Mini Review: Zombieland Headshot Fever Reloaded (PSVR2) - A Simple Yet Fun VR Zombie Shooter

If you ever liked virtua cop or time crisis, then prepare to love this. Fantastic game for quick 15 minute sessions.

This was a complete suprise for me, really scratched a light gun arcade game itch. Great pick up and play gameplay.

I've been wondering since the first massive wave of VR came about a few years ago why big arcade light gun experiences weren't being brought back.

House of the Dead, Time Crisis, Area 51, Confidential Mission, Terminator... the subgenre used to be huge thanks to arcades and the old TV technologies. I thought for sure VR would bring about a renaissance of the genre (a personal favorite).

If this has that energy, then count me in.

Will you be doing of a review of NMS VR? Because on PSVR2 it's transformed!

@riceNpea damn straight. I'd sunk about about 70 hours into it pre-PSVR2, but I've started again and put another 25 hours in 😅

@get2sammyb and this why you're one of the people in charge. Keep on trucking, Sam!

@get2sammyb fantastic. It deserves it. I bought NMS when it was originally released and was dissapointed with it. Tried it again years later because of the hard work Hello Games put into making it better, free of charge, but still found it unable to capture my interest despite being a sci-fi nut. But VR....it changes everything!

@AhabSpampurse I started I started new Relaxed game and I'm at least 50 hours in now, just building up my Freighter staff, getting my foundations in place before I start expeditions and missions.

Relaxed is a nice balance of resource management and gameplay that is much more palatable to spend my time on.

@neonpizza
You want AAA games and the Quest 3? The two things are mutually exclusive…maybe you didn’t think that through

@neonpizza
It will undoubtedly sell more. Hopefully a massive amount. The more sold, the more games we get (including a load of ports to VR2 I’m sure). But no game will be AAA by todays standard, no matter the developer, the power just isn’t there.

@neonpizza the flip side is anything that goes to quest 3 from someone like Capcom will undoubtedly go to an psvr2 as well with more grunt behind it. So it's back to tradeoffs of better lenses on quest and better performance or visuals or both on ps.

I'm still skeptical of that flat quest panel though. I foresee eyelash oil smearing issues like psvr1 as unavoidable and a complete show stopper. Psvr2 finally largely got past that by moving the lenses out more. I question if glasses are even possible in that, too.

Totally agree I want that 90fps target though. Sont said that was the minimum for vr1 yet here we are.

@neonpizza
Conversely, I just finished CotM last night and loved it. Yes, the image was somewhat soft, but that didn’t take away from the spectacle for me. It looked beautiful with some truly stunning vistas. I also use snap turning though, which does eliminate blur when turning.

You are right of course that native 90 looks better than 60 reprojection, but it’s a developer choice made in all flat and VR games. Some devs will give the player a choice in future I’m sure because people just have differences in tolerance.

It’s also likely the case that Sony will continue to refine its reprojection techniques for the system. Quest did also, and generally has a better solution at the moment.

The graininess you are referring to is something I can notice if I try, or if the image is very light / bright, and is to do with the pentile OLED screen used. I personally think it’s a very reasonable trade off for the benefits of the screen’s colours, blacks, and brightness, but other people (quite literally) find it impossible to look past it it seems. It does also add a bit to the blurriness because of the physical diffusion filter used to reduce screen door in such a display (which the quest also has btw).

Basically, there are compromises that had to be made to provide us with the device at a reasonable price. Personally I would have been willing to pay more for lenses that didn’t have such a small sweet spot, a diopter adjustment or slot for prescription inserts, and in built audio, but I also want it to be relatively successful in sales, and people were (unbelievably) already complaining at the price, so here we are.

By the way, for me the motion controls when climbing were so fun. Not realistic of course with the telescopic arms, but to go for realism like The Climb would have just been frustrating. Also, there are no framerate dips I saw, although there does appear to be a weird judder when using smooth turning. I turned that off right away though.

@neonpizza the whole glasses thing is the thing that will guarantee vr is never, ever truly a mainstream thing. Most of the population has glasses or contacts and at least half use glasses. Not choosing contacts is done for a reason and nobody's going to change that reason to play video games a certain way. And nobody but the hardcore is going to get prescription lenses for their video game viewer that will be replaced often anyway. It's the biggest issue for vr adoption. They either need to make it glasses friendly, or build in some correction like Nintendo did in the 90s....

One thing I'll say with horizon, is, idk if it's about finding the sweet spot or if it's about being tired but some days it really bothers my eyes and other days it's not a problem. Today, no strain. But the weird thing is I'm in the ruins and that area really seemed to bother me, but today at the top, not so much. I think the more tired or screen fatigued you are the worse the motion/reproduction/grain bothers you.

That said I will also say I'm not sure 60fps/motion issues are universally affecting. I've found horizon is the only game that really bothers me, and if I look closely the parts that bother me are still there at 0 brightness. And I notice frame stutter when moving like my flat screen at 30fps. I think horizon just has performance issues that were lumping into hardware issues where it really is just a game issue for the most part.

I will also say: do not, do not, do not use smooth turn in horizon. Just consider that a broken feature. Don't attempt to use it. The game itself does heavy blurring, presumably to smooth a terrible fps drop. Using it wears my eyes out fast and it negatively affects the rest of my play time with it or even other games. The game should not have implemented smooth turning. Owlchemy games don't include smooth and they're just fine without it. I think of you've been using smooth turning it's negatively affected everything else in the game.

Idk about true blacks. If your play rez, thumper, Tetris, games that feature black backdrops is certainly true black. I Don't find it likely the screen can't do true black. I find it more likely that many games in hdr aren't calibrated for true black. I.e. if I play light brigade where lots of screens are very black it has an ips glow effect to the blacks. But that's the game. Rez and thumper do have true black

". But I'm willing to throw down a couple of grand for a far greater VR experience"

Lol there's the problem right there. You're in that tech enthusiast space where a car enthusiast is willing to buy a Ferrari to get what they want but for some reason keep buying Hondas and getting upset when it didn't perform like a Ferrari . Why not just get quest pro and build a total pc and $5000 later, voila, you'll still be disappointed, bit less so?

Of course you'll still be playing thumper and song of smoke on your 5k vr rig because all 50 of you with a rig aren't going to be enough market for anyone to make games for it

Right now we need adoption numbers and that means compromises to get to a point enough people buy to make up a market to sell to. And a $1k+ hmd won't do that. It's doubtful a $500 one will either though.

Idk I can't imagine you'll be thrilled with quest 3. It'll solve some of your hardware issues but then you'll be back to either lo fi indie games even moreso, or poor fps and retrojection again. I think pc and quest pro or that apple kit that I doubt will start at less than $1k is the only you that's going to do it for you, but only if running on high end pc. And then that means back to wired because with how sensitive to motion issues you are, wireless 4k+ is a total non starter for you.

I do still wonder about eyelash oil in those flat visors. That made psvr1 horrible. Vr2 fixed it. I'll never go back to wiping lenses 4 times a session. I also don't get what's great about them unless the balance is much better. You don't see the visor when you use it...

@thefourfoldroot1

You are right the developer choice is to reduce the resolution of the native image and thus allow more GPU room for FPS or vice versa.

For COTM they must have chosen resolution over FPS; and like you say I hope they make it optional, like they do with 2D games, to have a Performance/Quality toggle on VR games. After all, its exactly the same PS5 GPU of course thats doing the work.

The conversation here is truly off the rails. But to return to the topic, this game is insanely fun, and very addictive. There isn't much to do, and trying to get the B side objectives is extremely hard, but I have fun just replaying levels I've already beaten.

I used to think VR lacked the big budget AAA games that take 80 hours to beat. But this game and others like it have demonstrated I was wrong. Id much rather jump into these 20 dollars games and have an absolute blast for an hour.

Id give it an 8/10. It doesn't do anything wrong, but even for VR it could have used a few more modes or more levels like the last one with branching paths to spice it up a bit.