I feel like I have been hearing about Hellsweeper VR for quite some time now, and with that, I was hoping and expecting a grand Sweeper story of some sort, with big ambitions and an attempt at something in the VR space. But what I experienced over the course of four hours completely took me by surprise.
What I was met with was a brief slide show of how the world came to be and what it means to be a Hellsweeper. While this can be enough and serviceable, the environment around the Hellsweeper, upon starting, calls for more. There is this sense that the world wants to be more, but because of this very awkward tiny vignette that was barely visible, it immediately felt like the story was a second thought, but that wasn’t even the biggest sin of Hellsweeper VR.
The gameplay in Hellsweeper VR is, in the first few levels, pretty fun. Being able to assign skills to trigger hold and flicks of the wrists helps fuel this fluid movement and feels natural while you slay demons. The immersion of calling a sword to you, charging it up, and slinging a blade wave does feel very gratifying. The same goes for the gun you can use. It is very floaty, like every other gun in VR, but nothing beats flicking your gun sideways to reload, or if you want, you can reload your weapon manually if you want the extra sense of immersion. Plus, you get an added bonus of additional damage if you do this.
You can also gain spells, but easily my favourite one is the first one you receive: Fire. As you finish levels or find and unlock chests, you gain power-ups for your loadout. This is where you will gain the blade wave or make it so your bullets will ricochet. You could even level up your magic, which not only increases the damage output but creates new effects like the flame vortex. When you conjure two fireballs and smash them together, it creates this upward lift of momentum while encircling you. It’s a very cool visual attack, and that’s one of the biggest strengths Hellsweeper VR has going for it.
“The gameplay in Hellsweeper VR is, in the first few levels, pretty fun.”
Then, there is the way the flow of the game is presented. After a brief prologue that acts as a tutorial, you are ported into this hub world that feels pretty barebones. You can unlock and change the way your avatar looks, do some advanced training, and dive into the campaign of Hellsweeper VR, which, boiled down, is set up as a rogue-like, in which as you do runs, you slowly gain the skills to continue the story. This is where the biggest problem with Hellsweeper VR presents itself almost immediately.
Roguelikes are not easy, but with enough practice, some pattern learning for enemies, and a little bit of luck, you can progress far enough to hit that next milestone of progressing to the following act. But, in the way that Hellsweeper VR sets it up, is that you gain experience to level up even with a failed run. However, in the four hours I played Hellsweeper VR, I was not able to level up. That kind of grinding is not fun.
In a way, it feels like the developer doesn’t respect my time and is borderline offensive. It takes 1000 experience points to level up, and with a failed run of me making it all the way to the boss and dying, I was rewarded with 55. With it taking around twenty minutes to make it that far, that would round out to roughly six hours for a single level. Ridiculous.
“…even with the comfort controls, like tunnelling turned on, there is just something about the movement in Hellsweeper VR that triggered the motion sickness.”
On top of the egregious levelling system, when you die, your currency gets transferred into permanent currency. I had 1260 dollars, for lack of a better term, when I died and gained 12 permanent currency, but when it costs 300 for a vein colour change, not even a significant difference, it would take an excessive amount of time. There is an apparent lack of respect for players’ time here, which is very disappointing.
There are also two modes of play available in Hellsweeper VR: sitting or standing. Usually, there is an attempt at parody between the two modes, but in Hellsweeper VR, it is clear that if you are a seated VR player, don’t bother. There is an advanced training mode available at the hub that teaches you the locomotion tricks like wall running, etc. While standing felt okay to do, sitting is my preferred way to play heavy locomotion games to reduce my motion sickness. The locomotion with the amount of gesturing needed to pull off some of the more complex moves and even sometimes just simply calling up a fireball was challenging to pull off while sitting.
Usually, this would be a big enough issue, but when you come across the first boss in Hellsweeper VR, it becomes apparent that these advanced tactics are needed if you want to be able to beat it. It was rough, so after resetting my VR boundaries and getting myself set up for standing, I was finally, after five attempts, able to beat the boss, but in doing so, I made myself so motion sick I was unable to continue on.
So, after four hours, I hung my headset and can not recommend Hellsweeper VR to anyone who values their efforts or time. It was the first time I had been that physically sick because of a VR game. Usually, locomotion does not upset my stomach. Still, even with the comfort controls, like tunnelling turned on, there is just something about the movement in Hellsweeper VR that triggered the motion sickness.
Overall, Hellsweeper VR is a disappointment. Hopefully, with a few tweaks to the numbers game, they can at least make the rewards a little better. But even then, if you are a sitting player like myself or someone who gets motion sickness, there is so much locomotion and grand sweeping gesturing involved that this is easily a nonstarter.
