
It’s incredibly satisfying to teleport up to an imp, give them a bit of attitude with your shotgun before dashing away and laying down fire on the rest of the room with rifles. To make Doom work in virtual reality, grenades always appear in your left hand (before later being dispersed from a launcher) and ammo seems far more plentiful, perhaps so as to not pull you too far out of the gripping carnage too much while you clumsily look around on the floor for pickups. Stay on the move, never stop firing, and dash as much as you can and you might leave encounters breathless but intact. Rooms quickly fill up with enemies and the game won’t let you progress until you dispose of them all, so you better grit your teeth and unleash mayhem. I was so shocked that I didn’t become nauseated from playing Doom VFR because it is absolutely frenetic, featuring all of the demons from the main game in great abundance for you to shoot your way through. As I wanted to eat a grenade after the very first scene of Here They Lie, I was pleasantly surprised to be able to play without much fuss, though chewing gum and ginger capsules –the saviours that they are– helped. Against my better judgement as someone who suffers from motion sickness all too easily, I was shrieking like a banshee and bobbing like a deranged demonslayer along to the heavy riffs of Rip and Tear and Bfg Division for minutes at a time with little nausea.
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id Software have done a great job of replicating that simple but joyful principle in virtual reality, especially when Mick Gordon’s already classic soundtrack kicks in. If you’ve played Doom before, you know what the aim of the game is: kill the demons. That being said, I only typically like to use Moves for shooting galleries and “static” games, so your mileage may vary. I dabbled quickly with the Move controllers, though the finicky movement and somewhat unpolished tracking of the devices left me cold.
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I had worried that I would be hamstrung by the game’s teleporting mechanic, which was seemingly introduced as a way to reduce nausea, but once I could combine free (if fairly slow) movement with the left stick, I was flying. Most of my time with Doom VFR was spent using a Dualshock and it felt like the best way to play it as it more or less controlled the same way as last year’s effort. I eventually got over it once I was sucked into the chaos, but it’s still an utterly alien design choice.

For some reason, the protagonist’s arms are extended out of his chest as if he was an extra on The Thing, resulting in me being totally taken out of the game. The first time you take control in Doom VFR, you are probably going to laugh. Sadly, the protagonist is little more than a tour guide with a very bizarre physical impairment. It’s strange to play as a mild-mannered and relatively normal guy in a Doom game, but it’s understandable here – Doomguy wouldn’t exactly hold your hand through a VR tutorial. You aren’t Doomguy, rather a random scientist who finds himself resurrected after Hell caused hell at the UAC facility on Mars. There’s a definite distinction between VFR and its infinitely refreshing reboot from last year. At its core, Doom VFR accomplishes just that, but it’s a therapy session that’s over before you’ve even really started to exorcise your demons. Doom in virtual reality is something that should be really straightforward: here’s a gun, here’s some demons unleash all of your real-life stresses.
