Hellsweeper VR
Better to kick ass in Hell than… eat… ass in Heaven? I don't know what happened just then. I can't undo this. I'm sorry.
VR combat games are a dime a dozen, or they would be if VR games didn't all have outrageously inflated prices. So I probably wouldn't have given Hellsweeper much of a look if it wasn't part of a Steam Next Fest demo event. Being one of the few demos for VR that looked relatively like a real game, I tried it out, and thought it was surprisingly decent, if a little bland. I wishlisted it, mostly forgot about it, and skimmed the occasional news blurb about some update or another as it made its way through Early Access.
Then a month or so ago, one of those updates caught my eye - Finger Guns. The ability to turn your bare hands into magic guns to shoot enemies with. I watched the showcase, decided the game looked like it was leaning well enough into the silly fun angle of VR games, and bit the bullet. That night I played it so much my headset's dual batteries died - then I charged it up and played it some more.
Hellsweeper is a roguelite arena shooter, one that, honestly, would feel pretty sparse or shallow on a flat screen. There are a few different room types, the occasional mazelike sprawl, and a couple 'modes' of challenges to complete before moving on. You might simply have to kill every enemy that spawns, or survive endlessly respawning waves until a timer runs out. Some maps have totems that need to be destroyed to stop the spawning, while others make you do puzzles or sacrifice an equipped skill to escape. Enemy variety is decent, but not especially impressive. Where Hellsweeper makes up the difference is in the variety of ways to kill those enemies.
You have six 'slots' that can be occupied by various weapons or elemental spells - one on the 'shoulder,' one on your hips, and four that are summoned by gripping and swinging your hand in one of four directions. All of the weapons have their own special properties and tricks, like the mace's ranged grappling hook and the bow's ability to turn any other weapon into a unique arrow type. Magic is summoned into your hand as an elemental orb, which you can then simply throw at enemies, or use your trigger and a gesture to blast the element out - a flamethrower, shards of ice, ect. Or you could slam the orb onto a weapon, imbuing it with that element, and changing both its damage type and other effects, like homing shots in the case of lightning. Or you could imbue your hand temporarily with that element, causing any weapon summoned into that hand to also be imbued, and altering the casting of other elemental spells from that imbued hand. Finally, you could summon an orb in either hand and slam them together, creating a field of magic around you that is different for every combination, and letting you unleash the channel in a burst, or concentrate it into a final forward attack.
Most guns can be reloaded with a flick of your wrist, but some can be modified to reload automatically, and many can also be reloaded manually - though you need to have the 'bullets' weapon equipped to do so. Manual reloading brings a host of benefits to counteract the loss of convenience, and, with the Finger Guns update, you can even use them alone, upgrading them into a real destructive power or elementally imbuing your hands beforehand.
You also slowly unlock 'passive' skills, which are always available to you and don't need to take up a slot. Levitation allows you to lift and throw environmental objects and enemy corpses or body parts, but upgrading it also lets you tear rocks out of the ground, hold weapons at a distance and telekinetically spin them like lawnmower blades, and hold and fire a brace of floating SMGs in front of you. Unarmed gives you the strength to meaningfully punch demons in the face, and if you put points into it through a run, you can augment those swings with projectiles, give yourself a stunning open-hand slap, or wrap your arms in rocks conjured by Levitation to create indestructible stone fists, which can of course be elementally imbued and even fired off like missiles.
All your skills can be improved in a run by finding chests or picking their representative token as an end-of-room reward. Each time, you get a Vampire Survivors-like selection of randomly chosen options for how to augment the spell, weapon, or ability. Some are straightforward bonuses, like increased damage or lowered casting cost, while many others are more interesting modifiers. You can, for example, give your rifle a bayonet, making it a halfway decent melee weapon in a pinch, or you can instead have an open bracket, which you can put… pretty much any other summoned weapon into, for a much sillier bayonet. Every skill has several 'forged' upgrades too, which can be chosen once you have all of its component upgrades, and many can be stacked.
Movement is handled well too, at least if you're thoroughly comfortable in VR. There are plenty of assistance and calibration options, and you move pretty quickly and fluidly once you get dialed in. The jumping is one of my favorite parts - you tilt the stick forward to summon a visible line, showing you the arc of where you'll fly, as time automatically slows, letting you launch yourself to specific platforms or just past encroaching enemies. While airborne, you have by default one 'double' jump available too, which functions the same way, so you can, for example, leap off a ledge and then turn around to bounce up onto a higher level, or bound straight up to get a vantage before deciding your next destination. At any point while in midair, you can throw your hands up like you're in a roller coaster, and you'll begin a somersault, which slowly spins your camera and gives you a free stretch of bullet time. [all other ways, including jump designation, do drain your mana to use] You can even enable wallruns and sliding that triggers if you crouch while landing from a jump. It's all very fun, probably extremely nauseating to most people, and all feeds into the scoring system, awarding you more loot for 'stylish' kills on that map.
You make progress in a few ways. New weapons and spells are either purchased using meta currency earned in runs, or unlocked by completing certain challenges, like finishing a run with particular equipment. You can spend another type of meta currency on permanently upgrading skills, improving their base attributes while also unlocking a few automatically equipped upgrades to start every run with. There are also around a dozen Epithets, which are essentially classes. They level up and provide permanent bonuses as you use them, and are themed to a particular playstyle, like using elemental spells or improving your guns. Finally, as you play and level up your profile, you slowly unlock more and more options for blessings, which are major perks you choose from at the start of a run and after each boss fight.
It all comes together into a surprisingly effective and addictive package, one that I've easily gotten my money's worth out of. Bouncing around a combat arena whipping chakrams into monsters' heads, exploding a few with a shotgun at point blank range, doing a telekinetic slam that launches everything around me into the air, and then hurling myself up above them into a slo-mo somersault to precisely drill the survivors with a bow firing guillotine broadheads… and all the while my faithful hellhound is running around shooting an Uzi out of its mouth. Oh, did I mention you get a dog? There's just too much crammed into this game to describe it all, and the most important thing is that, by and large, it's all fun to use.
That all said, there are a few friction points, and due to the nature of the game, they're things you're going to be putting up with almost constantly. Most of your upgrades in a run come out of chests, which must be manually unlocked by destroying crystal-tipped pillars just kind of poking out of random surfaces around the levels, which hide keys inside them. The keys are at least collected automatically, but to open the chests, you need to walk up to them, grab the key type you want to use, jam it into the lock, and repeat for as many locks are on the chests. Keys can be either silver or gold, and using the rarer gold keys improves the amount of upgrades each reward inside grants you. It's cool the first few times you do it, but you're going to be doing it DOZENS of times in a run… unless you just don't bother and start skipping them, which to be fair, you can probably get away with, at least on lower difficulties. It gets exhausting though, because once that run is over, you DO need to open at least a few chests to get your next run moving along, and the whole crystal hunt and physical unlocking minigame never really improves or gets more interesting. There is an option to disable the keys and chests entirely for a run, and the game 'balances' this by making the single skill upgrade you get at the end of a stage grant up to five skill points, but you're still going to be significantly underpowered compared to jumping through all the hoops.
And speaking of difficulties, I found the later ones to be drastically overtuned, with enemies taking ages to kill, and a handful of types basically one-shotting you if you get caught by the wrong attack. Especially bad is the overload of elementally augmented enemy variants, some of which can be enough of a pain on normal difficulty. You can end up facing whole waves of tanky enemies that also have the ability to regenerate, or can summon dozens of homing projectiles that tear you to shreds before you can react. I'll make it through the difficulty I'm stuck on eventually [though I'll probably have to lean on a class that gains extra shield points] but there's a whole difficulty tier above that too, and I don't know if I'm going to be enjoying the game at that point. Once in a while one of your chest rewards will be the option to turn the next fight into a mirror match against a character just like you, with every weapon and spell at your disposal, and it's so erratic, dangerous, and tanky that I just avoid it like the plague.
Finally, the game has a surprisingly helpful tip system, with in-game video demonstrations of a lot of the mechanics of each skill and weapon, which you can even call up later through the menus in case you forget the tutorial info. However, as I described earlier, the game is massively overstuffed with content, quirky gear interactions, and sometimes vague or confusing upgrade descriptions, so I wound up having a ton of very specific questions I couldn't find any answers to. Such as - is there a point to using one gold key and two silvers to open a chest? [there is] What are the properties of the various arrow types created by sacrificing other weapons to the bow? [I have limited experimental knowledge] Does the upgrade that just reduces 'cost' stack with the one that reduces 'cost of AOE spells' or does it only affect summoning the spell? [I don't know] I have dozens more questions like that, and though the game is still being updated regularly and so I understand things are in flux, and the developer was kind enough to answer my first brace of questions in their Steam forums, they then directed me to their Discord and have not answered any follow-ups, which is the quality of modern indie game developers I loathe the most.
I didn't do much streaming of the game, since intense VR titles tend to make people watching pretty unhappy, but there are some nice features - the game allows you to mirror several view options to your desktop monitor, including a kind of third-person chase-cam that might really show off how unathletic you are despite virtually emulating a John Woo movie. Maybe more importantly, I never tried out the co-op mode, despite it plausibly being a lot of fun and a big selling point - it's only a selling point if you know people who have already wasted a lot of money on VR headsets, and Gentacle only wants to go fucking VR Fishing!!!
Hellsweeper is standout in the VR 'slap things around until you get uncomfortably sweaty' genre, an engaging and satisfying package that is worth the price if you can stomach the disorientation. It's got nowhere near the visceral impact or modability of Blade and Sorcery, and it might have a bit too much going on for a lot of people, but it rides a line of dumb fun and significant enough challenge that I'll be hopping into it off and on for a while. Did I mention you can pet a dogggaaaaaaaAAAAHHHHH! *starts punching myself in the head with VR controllers*