It's almost like Serious Sam, if the way you play Serious Sam is by never touching the movement controls. Probably more fun with friends, but for this price, I'm going to just be honest and say this game's ♥♥♥♥.
It seems like they designed the game to revolve around the skill and weapon upgrades. On Tourist and Easy you could win even if you took the headset off and pointed in random directions for 3 minutes, but the moment you hit Normal or higher, the volume of enemies and projectiles grows exponentially higher. Since you have no mobility, the only way you can fight back is by shooting down any shots that the enemies produce, while somehow simultaneously taking out enemies that keep spawning in. It leads into this super "fun" butt ♥♥♥♥ conga line where you're either horking bullets trying to thin the herd or you're swapping spit with the alien spiders as you aim at one of the 300 fireballs closing in on you.
The upgrades are there more for padding than out of any player interest, since they give you upgrade points based on the difficulty you clear, and whether you do it deathless or not. They pretty much expect you to replay the same five planets several times, for the privilege of more feasibly playing the same five planets on a higher difficulty, for the privilege of more feasibly playing the same five planets on a higher difficulty, for the privilege of more feasibly playing the same five planets on a higher difficulty.
Maybe it's different on harder difficulties, but many weapons had no value in my experience, such as the Shotguns (Tommy Gun and melee exist, both are better for close range), Sniper Rifle (Assault Rifle better), Rocket Launcher (Devastator, Minigun) and Cannon (same here). Slow and powerful does nothing when crowd control is 99% of the game and the same weapons dual-wielded can still handle the bigger guys.
The controls suck, at least on the Index controllers. My favorite thing in the game was when I would try to shoot down projectiles or enemies in the sky and the game would instead prioritize random item pickups because the actions share the same button. I was also a big fan of trying to shoot something and accidentally squeezing the controller very slightly, draining some of the shield while making me unable to fire the weapon. Menus were cumbersome to navigate.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the game has this cool [strike]bug[/strike] feature where it wants you to press "Up" even when you're using controllers that don't have an "Up" to successfully press, such as the Valve Index controllers. During the levels with tutorials, you have to start the level, open the pause menu, choose Restart Wave and then Start Game. Also, unless I missed it, there's no height adjust or seated play, which can make a few levels annoying when you have to reach over to shoot something.
If you want an actual Serious Sam game in VR, I'd recommend trying out TFE VR or TSE VR instead. They're cheaper and play like the originals, except you also get roughly the same experience as this game has with the added benefit of being able to move around instead of just being a one-liner on a tripod.
