When a gaggle of feral ghouls gets up in your face, activating VATS to stop them in their tracks for a few auto-aimed headshots is a lifesaver.

Not quite as smooth as a made-for-VR shooter like Robo Recall or Superhot VR, but not bad. Because the combat in Fallout is focused on shooting, picking up a gun and blasting mole rats and raiders feels pretty good. I wasn’t able to get smooth turning to work, though there appears to be a menu setting for it, and that left me with the incremental turning when I was at the limits of my Vive’s cord. Switching from teleportation to smooth movement makes for a nice walk through the wasteland, if you can stomach it. By default it’s set for teleportation, with the indicator turning from blue to green if it’s far enough away from you to burn your stamina. The menu options allow for a fairly flexible VR experience. And yet the first night I played Fallout 4 VR ($60 on Steam, or bundled free with the HTC Vive VR headset) for three hours straight and only stopped because it was 4 A.M. As I dove further into the game, I kept finding other aspects that annoyed me, that demonstrated Fallout 4 was never built with VR in mind-awkward controls, a terrible teleport system, objects that don’t react the way you’d expect in VR. This “Oh, someone didn’t even think of this or at least didn’t come up with a way to solve it” rough-around-the-edges aspect does not bode well. But it soon smoothed out, and for the most part played as expected. I did have a few stutters on hardware above the requirements (a GTX 1080), but those appear to be limited to certain areas – such as Vault 111, which doesn’t make the best first impression. Far fewer knobs had to be turned to their lowest setting here than in Skyrim VR on the PlayStation 4, and while Fallout 4 was never a cutting-edge game when it comes to graphics, character models, textures, and draw distances are only a little bit below where I remembered them. Given the sky-high system requirements of a GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD RX Vega 56, it’s not all that surprising that Fallout 4 looks pretty respectable in VR.

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