Since I’ve got an Oculus Rift with Touch controllers now, I figured I’d start posting about games I’ve played and the experiences I’m having. First up is a game I got for free with the Touch controllers: Dead and Buried.
Dead and Buried is a pretty basic first-person shooter. There’s a single-player shooting gallery that’s pretty neat but a bit boring. It’s great for improving your aim, though. The real draw of Dead and Buried is its multiplayer modes, of which there are four: Quickdraw, Shootout, Robbery, and Horde. Each mode supports 2 – 4 players.
Quickdraw is exactly what it sounds like. The players go one-on-one in quickdraw duels. Each player has three lives, and the last man standing wins. The one time I played this, I lost every duel and was left on the sidelines to stand and watch everyone else duel. It’s a neat game mode and certainly appropriate, but wasn’t very fun. Maybe it’d be more entertaining if I had better aim.
Shootout puts two teams against each other with a time limit. When you die, you spawn at a new location around the area and continue the firefight. There are also various weapons hidden at some locations that you can use if you spawn near them. Sometimes a shotgun will be lying on a table near you, or a stick of dynamite on the floor beside a column. Occasionally you’ll spawn in an area with very little cover and die pretty quickly, but overall it felt balanced. Most games ended with only a few points separating the two teams. This was the most fun competitive mode for me.
Robbery is another team-based mode where a team of outlaws tries to rob a safe while another team of good guys tries to stop them. There are several battles that play out before the safe. If the good guys win enough battles, they win by driving away the outlaws. If the outlaws win enough battles, they get a chance to crack the safe. Things seem fairly even (maybe the outlaws have a slight edge) until the safe, where one outlaw has to cover the other while they unlock the safe. This seemed really unbalanced and the good guys won every time I played.
Horde is the game’s cooperative mode, where the players are all on the same team with a shared set of lives. Zombies enter the area and shamble toward the players. If the zombies get close enough, they’ll start to destroy your cover. If they get through your cover, they’ll kill you. Between waves you’ll be able to spend coins you’ve earned (by killing zombies) on cards to repair your cover, get new weapons, or gamble for a random buff (or penalty). Every map has a theme and an appropriate boss that appears every few levels. I’ve played this mode the most because I tend to prefer cooperative experiences, and it’s really fun and chaotic.
In Shootout and Robbery, cover plays a big part of the game. There are crates, tables, and walls that you can duck behind, and you can work up a sweat while playing. I would crouch or stand on my knees to hide behind cover, either popping up my head to aim and shoot or firing blindly. My girlfriend says I looked ridiculous.
Dead and Buried doesn’t do a lot (it’s a pretty straightforward shooter), but it does it well and in a fun, stylized way. It’s a good VR experience and definitely worth playing.
One reply on “Dead and Buried”
I was kinda bored ’till I got into the horde mode. It was a lot of fun! My only beef was the time between rounds was too short. One of the best parts was the pre-round where you can just kinda see the other people in a shared VR space.