Master Shot VR pre-release review

Today I’ve tested Master Shot VR, a VR shooting game that will be available as Steam Early Access on May, 12th.

The game has very simple mechanics: you are inside a shooting center and you have to shoot at things 🙂 . In the training stage you’re like in a desert and you have to shoot some drones. In the game stage, you’re inside a building and you have to shoot at zombies (cool! Love killing zombies).

There are various training missions as long as game missions, but the mechanics are always the same. You have a table in front of you with the weapon and the ammo and you have to shoot and destroy all the waves of enemies. You have to be careful not to run out of ammo or let the enemies come near to you and harm you. In both modes, you have only one mission available and the others gets unlocked as long as you win the previous ones. Every mission has one particular weapon that you can use and there are lots of guns out there: pistols, shotguns, machine guns, etc…

The game trailer highlights the fact that all gun handling is hyper-realistic and I can assure you that this is true. In fact there is a tutorial section that explains you the characteristics of each weapon, like how you do have to use it and how you have to reload it. Because yes, even reloading is hyper-realistic: for example, with a pistol you have to remove the old empty magazine, insert the new one and then put the first round in the chamber. All using your VR controllers (I’ve used my Oculus Touch).

I’ve played a bit this game and I’ve pretty mixed impressions. I mean, I liked the game idea, I liked the fact that guns are realistic, I liked the high number of available weapons. And then I like zombies… everyone loves shooting zombies. And in VR it is even better. Devs have also been smart in handling different headsets: even if the trailer says this is a game with 360-degrees action, on my Oculus frontal setup, it is an all-frontal game.

Graphics is not an AAA-game one, but for an indie game it is surely Ok. There’s still some polishing to be done (like the writing “Headshot” that is very rough… and I don’t even like that much the zombies… does not appear realistic to me), but it’s a good graphic.

But… but there are some serious issues. In my opinion the realistic gun feature is a fun-killer. I mean, I have to shoot zombies… I just want to take a shotgun, fire 8000 rounds and see their blood to splatter everywhere. Instead I have a shotgun and I can shoot only a bullet per time and after every shooting, I’ve to put again the cartridge in the chamber to be able to fire again. When ammo is over, I have to reload the shotgun shell by shell and this takes up to a year. Furthermore, the aiming process is absolutely non-intuitive: due to the gun moving during the shot and other things of the realistic gun handling, I have not been able to aim correctly at enemies.

So the process of the second mission went this way: zombies arrived next to me; I tried to fire the first bullet; miss; tried to fire the second one; click; oh damn, I’ve to put the shell in the chamber; put the shell in the chamber; I tried to shoot again; miss; I tried to fire the third one; click; oh sh*t…; in the end the zombies were all grabbing pop corns, laughing about how I wasn’t able to kill not even one of them. In the end the zombies comforted me, saying that these things happen and are quite normal when you’re learning a new game.

The game sounded also a bit monotonous to me: it’s true that due to frustration I’ve not tried many missions, but the ones that I’ve tried are all similar. You are somewhere, there is a table with weapons and ammos, take and shoot zombies.

Another problem is motion sickness: to start each mission, you go up with a lift to the mission place. When the mission is over, you return with this lift to the initial floor. All this up-down for the various missions causes a bit of motion sickness (maybe the devs haven’t read my post about how to reduce motion sickness in your games!). Some teleporting would be better, in my opinin.

There are also some little bugs (e.g. I had to quit because while in training, the system did not detect I had no ammo, so did not abort my mission), but the game is in pre-access, so it is quite normal… I’m sure they will be fixed.

As a final opinion, I can say that this game is not my genre. I had a classmate at university that loved playing hyper-realistic military games because he had this dream of becoming a military and I think that this is the kind of game he would have appreciated. In my opinion this is not an action game, not even a zombie-killing game. If you think like this, you find it frustrating. There’s not the scary atmosphere of Resident Evil and not the action adrenaline of Robo Recall. I think that this is a shooting game, in the sense that is a game that lets you practice in shooting with different weapons, in a realistic way, while having fun. It’s like learning using real weapons in a funny way. If you think at it this way, then it is a nice game.

Here you are a Steam link for this game… so you can test it and have your own opinion about it!

Hope you’ll have liked this review… if this is the case, like, share and comment!

(Header image by BIG3D)