So far, the most common way to adapt an existing first-person shooter to VR has been to turn it into a shooting gallery, where you hold still and shoot targets as they pop up. Doom VFR

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Teleportation is also what VFR uses to replace the gory melee kills in Doom: once you stagger and enemy by dealing some damage, you telefrag them (teleport on top of their location) for fun and extra items. Watching gore shower around you as you explode a demon from the inside isn’t quite as satisfying as Doom’s elaborately animated demon-dismembering kills, but it’s just about as effective in adding some strategy to the fray: the same concept of picking off weaker demons off to replenish your health as you take a beating from the stronger ones works in VFR.

but makes me wish I could just enable smooth movement in the menus

“ Using two types of movement together takes some getting used to.

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“ Motion-tracked controllers dramatically improve the immersion of aiming and firing a gun.

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The other movement is a sort of scoot, where you use the directional buttons or d-pad to jump a few feet at a time. You can do this as quickly as you can push the button, making for a jerky but speedy form of movement. It works,, [It turns out you can enable smooth walking movement, it's just not made at all clear by the menu options] just like you can turn on smooth turning if you don’t like the default incremental turns.Through the roughly six-hour campaign of all-new levels (built to accommodate teleportation), you get to blast all the familiar enemies (who all have pretty much the same unique behaviors as in Doom) with all the familiar weapons using a simplified version of the familiar alternate-fire modes and upgrades. From the meaty Super Shotgun to the damage-hose of a Plasma Rifle and the room-clearing BFG (which is now launched as a grenade), it’s a great arsenal.But one of the persistent issues I have while playing with motion controls is that a charging enemy (imps, mostly) will often get so close that pointing my gun at them and firing misses because the barrel of my gun is sticking out of their backs. I have to hold the gun up above them and shoot down, which is just goofy. There’s a shockwave move that blasts them back to help combat this, thankfully – and it works on big enemies that have you cornered, too.

Another way VFR stands out is that it looks very respectable for a VR game, even on a stock PlayStation 4. Obviously, it’s not as sharp as Doom itself, and there’s some noticeable pop-in, but the relatively environments let it run smoothly without overtaxing the hardware. It’s great that id didn’t have to reduce the impressively animated demons down to pixel blobs. And when you die and have to reload, load times are mercifully brief.

What inevitably happens when you play VR games with a space gun in full view of your coworkers.

After the surprisingly smart take on interdimensional invasion in Doom, VFR’s story is the biggest letdown. It doesn’t bother to make use of its concept of a demon attack victim’s consciousness being transferred into a robotic body – it’s a whole lot of nothing.Beyond that, VFR carries forward Doom’s very smart achievement-based side goals for all its levels, such as killing 20 enemies with telefrags, bullseying cacodemons, and getting a large number of kills with powerups like berserk or invulnerability. And as a fun bonus, it even includes some classic-style Doom levels to blast through, though they’re inhabited by the modern incarnations of the enemies instead of their sprite-based ancestors.