The Forest VR Review Played in PCVR On The Oculus Quest 3
The Forest sounds like it would be a fantastic VR game for a ton of reasons. First of all, because Virtual Reality and survival games are a match made in heaven.
Seriously, survival games are one of the genres that really thrive in the VR gaming space. This is even true among flatscreen games ported to VR, like Subnautica.
So naturally I was really excited to get to know The Forest VR based on what I already knew about the game. It’s got a vast open world with a ton of things to do and constant challenges to overcome. There’s hunting, gathering resources, and building your base to do to constantly keep you busy.
More than anything else I was looking to facing the constant threat of the mutant cannibal people that hunt you with more and more aggression and force as time goes on. That was a challenge that would be even more fun to face when fighting them with my actual hands in VR.
Unfortunately it didn’t quite turn out how I imagined. The Forest VR has the bones of a good VR game, but has a lot of little things holding it back from being as great as it should be.
We’ve got some beef with The Forest VR… but I still kind of love it
I can only imagine how awesome of a VR survival game The Forest VR could be if it had had more time and effort put into it by the developers.
While there’s no Sons Of The Forest VR, it would be really nice if the developers took another crack at a VR mode for one of their games and made a great VR Sons Of The Forest, unfortunately for now all we’ve got is this VR The Forest port.
If you want to try The Forest VR yourself and you have an Oculus Quest 2 or Oculus Quest 3, also keep in mind that The Forest is a PCVR game, meaning that you can’t run it directly on your Quest device. You’ll have to connect your Quest to a computer to try it. So you can play The Forest VR on the Oculus Quest 2 or 3 if you’re wondering.
Anyway, on to the review. This is my experience playing The Forest VR on the Oculus Quest 3, and why you may or may not want to do the same thing too.
The Forest VR Review - The Technical Stuff
The feeling that the developers of this Virtual Reality option for The Forest didn’t get all of the time they would need to finish it is really prevalent.
It’s still called a “Beta” in the main menu, though with the release of Sons Of The Forest and no updates for a very long time, it’s clear that the current state of VR The Forest is as good as it’s going to get as far as the developers were concerned.
Which is a real shame since the whole experience is just so… janky.
See the warping here? Well this is what I saw in my headset, and it happened all of the time.
Let’s start by talking about graphics and performance. As with most VR titles this will vary a lot depending on your personal setup, whether you’re using Airlink or a headset that is cabled directly into your PC, and your PC specs themselves.
Still, I’ve run a lot of PCVR games and few of them run as poorly as The Forest VR. Hopefully this has something to do with the graphics card being used and you don’t have similar issues, but the first hurdles to get over were all related to low frame rates and choppy visuals.
That’s also why the screenshots in this article all look a little bad, though I’ve generally tried to pick moments that look good. Even with a PC that is overall very capable of running PCVR games smoothly it is clear that The Forest VR is poorly optimized.
While I’ve heard that this may be because of the brand of graphics card you’re using. It’s possible that AMD cards run better, but overall it is clear that you’re probably going to have trouble running VR The Forest at anything above 45 FPS even with graphics settings turned down, and it’s still going to look bad.
A view of the beach… still doesn’t look half bad when you don’t move your head
Quick movements, such as those you’ll do during combat, make this problem even worse.
There are a lot of things in The Forest VR that take you out of the experience purely because of the quality of the Virtual Reality port, and a big one is how choppy your frames will get when you’re swinging your axe at an aggressive cannibal.
VR melee combat, or ranged combat, or combat of any kind, gets really hard and awkward when you need to react quickly to something with your actual body, and the reaction that you see in the 3D VR view doesn’t keep up with your hands and head.
That, combined with the visuals that are hampered by performance issues and look grainy and just plain weird makes for an immediate negative impression just when starting the game for the first time.
That’s all we’re going to say about the technical issues of The Forest VR, but there are other things that are also hard to swallow about this Virtual Reality game.
The Forest VR Review - The UI and Bugginess
I can’t tell you how many times I was feeling truly immersed.
I had managed to get over the choppy frames and bad resolution and just play the game without minding it. In our quest here at Reality Remake to try all VR games, I had already put up with worse.
I just started feeling the pressure, had a fight with a mutant, chopped down a tree, delivered some logs to a construction site. Any of the many things you can do in The Forest VR.
For a split second I had finally felt immersed, then I walked into a piece of luggage for a split second so I saw “Movement Blocked.”
I wish this popup never existed
I’m not against popups on your screen in VR games. This review is not going to say that all UI elements in VR games are always bad.
UI popups that appear constantly without any need for them are though. If my movement is blocked then I can tell it is blocked because I didn’t move.
Seriously, this popup will appear every minute or so, and sometimes for no apparent reason. It is so annoying and a constant reminder that you’re in a game. I’m pretty sure it’s broken, just like crouching.
Even if you turn physical crouching on in the settings menu, bending over sightly to hit a locked piece of luggage with your axe will completely mess up your perspective.
A reminder that this is still a Beta years after it’s last update
Sure you can fix this by walking around a little, and then your feet will come back down to the earth, but you need to bend over a lot to wash your hands or interact with something.
It would also be nice just to be able to bend over without thinking “Well now I’m going to teleport into the sky a little bit and have to wait for that to go away.”
There are a ton of things like that in The Forest VR, and I’m not going to list all of them for you here. There are a ton of little pieces of jank that could be solved with just a little more polish put on the experience.
Let the player bend over without their height bugging out. Let them walk into a rock without a popup appearing. There are so many things like this that just scream “abandoned VR port” that you will see all of the time.
Just like with the poor performance and bad frames per second you just have to learn to ignore them to get any joy out of The Forest VR, and that’s asking a lot of a player that’s trying to have fun.
Fighting a mutant in VR The Forest
Oh, and while I never expected much, the The Forest VR controls are occasionally very bad as well.
We’ll talk about the good things here as well, but your selected dominant hand will always have something in it, like your survival axe, and you still use the grab button on that hand to pick things up.
The logic of Virtual Reality controls generally tries to follow some form of real life logic. Like, if you have something in your hand, your hand is dedicated to using that thing.
Say you try to pick something up with your non dominant hand, the hand that will be empty. Nope, instead you pull out your lighter. The natural instinct to use your empty hand to pick up an object constantly creeps into the experience.
I can’t tell you how many times I accidentally took out my lighter by hitting the grab button on my left hand while trying to pick up something off of the ground.
The control scheme in The Forest VR is another constant point of annoyance, and often feels as half baked as other parts of the experience.
Chopping down trees is pretty fun and intuitive though!
Oh, and for my final complaint, I’ll say that jumping out of your body to watch your character do an animation is always jarring in VR. Though it was probably easier from a technical level to do things this way.
For instance, every time you skin an animal or climb a rope, you stand in place while you watch your character bend over and do the thing.
In The Forest VR you are forced to view your character do certain things from outside your body
Of course your view being forced into a predetermined animation would also be jarring, and so would the animal’s skin just jumping off of their body and into your inventory.
This is why most VR games have you do an action yourself, with your real hands. To be fair that’s hard to implement too, and like with so many other things there probably just never was the time to make it happen.
I feel bad for whoever was working on this VR version of The Forest, it must have been really disappointing to see all this potential go to waste.
That’s not to say that there isn’t anything in The Forest VR to be happy about, what feels finished is really very good, and so let’s talk about that now.
While this has been a very critical review so far, there are definitely good things in The Forest VR.
The Forest VR Review - The Good Things
So we’ve spent quite a while here talking a lot about what’s bad about The Forest VR. I’m doing that mainly so that you don’t get your hopes up and only read half of this article before going charging in and being disappointed.
Let’s finally quit being so negative and talk about what’s good about this survival game’s VR port.
There’s a lot to do and see and find in The Forest, and it is a massive game too. Standing on a hill and looking out at the landscape below you is always breathtaking in Virtual Reality, and The Forest has a lot of natural beauty for you to enjoy.
The sound is also amazing. The wind blowing through the trees, a deer jumping through a bush, a mutant screaming in the distance. All of the sounds can take you from relaxed to fully alert in a second. It’s very well done.
Chasing down a deer with an axe in The Forest VR
More than anything else what shines in this game are the tools and weapons you get your hands on, and the building.
First let’s talk about your tools and weapons. Shortly after starting the game I figured out how to craft a slingshot, which turned out to be as cool as it was ineffective.
It’s ineffective because the stones don’t go very far and do very little damage, but what was cool about it was that the slingshot actually works really well with VR controls.
There’s no cheap “press this button to fire slingshot” instead you pull back the slingshot by holding trigger on your dominant hand, and then actually aim and release it.
The slingshot is ineffective, but a lot of fun
It’s pretty intuitive after you figure it out, and a ton of fun to aim and shoot. It feels like you’re using an actual slingshot and is a ton of fun.
The bow is also pretty easy to make, and is also way more effective against the mutant cannibal enemies. Also it’s a great tool for hunting more illusive game more easily.
It works just like the slingshot, pull back while holding trigger with your dominant hand, aim and release to shoot.
The Bow is more effective and even more fun
A lot of items are meshed very well with the VR motion controls, and when they work they work amazingly well.
You can tell what had a decent amount of development time before development quit on the Virtual Reality support, and what was finished to an acceptable degree functions very well and satisfyingly.
Chopping down trees for sticks, leaves, and logs is also a ton of fun. Chopping around the sides of the tree with your actual hands feels good when you notice a section of trunk fall away with each strike.
Then you look up with your actual head to see the whole thing fall down before your eyes. It’s those sorts of magically immersive moments that make The Forest VR feel worth it.
Delivering more logs to the log cabin
The building is also fun, despite being rudimentary. There’s no manual combining of items by wrapping rope or hammering pieces in like in Green Hell VR, and there isn’t any craft to crafting like in A Township Tale.
Still, putting your construction site in place and adding pieces is fun in VR The Forest, and putting even a simple log cabin together comes with a feeling of accomplishment after chopping down all those trees and hauling all those logs.
Big expansive VR survival games that give you the amount of building and crafting options to play the game your way like The Forest VR does are few and far between. So it’s hard to hate this experience despite the flaws, because building a log fort to fight off hordes of cannibals is something you can’t do in any other Virtual Reality game.
All in all there are a lot of little things holding The Forest VR back, but beneath all of them is a truly great VR survival game. There’s a gem lying beneath all of these performance issues and general jankiness. If you can get past all of those things there are hours of fun to be had. If you can’t get past all of those things then I really can’t blame you.
Hopefully we get more a more complete Sons Of The Forest VR down the road. I know I’d try that game just for VR.
Whether you choose to play The Forest VR or not, there are also other great VR survival games out there, and whatever experience you choose to pursue, enjoy!
