So I have been watching TheFreeMike’s F.E.A.R. VR very closely.
It is a free PC VR mod for the original campaign, and whatever it was when it started, it is not a weekend experiment anymore. Version 0.1.0 went up on GitHub on September 11. Version 1.8.3 arrived on November 1, the 24th release in seven weeks, and the release zips have been downloaded about 10,700 times between them. It needs your own copy of the game from Steam, where it is $9.99, or GOG’s F.E.A.R. Platinum.
Slow-mo goes on your wrist
Every F.E.A.R. conversation ends up at slow motion. Your reflexes could stretch a firefight out until you could watch every round leave the barrel, every chunk of plaster come off the wall, every body fold. In 2005 that was the trick that made a corridor fight feel like a movie you were directing. It ran off a meter in the corner of the screen.
The mod moves that meter onto your arm. Version 1.8 added a redesigned wrist display that carries your ammo, health, armor, medkit and grenade counts and a slow-motion charge meter, so you check whether you have the reflexes to start a fight the same way you would check a watch. There is a tutorial card for slow motion that shows your mapped button once the ability is charged. If you own a bHaptics vest, the mod adds feedback for slow motion too.
Here is what I keep thinking about. On a monitor, slow-mo slowed down the picture. In a headset, it slows down a room you are standing in, while your head and hands keep moving at normal speed. I do not know yet what that does to the fight. I want to find out.
Your hands do the work
Reloading is manual, and it is weapon by weapon, which is the part that convinced me the mod is being built by someone who loves the guns as much as I do. You seat a magazine. You rack the weapon when it is empty, and a tactical reload skips the rack. The shotgun takes shells one at a time, then you let go, grab the fore-end and pump it. The Type-7 particle weapon wants its cell first and then the hammer. If you would rather not do any of that, there is a button-reload mode.
Guns live in holsters on your body. Tap the grip at a holster to draw, carry the gun with your hand relaxed, tap again to put it back, and dual pistols toggle one at a time. An optional Physical Weapons mode, which TheFreeMike labels a prototype, lets you hold a gun by the grip, drop it or throw it, catch it, and switch hands.
And the kicks are in. F.E.A.R. had a flying kick and a slide kick, and both are mapped to the jump stick: flick up to jump and flick up again in the air for the kick, or push forward and flick down twice to slide. Empty-hand melee works with an open hand or a fist.
The part my stomach cares about
I default to teleport whenever a game offers it, because smooth stick movement gets to me. F.E.A.R. VR does not offer it. You start in run mode, tap the stick to drop to a walk, and turn smoothly at 180 degrees a second unless you change it.
What it does give you is a decent comfort menu, with snap turning and a vignette, movement that can follow either your head or your controller, a separate mode just for ladders, and damage camera motion split away from explosion shake, so you can keep the big blasts and lose the jolt every time a Replica lands a hit on you. If you are built like me, go through all of it before your first fight. Not after.
