Crisis VRigade 2 Review: hide and shoot to your victory!

Crisis VRigade has been one of the most successful game on SideQuest, and strong of this success, indie dev studio Sumalab has decided to create a new episode of the saga, Crisis VRigade 2, that has been released to various platforms. I have tried the PC VR version on Steam, and here I’m sharing with you my impressions of this game!

Crisis VRigade 2 Video Review

I have also made a video review of this game, but I admit it is not my best video ever, also because it came after a stressful day where to make Crisis VRigade 2 work I had to try 3 different headsets and 2 PCs… not because of problems of the game itself, but for random errors that my SteamVR installation was having. Anyway, a good reason for watching it is enjoying some cool gameplay scenes! So here you are my video review of the game, enjoy!

Gameplay

I honestly don’t know if Crisis VRigade 2 gameplay genre has a specific name… I think it has not because it is a pretty original mix of a wave shooter and a rail shooter. The only clear thing is that it is in the “shooter” genre, so you have to kill people, but don’t worry, they were all bad guys and girls.

In Crisis VRigade 2 you are a policeman, and you have to fire at all the bad guys that you find in front of you, until you reach the final boss of the level, that you have to kill as well. To make things even more complicated, you have a limited time to complete each mission (7 minutes for the first one, for instance).

The original twist comes in how you have to kill these enemies, and it is pretty hard to explain without making you play it. Basically, you spawn at a point where you can take cover, because there is in front of you a tank, for instance, and then some bad guys appear in the buildings and the streets in front of you. Using room-scale tracking, you take cover behind the tank, then you occasionally raise your head and your faithful gun to take aim and shoot some bad guys, then you cover again. The bad guys can be in the streets, or on the balconies of the building around you, behind a window, etc… Once you’ve killed them all, you shoot a street sign, and you see an animation with your character moving along a colored rail until you arrive at a second point, where there are again some objects behind which you can cover (e.g. some barrels) and enemies around you. Again, you take cover and shoot, until you kill them all. Then you follow the rail until the next station… and so on.

The game always keeps you under tension, and you have to be very reactive. Before you start shooting, you can see how the first enemies position themselves, and some of them are clearly in a position where they can kill you no matter how hard you try to cover (e.g. they are on a balcony that is exactly upon you), and so as soon as the level starts, you have to shoot them and you can’t take the luxury to miss them. Some of the enemies will run towards you, and as soon as they will appear on your side, you have to shoot them. Some others will have powerful weapons: in the 4th station of the first campaign, for instance, at a certain point, I saw some explosions happening around me. It was an enemy armed with a grenade launcher, against which I couldn’t take cover, so I had to kill him pretty fast. The more you go on, the more the enemies will come out from all angles, so if in the beginning, they are only in front of you, later on, they will start appearing also from the sides, from which you have no cover. You have to constantly look out in every direction if you want to survive. This game is very hard to win.

The gun you’re equipped with has infinite ammo, but it needs reloading, that you have to manually perform by ejecting the old magazine, then taking a magazine with your left hand and inserting it into the gun, then loading the bullet with your left hand. It is a bit similar to what happens with Half-Life: Alyx. The reloading mechanic adds anxiety to the game because sometimes you see some enemy running towards you, but you have just ended the ammo in your gun, and so you either reload fast or, well, RIP.

You can never take a rest: you cover, you shoot, you reload. It really looks like a real shooting scenario.

The game is pretty tough, but to make things a bit easier, the developers had made sure that the enemies always follow the same behavior, so you can learn how to properly kill them at every station, and be more efficient the next time you play it. This removes a bit of realism from the game, but at the same time, I think that without this help, winning it would have been very hard. The enemies are so many and so well armed that it’s better to know where you expect them to be.

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To help you even more in this unfair quest, when some enemies die, they release the colored icon of a bonus that you can loot to improve your lethality. Bonuses can be extra health, bullet-time (that makes the game run in slow motion for 5-10 seconds), or some cool weapons (e.g. a machine gun) that have only a magazine inside. Apart from helping you, these bonuses also add a bit of variation to the game that otherwise would have been very repetitive.

You start the game with only 3 health points, and they are really too few: with 3 shots you’re dead, and it is pretty easy to get 3 shots with all those enemies surrounding you. The only good thing of when you get shot is that you’ve given some seconds of bullet time to identify who shot you and shoot him back. If you lose all your health points, you die. When you die, you can decide to buy a “continue” bonus and restart the next match from the latest station you were playing from. This way, the game is not too much punishing if you died during a match that was going pretty well and you don’t want to re-start from scratch (this happens in theory, in practice, there is an enormous bug and if you buy a “continue” bonus, you die immediately after the restart of the match… but I think it will get fixed soon). You can constantly see how many hp and time remaining you have by looking at a little watch you have on your left hand.

In the home menu, you can buy some bonuses using the coins that you earn by playing the game and killing the enemies. These bonuses are for instance extra lives (up to 5), and cool weapons like Uzis and machine-guns. When you buy these bonuses, they stay with you for just a single play session (that is, until you die): it is cool sometimes to use a machine-gun instead of the standard gun, even if you have to learn how to reload it. And it is not only cool, but it makes you advance really fast into the game. Some other bonuses, like enhanced pistols and skins, are instead definitive and let you improve a bit your shooting capabilities or how cool you do look.

At the beginning of each level, you are together with two other cops. If you are fast enough to kill the first enemies of the wave, you have good chances to keep at least one of them alive. If you have a buddy, it helps you in killing enemies a bit faster, but it is very hard to keep him alive for more than 2 o 3 stations. Honestly, most of the time, he died directly in the first one.

When you win a level by completing the mission, you unlock the next one, for a total of three levels.

Humour

I added a special “Humour” section to this review because I think that this game deserves it. Crisis VRigade 2 is a game that always keeps you under tension, but the developers managed to make it also a bit funny thanks to the support voice that always talks with you via the walkie-talkie. It gives you some important suggestions (e.g. it told me where to look to find the guy with the grenade launcher), but most of the times it uses a lot of sarcasm: for instance, if you have no more ammo and try to shoot, it says something like “hey, have you forgot that guns to work need ammo?” or if you fire a whole magazine without hurting any enemy, it says “what are you firing at? Is there something you’re seeing and I’m not?” and things like that. This adds a very welcome humoristic touch to a game that is pretty adrenaline.

Also, the start menu is not a 2D menu, but it is your 3D office in the police department. Around you, there are objects that you can take and throw, and then you can start shooting to whatever you want. The menus are all operated by shooting, too. It’s funny that you can start shooting also at two colleagues of yours that are drinking, and if you do that, the voice will say something like “oh no, what are we going to say to the families now?”.

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I loved these nice touches on a game that is tough and stressful.

Graphics

The game has a graphical style that is realistic but with a cartoonish touch. There aren’t many details, this is not Half-Life: Alyx, but I found the graphical quality absolutely good to be an indie title. Given also the nature of the gameplay, that is not very complicated, I think that a more detailed graphics would have been overkill.

I also appreciated the variation that the developers have tried to add to the environments and the enemies: there are many enemy types with different clothing and faces and the three available missions have three completely different settings.

Audio

The quality of the audio is like the one of the graphics: absolutely ok for an indie title. The sound effects are well made and coherent, and also help you in understanding if you have hit an enemy or not. The background music helps in keeping a sensation of tension while you play.

Locomotion

Loco…what? 🙂 This game has no locomotion, you just move station by station via an automatic animation and then while you are in every station, you just use your room-scale tracking to cover yourself and shoot in all directions.

Immersion

Crisis VRigade 2 is very immersive. The audio and video quality are good enough to give you the illusion of being there, but it is especially the fast pacing of the game that gives you a strong sense of presence. You have no time to think if you are in a game or in reality, you just know that you have to shoot those bastards before they kill you! The game is so intense that it sucks you in.

Input

The only real input mechanism is for shooting, reloading, and shooting again. You reload by pressing a button on your right controller to eject the old magazine, then grab with the grab trigger of your left hand a magazine from your torso, insert it into the gun that you hold in the right hand, and then with your left hand, you move a part of the gun to load the first bullet. At this point, you can fire. As I’ve told you before, it is a mechanism similar to the one of Half-Life: Alyx, and after 1-2 play sessions, it is quite easy to master.

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What can really become tricky is getting the magazine attached to your jacket. You may think that I’m crazy in saying that just grabbing a mag close to your stomach is difficult, and theoretically, it is not, but in practice, you have to remember that we are using a VR technology that still isn’t perfect. When you play Crisis VRigade, in some moments you are really crouched down, and depending on your position in the room and your position of the base stations, it may happen that when you put the controller close to your chest, the base stations can’t see it anymore, and it loses the tracking. I was so unlucky that it happened to me, and I hadn’t better luck with an inside out tracked headset like the Vive Cosmos: the result was that during the most critical moments of the game, where I needed to reload fast, I started seeing my virtual hand flying away in the world letting me die while I screamed an enormous “F***********ck”.

Comfort

Motion-sickness-wise, this game is very comfortable, because there is no locomotion, but just room scale. So everyone can play it.

Regarding the overall comfort, instead, this game is pretty tiresome. It is very intense, so after half an hour playing it here during the summer I was all covered in sweat and I had to take a pause. Furthermore, since the game requires you to cover, you find yourself lots of time crouched on the floor for many seconds, and this is pretty tiresome for the legs. It is not a game that you can play when you want to relax a bit.

Special features

The game is compatible with the bHaptics haptic suit, for added realism and immersion. I haven’t tried it yet, but you bet that I will do.

Crisis VRigade 2 final verdict

Crisis VRigade 2 is my genre of games: you shoot, you kill and you don’t have to think much about strategy, logic, puzzles, or other boring stuff. You just take cover and kill, the fastest that you can. It is good to vent after a stressful working day.

Notwithstanding some issues with the tracking of the controllers, and some bugs here and there, the game has been a hell of fun for me. Maybe it is too intense, and playing it during the summer is not the best scenario; maybe it is a bit too hard to win; but it has made me spend some hours of fun without even noticing the time passing by. Yes, after I removed the headset I started feeling all the pain in my legs, but that’s part of the experience I guess.

If you like me like pure action games, I can only strongly advise Crisis VRigade 2. You can find it on Steam for around 17€. Buy it and support a talented indie game studio.

With this suggestion, I end my review. As always, feel free to let me know your impressions or ask me any kind of questions in the comments here below!

(Header image by Sumalab)