- Joined
- Dec 18, 2019
Alright this is a long one, strap in.
Hoo boy, It took me a long time but I finally finished doom 3 PSVR. Part of that can be attributed to the fact that this was made when shooters used to be 10 to 15 hour long experiences, and the other half was me being scared shitless. This is an absolute classic of a horror game, only further enhanced by my near complete ignorance of how it was going to go down before I played it in VR.
Does it still hold up? Absolutely. I had to make adjustments to the turning system to make snapping from the right to left side feel natural but after that it was smooth sailing. The way they implemented the Hud onto your wrist watch was absolutely brilliant. At no point is immersion broken.
To compensate for the fear factor you also have a laser sight for every gun except the shotgun and a fully working flash light. It doesn’t help. The first half of this game is some of the scariest shit ive played in a long time.
The best horror games are the ones that have the most “tricks”. The most unexpected ways of fucking with you that cultivates a fear of the unknown. And boy does this game have that in spades. When you start off, there is no safe space. There’s barely any time to process or taken in the carnage that you come upon when these things pop up and start killing everybody. You’re in a claustrophobic, beautifully, dreadful environment where they can come from anywhere, anyplace at any time.
The walls will literally open up and deposit a zombie on your ass so fast you’ll barely realize what the hell just happened. See all those powerups in the corner? There’s a less then 50% chance something wont use it as bait to bite your face off. It’s fantastic. And a lot of of the scripted scares are very impressive and varied. Even when the areas start to open up half way and you get used to it, the tension in the back of your brain doesn’t disappear.
It's a long ass game too, it’s from the days when shooters used to be 10 to 15 hours long on average and it sure as shit takes a lot longer to get though in VR. In the beginning you’ll look behind every nook and cranny waiting for something to pop out and its going to take a while before you get comfortable with running and gunning.
Plot is dirt simple, but it works and has a surprising amount of depth and worldbuilding in the environmental design. So much so I wouldn’t mind seeing what the verse would look like without the demon invasion.
The audio logs left a pretty big impression me too. Initially I was annoyed because most of them are banal descriptions of life on the colony before stuff start’s happening, but the utter disconnect between what they were talking about and what was happening in front of me was subtility unnerving. It feels like a very lived in environment and another thing I liked was how the level design was not straightforward. There were many times I had to stop dead in my tracks and try to figure out what the hell to do. Which worked well, because there was this sense of unease and despair at having to go back though a particularly dangerous area looking though dead body’s to find a pad I missed. Some of the puzzles are a pain, but most work very well and break up the flow in a neat way.
Far as I can tell the base game Is untouched and uncut. only major change I could see besides the VR hud was the hellknights rockets. I never played the original but they must have added this in. They track your bullets and actually move out of the way when you shoot at them. Very unnerving 3D effect.
I think the only real negatives is that the weapon switching can be a bit clunky, the hell level is somewhat overhyped as area, and I wanted to walk on the surface of mars a bit more. Also Mirrors don’t track your character movements (unless your using grenades for some reason) Which felt nauseous when I looked at it for too long. Sometimes you rarely see an enemy before you're supposed to and get the chance to kill them before their AI loads.
Overall the base game is chief's kiss and I have no major complaints.
The two expansion packs were a mixed bag but they extended things nicely.
I Played the bonus mission first because that’s happening around the same time as the base game. You’re a bravo marine who somehow survived and linked up with a scientist to go shut down a hell portal the doom marine missed. It’s relatively short and not going to win awards for innovation but I still appreciated the effort they put into it. A common complaint is that the mars environments felt recycled and bland. Didn’t get that feeling at all, they did a great job with what they had and it has the best hell level designs in the entire game. Solid presentation and very underrated.
The expansion by contrast…. Felt lacking. There’s not really much new here, especially considering 2 out of 3 new weapons and enemies are in the bonus mission. The one prominent enemy of note is a carbon copy of the xenomorph, only now it’s white and throws green fireballs at you. Compared to the last game’s chilling designs it’s laughable.
As for the guns, the super shotgun is impractical, especially in VR when you have go up an enemy’s asshole for it to be effective. (Works great on archviles though)
The gravity gun is neat, but very redundant, you can tell they put it in to capitalize on half life 2’s success, but there’s not enough stuff in the environment to interact with and it cant keep a charge worth a dam. Most importantly it’s a pain in the ass to aim in vr. There is a laser site for it, but the object your carrying will block it, so you’ll try and aim center mass on huge ass enemy’s and miss several times before you figure it out. And it’s mandatory to use for 2 boss fights, so that was fun.
The heart is the only exclusive weapon the expansion has, and it is very cool, but it has its own set of problems. For starters its ammo supply is dead bodies, which while neat removes the dread and tension every time you entered an area with bodies that could stand up and turn into zombies. 2ndly this is where switching weapons becomes a problem. See on the aim gun controller, you switch guns using the triggers on the side of the controller, which is a little awkward but manageable. The problem is there’s no weapon wheel. You can whip out the heart by pressing the d pad, but it wont automatically switch back to the last weapon you used unlike the soul cube. So your gonna have to press the switch buttons like 5 times every time you want to go slowmo with the shotgun and that is a pain in the ass. I got used to it, but wow that was an oversight.
The scares are still here and there, but it really feels like there was a lack of effort into making anything innovative and truly wow inducing. Compared to how the base game made some really scary and memorable environments, there’s few interesting areas aside from the last couple missions.
It also has the worst story out of all of them. Mainly because there’s a distinct lack of environmental world building and competence. The first game was absolutely brilliant at painting a picture of life at the facility before the outbreak and the events that led to first contact. With the expansion There was a lot of potential exploring the aftermath of the outbreak and going into the civilian, corporate and military reactions to the hell invasion. There could have been some great world building here. instead we get bunch of dumbasses who are arguably even less well equipped and prepared then in the base game. There’s even a fucking email talking about how they don’t have enough ammo on hand because some assclown keeps swiping it. It’s ridiculous and the audio logs are little better. The great thing about the original is that unlike a lot of other games ive played with audio logs, there is a surreal and well done sense of banality to them. They really feel like something an ordinary person would record to catalogue the day and they seldom actually involve anything directly involving the demons. By the time the invasion actually happens, almost everybody’s already dead or trying to stay quiet so there’s almost no logs that are recent. It was very refreshing, because im used to logs pointlessly whining about how screwed they are. Here? We are right back to screaming square one. And nothing really gives any kind of concrete background to the thought processes of the setting or even why the hell they sent a 2nd team up there to screw around.
The plot is literally, “lets poke around and see what happens” oh no everybody’s dead, time to kill all the boss demons. I get it, that is doom in a nutshell, but they could have done better.
Here’s some some more plot splurgeing. There’s two main scientists that survived and you gotta meet up with them for some lore totem exposition. Oh cool, they must have some kind of security or automated AI defenses to keep them safe. Fuck no, Dr cloud (seriously) is in a dank ass, rustic room all by himself and is somehow perfectly fine. While dr big tits has only two robot sentry's and a locked door to keep herself company. It’s lame, and really has no excuse considering how dangerous the setting is.
Gripes aside, it was still a decent fun house experience, and it did get significantly better towards the end when hell and reality start merging. It just lacked the fine wine quality of the original.
Overall It’s a must buy for a horror fan who’s got money to shell out on a vr headset.
Hoo boy, It took me a long time but I finally finished doom 3 PSVR. Part of that can be attributed to the fact that this was made when shooters used to be 10 to 15 hour long experiences, and the other half was me being scared shitless. This is an absolute classic of a horror game, only further enhanced by my near complete ignorance of how it was going to go down before I played it in VR.
Does it still hold up? Absolutely. I had to make adjustments to the turning system to make snapping from the right to left side feel natural but after that it was smooth sailing. The way they implemented the Hud onto your wrist watch was absolutely brilliant. At no point is immersion broken.
To compensate for the fear factor you also have a laser sight for every gun except the shotgun and a fully working flash light. It doesn’t help. The first half of this game is some of the scariest shit ive played in a long time.
The best horror games are the ones that have the most “tricks”. The most unexpected ways of fucking with you that cultivates a fear of the unknown. And boy does this game have that in spades. When you start off, there is no safe space. There’s barely any time to process or taken in the carnage that you come upon when these things pop up and start killing everybody. You’re in a claustrophobic, beautifully, dreadful environment where they can come from anywhere, anyplace at any time.
The walls will literally open up and deposit a zombie on your ass so fast you’ll barely realize what the hell just happened. See all those powerups in the corner? There’s a less then 50% chance something wont use it as bait to bite your face off. It’s fantastic. And a lot of of the scripted scares are very impressive and varied. Even when the areas start to open up half way and you get used to it, the tension in the back of your brain doesn’t disappear.
It's a long ass game too, it’s from the days when shooters used to be 10 to 15 hours long on average and it sure as shit takes a lot longer to get though in VR. In the beginning you’ll look behind every nook and cranny waiting for something to pop out and its going to take a while before you get comfortable with running and gunning.
Plot is dirt simple, but it works and has a surprising amount of depth and worldbuilding in the environmental design. So much so I wouldn’t mind seeing what the verse would look like without the demon invasion.
The audio logs left a pretty big impression me too. Initially I was annoyed because most of them are banal descriptions of life on the colony before stuff start’s happening, but the utter disconnect between what they were talking about and what was happening in front of me was subtility unnerving. It feels like a very lived in environment and another thing I liked was how the level design was not straightforward. There were many times I had to stop dead in my tracks and try to figure out what the hell to do. Which worked well, because there was this sense of unease and despair at having to go back though a particularly dangerous area looking though dead body’s to find a pad I missed. Some of the puzzles are a pain, but most work very well and break up the flow in a neat way.
Far as I can tell the base game Is untouched and uncut. only major change I could see besides the VR hud was the hellknights rockets. I never played the original but they must have added this in. They track your bullets and actually move out of the way when you shoot at them. Very unnerving 3D effect.
I think the only real negatives is that the weapon switching can be a bit clunky, the hell level is somewhat overhyped as area, and I wanted to walk on the surface of mars a bit more. Also Mirrors don’t track your character movements (unless your using grenades for some reason) Which felt nauseous when I looked at it for too long. Sometimes you rarely see an enemy before you're supposed to and get the chance to kill them before their AI loads.
Overall the base game is chief's kiss and I have no major complaints.
The two expansion packs were a mixed bag but they extended things nicely.
I Played the bonus mission first because that’s happening around the same time as the base game. You’re a bravo marine who somehow survived and linked up with a scientist to go shut down a hell portal the doom marine missed. It’s relatively short and not going to win awards for innovation but I still appreciated the effort they put into it. A common complaint is that the mars environments felt recycled and bland. Didn’t get that feeling at all, they did a great job with what they had and it has the best hell level designs in the entire game. Solid presentation and very underrated.
The expansion by contrast…. Felt lacking. There’s not really much new here, especially considering 2 out of 3 new weapons and enemies are in the bonus mission. The one prominent enemy of note is a carbon copy of the xenomorph, only now it’s white and throws green fireballs at you. Compared to the last game’s chilling designs it’s laughable.
As for the guns, the super shotgun is impractical, especially in VR when you have go up an enemy’s asshole for it to be effective. (Works great on archviles though)
The gravity gun is neat, but very redundant, you can tell they put it in to capitalize on half life 2’s success, but there’s not enough stuff in the environment to interact with and it cant keep a charge worth a dam. Most importantly it’s a pain in the ass to aim in vr. There is a laser site for it, but the object your carrying will block it, so you’ll try and aim center mass on huge ass enemy’s and miss several times before you figure it out. And it’s mandatory to use for 2 boss fights, so that was fun.
The heart is the only exclusive weapon the expansion has, and it is very cool, but it has its own set of problems. For starters its ammo supply is dead bodies, which while neat removes the dread and tension every time you entered an area with bodies that could stand up and turn into zombies. 2ndly this is where switching weapons becomes a problem. See on the aim gun controller, you switch guns using the triggers on the side of the controller, which is a little awkward but manageable. The problem is there’s no weapon wheel. You can whip out the heart by pressing the d pad, but it wont automatically switch back to the last weapon you used unlike the soul cube. So your gonna have to press the switch buttons like 5 times every time you want to go slowmo with the shotgun and that is a pain in the ass. I got used to it, but wow that was an oversight.
The scares are still here and there, but it really feels like there was a lack of effort into making anything innovative and truly wow inducing. Compared to how the base game made some really scary and memorable environments, there’s few interesting areas aside from the last couple missions.
It also has the worst story out of all of them. Mainly because there’s a distinct lack of environmental world building and competence. The first game was absolutely brilliant at painting a picture of life at the facility before the outbreak and the events that led to first contact. With the expansion There was a lot of potential exploring the aftermath of the outbreak and going into the civilian, corporate and military reactions to the hell invasion. There could have been some great world building here. instead we get bunch of dumbasses who are arguably even less well equipped and prepared then in the base game. There’s even a fucking email talking about how they don’t have enough ammo on hand because some assclown keeps swiping it. It’s ridiculous and the audio logs are little better. The great thing about the original is that unlike a lot of other games ive played with audio logs, there is a surreal and well done sense of banality to them. They really feel like something an ordinary person would record to catalogue the day and they seldom actually involve anything directly involving the demons. By the time the invasion actually happens, almost everybody’s already dead or trying to stay quiet so there’s almost no logs that are recent. It was very refreshing, because im used to logs pointlessly whining about how screwed they are. Here? We are right back to screaming square one. And nothing really gives any kind of concrete background to the thought processes of the setting or even why the hell they sent a 2nd team up there to screw around.
The plot is literally, “lets poke around and see what happens” oh no everybody’s dead, time to kill all the boss demons. I get it, that is doom in a nutshell, but they could have done better.
Here’s some some more plot splurgeing. There’s two main scientists that survived and you gotta meet up with them for some lore totem exposition. Oh cool, they must have some kind of security or automated AI defenses to keep them safe. Fuck no, Dr cloud (seriously) is in a dank ass, rustic room all by himself and is somehow perfectly fine. While dr big tits has only two robot sentry's and a locked door to keep herself company. It’s lame, and really has no excuse considering how dangerous the setting is.
Gripes aside, it was still a decent fun house experience, and it did get significantly better towards the end when hell and reality start merging. It just lacked the fine wine quality of the original.
Overall It’s a must buy for a horror fan who’s got money to shell out on a vr headset.
