I tried Saints & Sinners again with that physical crouching deal you can enable with the latest patch (really the problem wasn't so much the crouching itself but that the warping occurred even if you just leaned a little further down the normal height to look at something closely and stuff) and damn, it feels really good.
I obviously can't know if the game and campaign structure is any good just yet, I've not even completed an area past the tutorial, but the atmosphere is great and the graphics clean even on the original Rift's low resolution, it shows the potential of a Resident Evil style slower paced zombie game in VR more than any other so hopefully the rest of it delivers. I also don't have any performance issues yet (unless I crank the supersampling). I just opened a door to find 3 zombies behind it, my first shot didn't kill the first, something went funky with my revolver or I just suck at shooting, so I noped out of the game, lol.
Contrary to Boneworks it's not trying to be a physics sandbox or whatever, it's a fairly traditionally designed and scripted game. The environments are mostly static and just there for the mood and to railroad you down whatever encounters but it doesn't feel wrong or anything, the atmosphere is spot on and there are random objects that do respond with physics, you can interact with or take most of it as loot turned into crafting materials at your home base thing but other than that they don't have any effect. There are also objects you can use as weapons like screwdrivers and knives as well as food or healing items.
The VR mechanics aren't fully physics driven either but most appear to work intuitively, I've not had problems yet. You can grab the zombies, they can grab you and you can shake them off, you can shove things in their brains as you hold them or just as they approach or if you manage to get behind them without being seen and so on (by the way, they've made it so you don't need to get super violent and fast or anything, mostly you just have to do a relatively wide arc and your strikes will have their full effect and easily pierce zombie skulls). The shooting seemed solid as in my last post even if I failed this session. The doors function easily too and you can vault onto things like cars or whatever and also climb designed for it objects like a drainage pipe I used to get in the house I noped out of earlier. Bandaging yourself is also neat and intuitive, it's easy to perform even around the original Touch controllers' ring.
The game does have a degree of arm presence and they do feel a bit off as they kind of slowly react to the positioning of the 1:1 hands but there has not been any instance of them actually getting in the way of gameplay or having unintended interactions, getting stuck in geometry or objects or anything.
It's really promising stuff. The very first zombie startled me as I was unsure of how easy they are to take down, I took care of it easily enough, then I was moving very carefully and taking them out quietly one by one as I reached them and just as I got confident that deal with the 3 zombies occurred, lol. I'm sure you get used to dealing with much more, especially after you get your hands on some decent weapons that won't break after a few kills, but yeah.
The one thing that miffed me so far is that there's a degree of respawning, I never like that. I could understand repopulating the area after you leave and come back another day for another mission or just to loot it but clearing an alley then finding it unsafe again when you go back doesn't feel right to me. Perhaps it works overall to make you feel under constant threat or whatever even after you get used to the zombies so they don't appear so scary any more but it also goes a bit against the weapon durability systems as they don't appear to drop items or anything (yet?) to make up for the resources lost to take them down. But again maybe it works out with the overall economy of the game and for the mood it wants to create, not just with you but also with the NPC factions and interactions they may have later in the game for you to observe or participate in. So, again, the core systems are great, the rest of the game, we'll see.
