Plasmaborne Impressions: The Devil Is In The Details

There is no shortage of roguelites in VR, so a new entry would need to offer something new to stand out from the crowd. Plasmaborne wears its Doom inspirations on its sleeve, but it stumbles in the balancing of its rogue elements.

It’s clear as day that Plasmaborne took its cues from id Software’s classic FPS, Doom. The font selection, usage of a DoomSlayer-like character in the marketing artwork, and the game’s pulse-pounding soundtrack all evoke the thirty-plus- year-old pioneer shooter. The danger in doing this is when a game fails to answer a very simple question: why would I not simply play the brilliant game this is based on rather than this game? The appeal of playing a Doom-like in VR only works if the gameplay holds up and in that respect, Plasmaborne is a mixed bag.

Each room in a run has to be completely cleared of enemies before moving forward. Pretty standard arena-based roguelite stuff here, similar to games like Hellsweeper VR and Street Gods. The aforementioned drones will occasionally beam in support items and weapon upgrades. After clearing a room, you get your choice of three perks to carry forward to the next room. Roguelite players will feel right at home in Plasmaborne.

Visually, Plasmaborne has a heavy cel-shaded look like Sweet Surrender that looks fine in the headset, though the aggressively burnt-orange look of the first world wore thin fairly quickly. The music and sound design screams Doom, but no sense in trying to reinvent the wheel. It effectively got my heart rate up as I moved around the room taking down mobs. The teleporter movement doubles as a dash to get out of trouble. The game would be nearly impossible without it because the walking speed is comparatively slow. It is the only thing in the game that doesn’t adhere to the boomer shooter tropes Doom helped to popularize.

The perks are where the game stumbles. On my second run, these are the first five perks I got: an infinite ammo upgrade for my pistols, a bomber drone assistant, a sniper drone assistant, a healer drone, and a laser sight for my pistols that added damage when trained on an enemy. With this loadout, even with the underpowered starter pistols, I was borderline invincible. If I took damage, all I had to do was simply teleport away from the horde and allow a few seconds for my healer drone to restore my health and shield.

This run likely would’ve carried me to the end of the game, but I voluntarily quit shortly before reaching the second boss. Using the underpowered pistols for the entire run, the enemies in the last few rooms of the first stage of the game were absolute bullet sponges. I spent several minutes in there, simply teleporting around, healing and holding my triggers down without any worries about having to stop and reload. I got the distinct impression these rooms were meant to kill new players without the upgrades and new weapons to quickly dispatch these tougher enemies, but I had no such issue. It simply took a long time to take them all down.

This extended to the first boss, a near fifteen minute long slog of a fight spent dodging its area of effect attacks while avoiding more of the bullet-sponge enemies that spawned in. My pistols felt like mosquitos stinging a mountain as I chip damaged this hulking monstrosity into submission.

I continued through the next few arenas in the second stage before letting myself die and ending the run with over one hundred thousand dollars to buy whatever weapons and upgrades I wanted for my next run. Again, I feel like I was meant to die in that fight before the pistols could rack up enough damage, but that simply didn’t happen and the longer the fight wore on, the more tedious it became.

The enemy AI also needs some fine tuning. Some enemies appeared to be proximity triggered, such that if I moved far enough away, they never attacked me and were easily picked off from afar. Other enemies simply could not reach me when I stayed on a raised platform, allowing me to sit and shoot them for upwards of a minute straight until they died, as shown in this clip:

Thankfully, all of these can be fixed with patches. Checks and balances on the spawn of certain perks, tweaks to the enemy recognition range, and Plasmaborne can be a serviceable roguelite. It already is, really, but your luck with the randomly selected perks can wildly change the course of your run.

Plasmaborne is available on Meta Quest for $9.99