. From what I understand the game has dropped as low in price as $5, but it's regularly $15. At one point it was as much as $30! For the amount of fun I've had today playing it, I'm sure whatever price I paid for it as a part of the bundle was well worth it.
Happy Dueling!
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