Doom VFR (PS4)
A night out drinking. Riding a rollercoaster. Playing Doom VFR. What do these three activities have in common? All three can be a good time even if you find yourself throwing up afterwards. Despite having played quite a few virtual reality games by now, Doom VFR ends up being the first game to achieve the unusual honor of making me actually lose my lunch, and yet, the actual quality of the experience makes it hard to hold that against it. One thing that certainly works in this fast-paced virtual reality first-person shooter’s favor despite likely being the cause of the queasiness is the willingness to let the player adjust their controls to be more responsive, but that’s also because if you try to play this game with the Move controllers, you won’t get sick, but you’ll likely have an awful time.
Before you set about blasting apart demons from Hell in Doom VFR, you will definitely want to ensure you’re playing it with just the PSVR headset and a regular DualShock controller. If you attempt to play with the two Move controllers that would make aiming more accurate, you end up taking on a load of concessions that just do not fit the pulse-pounding movement-heavy gunfights found in this shooter. With the Move controllers you can only travel by way of teleportation, meaning dodging the incoming attacks from enemies is going to be difficult and likely involve frantic teleporting rather than reflexive and intelligent navigation. The bigger problem though ends up being the turning, the game locking your view to only where your head is looking, and even then, only as far as the game can track. You essentially only have 180 degrees of visual range since once you start looking too far back the motion tracker loses sight of you, and while you can press a button to turn around, it’s a complete about-face that will require a moment of orientation to get used to. Playing like this not only makes even simpler battles needlessly hard for the wrong reasons but feels incongruous with the rest of the game’s design, which is why it’s wise to swap immediately to the standard controller which grants you the ability to walk and turn as you like. You can adjust how in-game movement is handled further to try and lessen any motion sickness and you do keep the teleport ability which ends up being a great addition when it’s not your only means of conveyance. It may still be wise to take frequent breaks considering how fast you’ll end up running around and turning while your body struggles to understand why you’re just standing still or even sitting in real life, but unless you get a specialized controller like the Aim or simply play it on a different VR headset with better movement tracking, the standard PS4 controller is definitely the way to play Doom VFR even if your stomach may have some objections.
As for what Doom VFR actually entails, it is essentially a side-story to the 2016 Doom game and mostly borrows its creatures and weapons from it, although it’s not just a port of that game into VR due to new location designs and a different if light story. You are Abraham Peters, a scientist working on a Mars base which has been harnessing the power of Hell for new technological development. Tapping into demonic energies rarely works out in the long term, and the base is quickly overrun by the forces of Hell when a portal opens up within it, Peters quickly killed much like most of the base’s crew. However, a protocol kicks in that uploads his consciousness into a computer, and by loading himself into an android body, he’s able to get to work to try and close the portal while now having the strength and ability to actually fight against the invading demon hordes. Peters’s work will mostly consist of taking a teleporter to different parts of the facility in search of the equipment for shutting the portal, this primarily an excuse to throw you into new areas that can serve as arenas for some demon extermination work, and considering Doom 2016 is already well known for being light on story, it’s little surprise a short VR game would be even lighter.
Like with many Doom games though, the play is defined by your frequent battles against the forces of Hell, and while using a controller can make it a bit similar to a more typical game, the VR headset does let you look around and it still helps you angle your weapons for firing. The unique ability to teleport where you’re aiming does open up a good deal of opportunity in battle, both in how areas can be designed and how you choose to fight. Many skirmishes in Doom VFR happen in areas with multiple levels, the player able to teleport up high to take out foes pestering them from afar or escape the grips of more melee-focused monsters. While you do have an energy pulse that can be used to force enemies away from you if they close in, the teleport also gives you more flexibility in a firefight than something like a jump would, the ability to be somewhere different in an instant reined in a touch by needing to aim it and certain areas being ineligible due to distance. It still feels like a flexible tool even before the game uses it for light navigational challenges. The most enjoyable part of teleporting though must be its use as a killing tool in battle. When an enemy has been worn down enough through gunfire and starts glowing blue, you can then teleport into them to immediately destroy them, their remains leaving some helpful health or ammo as well. There are definitely battles in Doom VFR meant to strain your ammo reserves, and while you never need to worry about reloading thanks to how your guns are designed, the ammo economy and a need to stay healthy against very aggressive and mobile foes makes this teleport more than a visceral tool to make your foes burst into bloody chunks.
The interplay between the strength of your weapons and the strength of the demons you’re up against is definitely what makes the combat in Doom VFR so thrilling though. There are some enemies that are basically fodder, slow-moving zombies that help when you’re just acclimating to the game, but even early on you face the imps. Very mobile, easily able to leap and climb about, and throwing fireballs as they dash past, the imps are flighty despite being easy to kill and definitely one of the reasons you need that strong movement to keep up, but the battles in Doom VFR also are happy to throw a huge mix of demons into a space and expect you to survive because the shooting is so strong. Whether its dive-bombing skulls, the floating Cacodemons and their plasma shots, the burly Mancubus with its twin arm cannons, or enemies like the Hell Knight who can cross the battlefield in a leap to try and smash you, the demons of Doom VFR don’t let up even in a group and have multiple angles of attack covered.
That’s why the weapons you use are so key to staying competitive. There are two types of shotgun that fire strong blasts but at slow speeds, but their strength and how they tear through demons makes them a better standard weapon than the simple pistol. If you do want to just put out a lot of shots in a hurry there is an assault rifle and chaingun, but some enemies are so tough that even using the rocket launcher on them repeatedly will still take time to wear them down. The game isn’t shy with rocket ammo to compensate though, and you do get some more unique weapons like the plasma guns including the very powerful Gauss Cannon that can dish out that intense single target damage you’re itching for. Your left hand is even given the task of being a grenade thrower primarily, although you get better means of using grenades over the course of the short experience and they go from being a tool you won’t expect much from to being so strong that you might avoid using them to save them for only the most crucial moments. Notably, the game understands that weapon switching on the fly will be a necessity and will slow down time when you open your weapon menu to make a swap, this courtesy also extended to teleporting during a fight so you can more easily set up the teleportation kills or get out of a jam. Concessions like these don’t weaken the challenge thankfully, the durability of the demon threat scaled well so you can tear your way through certain battles while having your back against the wall in others, and the rare power-up like Berserk that lets you get in an instantly destroy demons with your fists feels so much more satisfying because you can appreciate how much this sudden surge of power is letting you take down monsters that could otherwise risk draining your ammo reserves.
The secrets in Doom VFR also feel well within reach and rewarding. Little figures of the Doom marine from Doom 2016 are hidden around areas but still shown on your map, and finding them will unlock stages from the original Doom games presented with their 1990s graphics. The enemies do use their modern looks, but the level layouts are a fun nostalgic throwback and they add 13 new levels to the mix. Your teleportation even allows you to explore them differently than in their source games and they have a much higher focus on walking through an area than Doom VFR’s more VR-friendly focus on large spaces so these unlockables feel rather unique to boot. Doom VFR’s story might take about 3 to 4 hours to complete otherwise, so these extras not only flesh out the package some more, but they allow that story to last a little longer as you have a pretty good incentive to look around spaces more and try to come up with clever uses of your teleportation powers.
THE VERDICT: Put down the Move controllers and pick up the DualShock and Doom VFR can provide you the exact kind of gloriously gory and frantic action the series is known for with that extra touch of better steeping you in its demon-infested Mars base. The teleportation mechanic helps the game feel like more than a recycling of assets from Doom 2016 as well, and a heavy focus on large spaces filled with fast-moving and deadly demons gives you room to put your special power and range of guns to the test. Hidden collectibles with some pretty substantial rewards also give you something to do in the downtime between conflicts, Doom VFR able to bring energetic first-person shooting into virtual reality well even if your stomach may be churning a bit by the end of it.
And so, I give Doom VFR for PlayStation 4…
A GOOD rating. Doom VFR’s unwillingness to compromise its game design to fit the Move controllers does make playing with them a very rough experience only for thick-skinned or stubborn players, but thankfully the standard PS4 controller shows that the action has been designed intelligently once you can control your own movement well. The main battle spaces in Doom VFR are built to spread out threats and also give you room to maneuver, keeping you from being overwhelmed since you do need to look around with your own neck and too many ambushes would make things feel frustrating. The teleport, while a common movement method in VR, works very well here as a tool for quickly shifting the battle situation, preventing the player from being overwhelmed even before you factor in other pressure relievers like the energy pulse. Doom VFR knows what concessions are necessary when you’re using the right control method even if it perhaps should do a better job of forcefully presenting it as the best way to play, and while you do lose some of that potential immersion from a reliance on a controller, the PSVR really isn’t at the point full immersion in a game world feels achievable yet. Moving yourself around in VR struggles to be natural, so having the movement instead line up with previous Doom games allows the game to include the hectic combat the series is known for that remains manageable because you and Hell’s forces are both strong and capable.
Looking over at the release of Doom VFR on Steam, it seems the game disagrees with many newer VR headsets, meaning it is very much a game about finding that one sweet spot of control and hardware. Thankfully on PS4 it’s not too difficult since you will have a regular controller on hand, but it does make the game seem like a concept that was maybe attempted before its time. There may be a piece of hardware that can mix the necessary movement control with the fast-paced shooting that Doom likes to feature, but if this is what we get before that day comes, you can at least say that it found a way that works that feels like it has been built around VR limits to some degree without diluting the demon blasting to something too mundane or simple to provide the series’s expected visceral thrills.