VRZ: Torment

so, i orignally played this a little in 2016, and it was OK, i have just come back to give it a go in 2021, and it doesn't work,
the settings button, takes you to a broken menu screen,
the start button, gets into the game, but it locks up, when you move, or even pickup and item, so its basicly unplayable.
PS, other games like half-life alex work fine.

Experienced on the Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers

I don't write a ton of reviews, but feel the need for VRZ: Torment, ESPECIALLY after dealing with the devs, in particular Irakli- (THANK YOU SO MUCH AGAIN, Irakli!!!!)
Let's begin with the quick issue. After installing and beginning play, no matter what settings I used, my character would not turn/ rotate. Along with this, in arcade mode, I was receiving no points with each kill, (also, SOMEHOW, probably because it was soooo much fun, I didn't even make note that I was supposed to be getting 5 lives lol!) Lastly, I was seeing one menu with options while the game was loading, only to see a different menu once loading was complete.
After much mucking about with the settings and reviewing the manual, I resorted to emailing StormBringer, certain it was something I was missing.
Irakli and I emailed back and forth, almost a dozen times, I suspect, over a period of two days before discovering the following:
It was Steam's fault.
Steam somehow managed to send me not just an older version, but we're talking a version that was MONTHS old.
An uninstall and reinstall fixed all but one issue (still get the "ghost of menus past" during loading of the game,) but even if the menu was what was causing the issue with my ability to rotate, THAT rotation problem is now a thing of the past. Points count, I actually have five lives in arcade mode, and the game seems to load quicker.
So, how is VRZ: Torment?
I'm writing this review without having spent ANY time in story mode (YET). EVERY time I log in and plan on finally hitting the story mode, I convince myself I'll give arcade mode one quick go, and end up playing it until I decide to hang up the ol VR goggles. Put it in THIS perspective: the arcade mode was SO MUCH fun, that even without the ability to rotate myself, and with only one available life... I STILL kept playing.
While I don't have a ton of VR games through Steam (purchased the Serious Sam VR bundle the same day as VRZ: Torment,) I DO have a TON of wave-based zombie VR shooters via Oculus Store.
VRZ: Torment is already my clear favorite.
Arcade mode gives you a nicely-sized stretch of island to roam as various types of zombies come at you. I realized, despite me thinking I was doing well, that based on the amount of varying zombie types, and me having only seen my third unique one, (admittedly, it's more a ghost than zombie,) I still have MUCH to do.
Where VRZ stands above all others is in not just the insanely fun weapon replacement: as you earn kills, you'll fill a meter. Once that meter fills, your weapon will instantly swap out to a different one. You'll be plinking away with a pistol, swap out to an SMG, a shotgun, a MINIGUN (which requires you to use both hands,) dual wielding pistols, katanas that set zombies aflame, and even rifles that you can opt to fire one-handed, or choose to use both hands for more accuracy.
The other part to this amazing fun is the SHEER AMOUNT OF MOVEMENT OPTIONS! For those with no issues with free movement, you'll be able to roam the island at will (although, unless I haven't found it, you'll always be walking-no running, which is still okay, as you're still faster than the munchers,) or you can teleport. Have a VR treadmill? go ahead and use that! Lucky enough to own the Hardlight VR suit? Yep, StormBringer has an option for that.
When I first stumbled across VRZ: Torment, (I don't even recall how I did, to be honest,) I saw a game that looked fun, but after some videos on YouTube, wasn't so sure it would be worth $20, especially with owning some (what I thought, were,) similar games. I took a gander on Steam and noticed that since the article I had come across, the price had been lowered to $10, and I had some credit I wanted to use. Best $10 I've spent on a VR title. As of this review, VRZ is on sale for $5.49... an ABSOLUTE steal!
People should be supporting this game, not just for the game itself, but for StormBringer Studios. It's obvious, with the sheer amount of options they're instituting for VR that they're dedicated to this fun new foray into gaming; one of the few offering so much depth of options. I'm looking forward to the future updates to VRZ, of course, but I'm also excited to see what else they accomplish with what the future holds for a company that seems just as enamored with VR as myself and my friends are.

This game held my interest for the whole campaign (8 hours for me), which is something that cannot be said for many other indie VR games I’ve played.

Essentially, you are on an island filled with various sealed-off areas to explore and the goal is to escape. You must use tools found in each of these areas to complete light puzzle elements in order to progress the story.

The story is well told and the narrator has a fantastic voice and demeanour. He gives you hints about what to do next but these are vague enough so that you still feel like you’re figuring it out yourself. The story mostly makes sense but there are a few leaps of logic which can be initially confusing, for example when I found a metal detector I did not use it because I thought I’d need to find a shovel first to dig things up, turns out a shovel falls from the sky when you find treasure.

Graphics are good, they’re immersive the environment feels real. That being said, optimisation could use some work as I was getting reprojection all the way down to medium graphics settings on a 1080Ti (although I suspect some of this may be CPU bottlenecking with my 2600k @4.3GHz).

Gunplay is very good, it feels realistic and satisfying. There has been a lot of care put into the various weapons and there are manual and automatic reloading options. Melee is combat is fair but not great.

There are plenty of movement options but free trackpad movement feels jerky to me and I wasn’t able to use it for that reason. The “point and walk” movement was an acceptable substitute though.

Overall the game is a fairly polished survival and puzzle game. It’s ferocious difficulty keeps you feeling satisfied after every day you survive, and there are plenty of “A-ha!” moments with the puzzles which you just don’t get in other zombie games like Arizona Sunshine and Dead Effect 2. It’s unique and worth playing, just be aware that there are still some rough edges.

Bought this game about 2 weeks ago. Played it quite a bit.

It's a open world zombie survival game for VR. You are on a small island and you are free to go wherever you like. There are about 5 different types of locomotion you can choose from, even the omni treadmill is supported, if you're lucky enough to have one. There is a story mode, and arcade mode...where you basically get swarmed by more and more zombies until you can't handle that many and die (this mode also has a leaderboard for players kill count). There is also a small mini game like a duck hunt, and a gun range/shooting range that let's you play with each of the many weapons.

Graphically the game is pretty good, the zombies look good, and there are a decent amount of variations between zombie types. Animations on the zombies are also good, as are the sounds they make.

Audio is what you'd expect, with decent enough sounds for the weapons, zombies & ambient noises. The story mode has an actor voice over narration which is decent. It's not going to win an Oscar, but it's certainly not bad.

Weapons are pretty good, and there is a large selection for your perusal. Everything from handguns, to assault rifles, shotguns, Katanas and even a bow and arrows are there waiting for you to play with. Very satisfying using the bow and katana. ;)

Environment is decent enough, and whilst the island that you play on is not huge, it is large enough and does the job. Would i like it to be bigger? Sure, i'd love a much bigger environment, but this is VR and some sacrifices have to be made. The devs have talked about maybe adding more chapters and i think more playable areas, so this COULD potentially make the game much bigger. We'll have to wait and see.

It's a single player game for the moment, but co-op mode has been confirmed and will no doubt be available in the coming weeks/months...so can't wait for that!

As for the developers, personally i can't fault them. They listen to their community, listen to what people want fixed or changed...and they do it. I have reported bugs and small errors in the game upon discovering them, and literally the next day i got a message from the devs thanking me, and a new build was pushed to steam with these problems fixed.

I would recommend this game without a doubt, for £15 it has more content and replayability than a lot of VR games i have bought in the past.

Bottom line: Using the Virtuix Omni treadmill with this game is a blast on Arcade mode. Dual-wielding sub machine guns while running and gunning with 5000 rounds of ammo is so much fun. Story mode still needs work: not enough ammo to survive as a loud gunner but zombies always find you even if you're quiet and stealthy.

I bought this game because I have a Virtuix Omni and HTC Vive, and it's one of the few games that natively supports the Omni treadmill for VR locomotion. I have no idea how this game plays in roomscale or sitting modes.

My primary complaints right now have to do with how story mode plays in terms of its meta. Game doesn't give enough ammo for the player to be a loud gunner. This would be fine if the game actually provided better stealth mechanics and allowed the player to hide or stay safe. Even with the flashilight off and standing still, the horde of zombies will always find the player. At night, the zombie count turns to 11 and surviving just amounts to a whole lot of running away. Yes, it's realistic in that manner, but it's not terribly fun because there's really not much of a reward for surviving another night other than getting supplies in your safehouse. Even then, supply drops for weapons you don't have is a pretty unfortunate reward for surviving, which has happened to me. Safehouse isn't much of a safehouse unless there's fuel to keep the door closed.

I expect my complaints will eventually issued. The developers actively take feedback and improving the game. To this end, I can at least recommend the game for its Arcade mode.

First let me start off by saying I do like this game very much however...

I will start with the bad.
-No direction from what I can tell. After getting the pistol I had no idea what to do or where to go.
-It could definitely use some optimization but that's not a deal breaker.
-And another thing that kind of bothers me is that your guns feel so weak even though they aren't. I'm talking like the firing noise and it's very hard to tell if you even hit them, let alone where. As with every survival horror your supposed to feel weak and what not, but I would rather that translate to scarce ammo low batteries etc, I would like to feel that as long as I can keep calm and have a few bullets I can have some kind of power.

And for the good
+the developer has made huge progress with the last few updates and is very into the community, he's on practically all of the discussion boards answering questions and responding to praise/criticism, and most importantly is listening to the community.
+the idea for this game is very good and it is definitely a work in progress but is heading in the right direction.
+The narrator is very well done
+it's actually very creepy. The first time I heard the screaming runners I almost pooped alittle.
+I really like the mystery of everything, what's going on, where are you, who's the voice in your head, etc.

An idea that I would love to see is to put back that sandbox style before these recent updates as a game mode, at least until the game gets further in development.




TL;DR
-bugs
-no direction
+great developer/community relationship
+pretty creepy/downright scary
+good looking future
+great updates
Edit:
controls are much better
save system implemented
much better performance

Thanks dev!

Thanks for the updates and nice try with them, but the game is a mess. It is has huge issues and problems, even more so then the earlier release. Its almost as if youve just tried cramming in everything you wanted without playtesting it.

Firstly, this was meant to be a zombie game, hence its best if you keep it as a zombie game, and forget doing silly things like adding ghosts and spirits. The first time i saw the ghost appear, i was like what is this crap?! Adding monsters etc.. is fine, also i remember before the zombies used to react much better to gun shots? or maybe its because ive played loads of good games since the first release you had. But now shooting them just feels wierd and doesnt give proper feedback, especially the dreadful crawling headless corpses, which is just silly aswell, they take up a whole clip and every shot that hits them just feels like its not.

I also hate the fact, that your just spawning countless amounts of zombies all the time, they just keep coming and coming. Start off slow, then build it up. Let the player ease into the game. I had a whole army of zombies on me within 5mins of playing the game, after that i just gave up and shut it down as i stood no chance. To be honest i would prefer fixed number of zombies per level, instead of none ending respawns for each day.


I have a gtx1080, and have most of my pc maxed out with the hardware, i tried playing the game on ultra, but it was very unplayable! Juddery, low frames etc.. What sort of hardware is the ULTRA mode designed for? Maybe next time i will try playing it on one setting down.

i see youve added some fixes in a new patch, especially with pickups etc. Thats great stuff, will hopefully try it out soon or maybe just wait for a few more patches to fix things up.

But seriously, get rid of the silly things like ghosts and the crawlers, or fix them up!

Keep up the good work,youve done a nice job refreshing the whole level, it was still poor performing but it looked very nice :) Hopefully the one setting down can fix my performance issues.

There's been a ton of negative reviews lately by people who don't follow the steam forum developments for this game, and got the impression it'd been abandoned because of how long it's been since the last update

...but as it turns out, the dev was just holding off on small updates to grope them together for one *massive* game-overhauling update in one big burst- instead of a bunch of smaller, more incremental changes.

This dev *definitely* is still putting tons of work into this game!

I dare say, this is the best of the zombie shooters. It's very much a work in progress, as the devs attest to, but this is the only game that I've played that doesn't use the teleport mechanic and plods you along the path you chose. (Careful. It can make you motion sick. But you do get used to the floor moving without you moving.)

After that, there's both good and bad. It's unfinished, by a large margin. Ammo and guns, at the current time, seem to be limited to the immediate square acre of space you start in. Zombies spawn in this same limited area. This makes restarting a little tedious. There's no "pain" mechanic, so you don't know when you're taking damage. (Heartbeat, red tinged vingette.) Replayability is good, but I expect once random spawn for guns and ammo as well as more actual story will add a lot to the game. Objectives like "get in, get evidence, get out" or just "get out" and the like would be fun takes on the game.

This isn't just another "Me, too. I can VR." gallery or on-rails shooter, which is nice. Can't wait for more polish and experimentation. Devs. Toss us some updates and we'll let you know what we like! This could be a lovely explore-y Silent Hill-like thriller. :)

*Update review after major update*

I love it, you dont get any instructions of what to do you just have to explore and see what you can find and put 2 + 2 together. Im exploring through the day and making sure i have enough petrol to power the safe house though the night, if you can venture out at night your a braver man than me ha

Iv found a nice collection of weapons, and the save feature keeps it that way :) where im upto, i need to find a certain sword, and spill the blood of a certain a$$hole, no spoilers. Then im guessing i can move on to the next part

As of now there is no story, just an island with guns laying around and you kill zombies. For less than 10 bucks, totally recommend. Change it to night settings and it's much more atmospheric. Can't wait to see the upcoming updates!

Short playthrough with control explanations and few things I would love to see in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlv15LSG9lE

Here's whats up with the Locomotion control in this game: Its bad, very bad. In detail, the 'new' 'natural movment' or w/e they are calling it is totally unatural to your brain, as it feels as though a conveyor belt just started up and your on it. Or like you are sliding on ice, and then abruptly stopping makes you lose your balance for a second for no reason at all besides your brain creating a placebo effect. Sure you can get used to it I guess. After about 5 minutes or so the strange feeling weakens. But then the whole moving around with a sliding effect still blows. The 2X movement speed is too slow and that is the max. At regular speed you are tip-toeing around very slowy. In a zombie infested place I wouldnt reccomend moving very slowly especially when zombies are after you. Anyhow I felt the whole thing was a damn mess. Also the teleport is BROKEN, it has some kind of wind-up time. "Tele-loading" that doesnt even work half the time. Even got this in a price slash, still want my money back. So I really cannot recommend this.

Best Game For VR i've found yet. The enviroment is beautiful and very creepy. The weapons are well done and I love the reload mechanics in the game. And it is set a price I believe any early access game should be for VR right now and it's even on sale for 6 dollars so there is no reason you shouldn't buy it.

The movement may disorient you AT FIRST but after 2 or 3 minutes you adjust and it is probably my prefered movement over teleportation.

VERY frequent updates so far, the map as well looks very expansive as I can tell they are still working to expand it. 10/10 would fall over from a scary zombie again.

So I bought this really to test the movement system, this is the best one ive seen yet. I hate any form of teleporting in vr games and prefer artificial movement, but this point and click walking is great! I hope more devs add this option. Now for the game its still very early access and needs work, my 980ti had studdering in some places. Really fun game though and can't wait for it to be "finished" since I love the movement alot.

i'd say this game is a little bit rough even as an early access, average graphic with jitters, shabby sounds,
occasionally bugs.

but hell i've managed to get some fun out of it.
locomotion works perfect, movement in the game is far more natrual than teleportion.
gun play is OK, it's more realistic compared with traditional FPS games, and is coming closer to the real world counterparts.
creepy mood.
if you like guns and got some balls, then give this one a try.
guns and balls equals... i don't know, do you? i don't know, do you?


7/10 so far, keep up the good work ladies.

I like the game, and have a question.
Melee? Either push them off or have a bat or something? When they get too close you can't really shoot them.(At least I've struggled to do so)
So any chance of adding a bat, crow bar, or simply push with the other hand to get space?

They've Added Melee! Great!

This game does ALOT of things right, sadly it does alot of things wrong too. everything bad about this game CAN be fixed though... hopefully they will be. The zombies take WAY to many rounds to die, and head shots seem to do nothing more than body shots.

All said and done, for $6 Its not a bad pick up. The game is scary and challenging.

Great start, the movement system is a unique, simple and very effective solution. Really gives you a sense of scale. It's easy to lose yourself with teleportation, I really appreciate this slow walk (with limitted sprint) locomotion. Creeping through a dark church with my flashlight, checking pews for supplies, looking behind me periodically for zeds...Very good stuff.

Needs optimization. Lots of frame loss in certain scenes, like looking at the ocean at spawn.
edit: There have been at least 5 updates and every one of them has improved performance. It's nearly 100% stable now!

Once you learn the controls, and figure out the UI for ammo, and learn the location of weapons, and figure out how sprint works...it's a lot of fun. You have tons of ammo. 30 clips for your pistol at the start. Go hammo on the ammo. There's an additional 15 or so clips by the huddled dudes at the start. Take it or leave it but once you engage it will never really stop. I've only found the shotgun and AK.

This game seems like a true "early access" game. You can see some great potential, but there are many items that need ironed out and many parts that need put in for this to be a great game.

For the current sale rate it was worth it to me to be able to actually walk around an area and know that zombies could be hiding behind any door.

I'm really looking forward to how this game improves. At full price, I'd probably wait a few weeks and see if the developers are going to flesh this game out. Right now with the sale, I'm willing to roll the dice - I think the odds of a promising game here are good. Hats off to the developers for not throwing this game out there for 20 bucks. If they build it up it could be worth that easily. I've no problem supporting developers with a clear vision that want to get their product out there for feedback and then raise the price after it has truely improved to a worthwhile finished product.

Good luck devs! and rock this game out please, it has the bones of a fun game.