A virtual shooting gallery is a quick sell for virtual reality. While light gun games have (mostly) been on hiatus since the turn of millennium, memories of Duck Hunt, Lethal Enforcers, and Virtua Cop have not escaped our collective unconscious. Additionally, Americans are immersed in gun culture and shooting objects, animals, and human beings with firearms is literally a right. Though Until Dawn: Rush of Blood would seem to have PlayStation VR’s shoot-bang market cornered, Pixel Gear, which is $9 cheaper, hopes to provide a competitive option.
Pixel Gear’s submission is a wave-based survival game. You remain at one stationary point and fend off waves of voxel-assembled monsters, knights, bats, ghosts, and witches. There are three different maps and each concludes with its own gigantic boss fight. Each wave ends with an opportunity to shoot non-combative ghosts for additional points, some of which are holding coins. In between each wave is a store which sells three additional weapons, expanded ammo slots, and a (mostly ineffective) ability to identify enemies easier.
The default gun is a snappy pistol. The most useful weapon is a submachine gun, which is great until you expend all of its ammunition. A grenade launcher is useful for taking out large congregations of monsters. The sniper rifle, which is presumably operated with just one hand, is pointless. I assume its barrel is a higher caliber and its bullets possibly cause more damage, but the absence of a laser sight makes it impossible to fire with any degree of accuracy. Interestingly, it does have a working scope that you can bring closer to your eyeball, but it shakes so violently that cracking off an accurate shot is near impossible. Neat idea, but a modest amount of testing may have revealed its functional impotence.
Enemies are largely mindless, spawning from a handful of points and advancing toward your position. Some of them have weapons of their own, but their bullets can be shot down before hitting your base. A few of the bats are carrying bombs, which can be shot out of the sky and strategically dropped on unsuspecting monsters. While there are minute differences in Pixel Gear’s almost-a-dozen creatures, the only available tactic is escalation. Headshots are remarkably easy to obtain, rendering crowd control the only perceptible challenge.
Three boss fights are closing acts for each level. These specialize in occasionally revealing weak points that need to be shot in order to open up another weak point. Each fight unfolds with predictable routine of attacks until said weak point is revealed. One of them, a wizard, is sometimes joined by parades of normal enemies shuffling about. Like much of Pixel Gear, boss fights are an exercise in tested simplicity.
Pixel Gear feels like it was conceived under a severe budget and/or in a very short amount of time. The user interface is sort of a mess; the start screen provides a nice look the game’s logo and the level select is tucked in the left corner. Looking further left reveals different difficulty options. When I was nearly finished with Pixel Gear I looked to my right, in the middle of playing a level, and found a diagram of the Move wand with a listing of button descriptions. Pixel Gear exhibits one of the more interesting, “hell, I don’t know” styles of user interface available.
I can’t find an appreciable reason for Pixel Gear to exist in virtual reality. The novelty of holding a gun and firing at objects is a premise, not a plan. You don’t move anywhere, you don’t really see around anything. Other than a floating gun, a broken sniper rifle scope, and the ability to see a few additional centimeters left or right, it’s senseless. Pixel Gear feels like someone found an abandoned design document for a WiiWare title and ported it to new hardware.
In the interest of brevity here more questions I found myself asking while playing Pixel Gear:
· Why do treasure chests explode into nothing?
· Why does all of Pixel Gear’s text look machine translated? (“Bullet of impulse micro gun,” is employed over “more ammo.” Similarly, “Increasing clip size,” somehow takes precedent over, “expanded clip”)
· Why does the ice environment abandon the Minecraft style and sport dreadful, low-resolution textures instead?
· Where are my lives, hit-points, or any measure of health listed?
· Why are those polygons in the corner flickering like a Sega Saturn launch game?
· Why spread one music track across all three levels?
· Why are there only three enemy sound effects?
· Why is the same noise responsible for a monster spawning and dying?
· Why give me a choice between two of the exact same options at the store?
· Why are there huge gaps of time where nothing happens?
· Why am I not permitted to turn the gun on myself and prematurely end Pixel Gear?
That last question is obviously facetious, but it speaks to the absence of value throughout Pixel Gear. It is neither an experience nor a game, but an anemic product. Pixel Gear thrives on its ability to operate a gun in virtual space and nothing else. If you’re nine years old you’re probably not going to care about any of the questions I have listed. Unfortunately the minimum age for PlayStation VR is twelve, which is also the point in life where you start to notice being grifted. Pixel Gear doesn’t seek to entertain; it just wants to have eleven of your dollars.
