COLD VR

Minor story spoilers at the end of my review. I can not recommend this game to anyone due to it's horrible optimization and average gameplay at best. Just buy SUPERHOT VR when it's on sale. It is a much more satisfying experience. Now on to the why. First off, 80% of the maps in this game were lagging like crazy. I think I had 20 FPS on epic. So I bumped it down to high and it still didn't help. My hardware? Ryzen 9 7900x, RX 7800 XT, 2x16 GB RAM.. I even put it on an ssd. The bullet time isn't a bullet time in the sense as it is in SUPERHOT. The slowdown is about 40-50% while you are moving. If you stop midway, time speeds up. This is problematic because the only way to move is via joystick, there is no jump, crouch or any other type of movement. Worst of all - maps are scuffed. Very often you will not have enough room to move around. Throwing physics in this game are also horribly bad, it only works half the time, the other half they just stop in mid-air. Now for the actual gameplay loop: it wouldn't be so bad if there weren't these backroom levels. They serve no purpose other than wasting your time to hit the 2 hour mark so you won't be able to refund it. The very first "backrooms" level tries to be dark and scary, then the rest are just mazes. The actual combat stages were average at best, because melees are extremely inconsistent due to physics, as well as not being able to parry bullets with all of them. Rooms are designed, so if you clear them, new enemies will spawn. This in itself wouldn't be an issue, but more often than not the enemies will spawn behind you, around you, only giving you a fighting chance if you can reach or react in time. Weapons aren't always clearly visible, so you may end up missing them on a few levels where it would make you have a less rougher time instead of being forced to stick with melee. There is no crazy story here, it's just based on the matrix. You are in a simulation, and a random guy finds you via a video call and gets you to kill the AI of the simulation so that you can free humans. Overall I give this game 4/10.

Not a bad game, but also far from a great game. Feels heavily unoptimized - and feels like the Quest port it is, but with added reflections, some dynamic shadows and some nice-ish textures. Unfortunately we get the low-poly Quest environments and low-poly npcs. I can live with that, but the game feels boring, like a chore - I greatly prefer Superhot to this kind of inverse Superhot-copy. I'd say, stay with the original Superhot, it's much better than this game. Using Epic in-game settings with the Index and an oc'ed RTX 3090, I got solid-ish 80 fps with res 250%. That's not bad - apart from this game looking very low-end (like Pistol Whip), and then getting worse performance in a lower res than I use in Arken Age (I used res 276% and Epic settings in Arken Age). Getting better performance in Arken Age says a lot about how extremly badly optimized Cold VR is. Btw, even using Epic and Index res 250% jaggies are easy to see - also you just have 4 settings for graphics detail, I've got no clue how the settings differ. Would be nice with separate settings for graphics. The game does look somewhat blurry, maybe some kind of temporal antialiasing is used... Controls work fine with the Index, but no finger tracking. There's smooth and snap turning. Even if I'd like to support the devs and it's only $16, I'm not going to keep a game in my collection I do not enjoy to play. Cold VR needs much more time in the oven to be worth buying and recommending, sadly. If this was early access I'd probably still be asking for a refund. UploadVR rated the game 2.5/5 - and I was hoping they'd be wrong, but 2.5/5 feels just about right.

I want to like this game much more than I actually do. That is in part due to the concept of an inverted Superhot, moving slows enemies/time instead of staying still. It sounds very cool, in theory should work well, and something that would be hard to f**k up . But somehow, it's not at the fun level that I anticipated. It's got jank. It's not optimized very well. It's short in length. But so was Superhot, and these things could be forgiven if it weren't for the gameplay, but also the fact Superhot is an old game. Some would argue Superhot was actually in theory a puzzle/reaction game. Moving slowly gave time to survey the scene, or field, to see the order of operations, who dies with what weapon, when. Having that time to think allowed strategy, in other words. This game takes away that added layer, and as someone already mentioned, due to the limited moveset, the fact you won't be Neo in The Matrix (you don't have time to plan), you end up circle-strafing enemies, arms flying out like the drummer from Rush on cocaine. This is not The Matrix or Severed Steel in VR. This is a minimalist VR boomer shooter with bullet time. If there were more moves/actions to perform, outside of just running- no jump, crouch, roll, dive, wall-run, nothing, this could have some depth. As is, it's short, shallow, overhyped. The VR industry right now is in a sad, sad state. It still hasn't caught on yet, devs that do seem to care are focused on mobile quest software. Oculus no longer develops for pc. The best PC VR games right now are mods. Praydog and Luke Ross are the reasons I still play daily. There is a serious problem when flat-to-vr mods make up half or more of the worthwhile games in VR. So that is why I give this game a positive. We, as VR players, are the poor cold people waiting in the bread-line for a piece of moldy bread. It is not wise to complain as beggers can't be choosers. We appreciate what we can get.

I don’t even know where to begin with this game. Calling it a "VR experience" is honestly an insult to both virtual reality and the concept of experiences. This is less a game and more an aggressive sensory assault mixed with broken mechanics, lazy design, and pricing that can only be described as daylight robbery. Let’s start with the visuals, which are painfully bad. Imagine being dropped into a world made of overexposed drywall, then slapped in the eyes with constant, screen-filling flashes of white light. That’s this game. 90% of it is just pure white hellfire. If your idea of fun is getting a migraine in five minutes, you’re going to LOVE this. The UI? Hilarious. Technically, yes, you can open a menu mid-game, but don’t get your hopes up. Want to change something basic, like your turning speed? Too bad. You’ll have to quit the entire level and restart the game just to do that. Immersion-breaking? Try rage-inducing. It's like the devs wanted to punish you for even considering the idea of accessibility or comfort. Gameplay? Where do I even start? It's a first-person shooter that hates the idea of giving you actual bullets. You get 3 to 6 bullets at the start, if you're lucky, and after that it’s straight-up VR slap-fighting while dodging full-auto enemy fire. Kill someone, grab their gun, and you think, "Okay, finally, some ammo!" But surprise: one bullet. That’s it. And don’t even think about reloading. It’s not a thing. This game actively mocks the concept of being armed in an FPS. At the end of each level, there's a weird 5 to 6 second pause where you just kind of… stand there. Not sure if the level is done or if more enemies are coming. Spoiler: usually, they are. And they’ll light you up like a birthday candle while you're stuck in this awkward limbo. It’s like the game’s trying to simulate lag on purpose. Let’s talk about the randomness. The first few levels hurl a dozen enemies at you, then suddenly, the game decides it’s a horror title and drops you into the most half-baked, uninspired Backrooms ripoff I’ve ever seen. Cheap jump scares? Check. Ear-shattering loud noises? Double check. A flashlight so weak it makes a matchstick look like a floodlight? Absolutely. After two of the most boring mazes ever designed, you’re rewarded by being tossed back into the blinding light show from earlier. Bugs and glitches? Oh, plenty. Sometimes, the game decides to just delete your bullets. You’re already stuck with one per gun, but guess what? Now it’s gone. Poof. Vanished. Hope you like fists. And then there’s this so-called "bullet-cutting mechanic" where you’re supposed to slice bullets mid-air. Sounds cool, right? Yeah, until you realize there's no feedback whatsoever. No visual effect. No sound. No confirmation. The only way you know it worked is if you don’t die. Except the system is broken beyond belief. Sometimes it works when it clearly shouldn't. Sometimes it doesn’t work when it obviously should. And get this. It only works if you use katanas or guns, not the actual light swords that are literally made to slice things. How does that even make sense? In summary: This game is a total trainwreck. A headache-inducing, glitch-riddled, overpriced VR catastrophe that somehow manages to fail at every basic design principle. It's like the devs threw darts at a whiteboard labeled “game ideas” and shipped whatever stuck, regardless of logic or playability. Final score: 0.5/10 – I’m only giving it half a point because it technically launches.

Very short (~90 minutes to finish all levels if you're used to similar mechanics from Superhot) and very poorly optimised. As soon as ~3 enemies die the body fragments tank FPS.

Das Spiel ist für mich im aktuellen Releasestadium leider kein Hit. Setting ist wirklich toll. Retrolike. Leider ist das Gameplay oft echt frustrierend. Man kann keine Gegenstände werfen. Läuft teils mit nem Schwert durch die Gegend, um Feinde, ausgerüstet mit Pistolen umzulegen. Leider zählen keine Hand/Arm Bewegungen, um die Zeit zu verlangsamen. Nur die reine Bewegung zählt. Man eiert dadurch oft in der Gegend herum, um nicht getroffen zu werden. Musik (Chordy UK Garage) ist ok aber wiederholt sich zu oft. Ladesequenzen sind zu aprupt und intergrieren sich noch nicht so recht ins Spieldesign. Was die Zwischenlevel/Minispiele? (will nicht spoilern) sollen, erschließt sich für mich nicht. Die passen nicht wirklich zum Konzept. Ich blieb dort auch an unsichtbaren Wänden hängen oder glitchte durch. Zumindest kann man sie überspringen. Alles in allem nett gemacht, aber es bedarf noch einiges an Updates, um ernsthaft mit Superhot konkurrieren zu wollen. Mein Livestream zum Spiel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0Wqw3ON0ww

Just play this game instead: https://store.steampowered.com/app/617830/SUPERHOT_VR/ [h1]SUPER BAD Design[/h1] I got to say, this game is terrible. This game suffers from numerous problems. It tries to be a SUPER HOT clone, just in reverse: Slow down time by moving, not by standing still. This is its first problem. The mechanic just does not work. In SUPER HOT, just by not moving at all allows you time to think carefully about your moves, works great in an action and puzzle mechanic. In SUPER HOT, it just felt bad-ass and made you feel like Neo in the Matrix. Here, it is just continuously move the joystick around so that you are moving to slow down time... it just feels dumb and bad design. This game is not a puzzle game like SUPER HOT, this game is a frantic bullet hell that just feels like it was designed by a kid. It is like they modded SUPER HOT VR and just slapped in some of the most poor designed maps with inverse mechanics and called it a day. Yeah, one thing that is cool, you can move around, but that is it. The visuals are just hot garbage. The devs put in a chromatic abberation filter on the visuals, and it just looks like ♥♥♥♥. It not only makes it look like my headset has smeared lenses, but it also gives me a headache looking at it. The game feels like it is an early beta. They bound a single main button on your left controller that takes you back to the main menu environment. If you accidentally press this button while you are in a map, tough luck, you just abandoned your run and took your butt back to the main menu without any return option. Absolutely terrible design. The shooting mechanics are terrible as well. Guns do not feel accurate, hitting your target feels like luck more so than skill. The worst slap in the face is most guns only give you one bullet, yeah, good luck in this bullet hell. Also the enemies, they have perfect accuracy and will predict your movement, even though they really cannot see you behind cover. REALLY fair. Also, speaking of "cover", yeah, they can shoot through the cover as well, makes no sense. If you stop, you are dead. Again, this mechanic just is TERRIBLE. Just play SUPER HOT VR, it is just a better designed game.

Tries to be superhot but adds nothing new at the same time. All they did is reverse how enemies act.