Walking through the ruins of Boston in Fallout 4 VR

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The menu options allow for a fairly flexible VR experience. By default it’s set for teleportation, with the indicator turning from blue to green if it’s far enough away from you to burn your stamina. Switching from teleportation to smooth movement makes for a nice walk through the wasteland, if you can stomach it. I wasn’t able to get smooth turning to work, though there appears to be a menu setting for it, and that left me with the incremental turning when I was at the limits of my Vive’s cord.

“ If you thought Fallout was gory before, you haven’t seen anything yet.

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That said, the sense of presence isn’t great when interacting with the world. That’s largely because your hands aren’t modeled in the world unless you’re using them as bludgeoning weapons, so when you reach out and grab a piece of junk to look at it you don’t see a hand grasping it – it just floats above your fist or gun or Vive controller model. It’s also disappointing that, like in Skyrim VR on PlayStation VR, you’re not able to pick up and move around corpses (or pieces thereof) like you can in the normal version of Fallout 4. I’d guess that’s out of fear of causing frame rate issues when the physics go bonkers, which is understandable but disappointing.

There are some cool VR-focused UI touches, like keeping the compass down below your line of sight, letting you take in the view around you without a trace of floating HUD until you look down or at your gun hand. And when you raise your left wrist your Pip Boy grows dramatically so you don’t have to keep your arm right in your face to read it. Some thought has gone into this adaptation.

“ But actually using the Pip Boy? That’s pretty rough.

Considering how cumbersome the inventory management is to use, it’s a very strange design choice that the action doesn’t pause when you’re looking at your Pip Boy like it does in the normal game. That makes you much more vulnerable in a fight, since you can’t call time out whenever you like, and you’re completely dependant on the quick-access favorites menu to heal yourself while under fire. So consider keep the difficulty low until you figure things out. [Update: There's an option to set the Pip Boy to "in front" or "projected" mode that does pause the action while you use it and doesnt' require you to hold your arm up the whole time.]A couple of warnings before you jump in: while Fallout 4 VR does run on the Rift, the controls are all but unplayable right now, so maybe hold off on that. It also doesn’t include any of the DLC, which is kind of a bummer considering that content is over a year old. And, right now, there is zero support for mods – even your saved games from Fallout 4 won’t transfer over to Fallout 4 VR for some reason. But, of course, there’s still a ton of excellent content built in, and exploring it up close is impressive. For more on that, check out my Fallout 4 review.