Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today, we want to know what you think about the potential success of Pistol Whip.
As it turns out, the last time a rhythm-focused VR game was heavily featured using mixed reality videos it went on to become a smash-hit success: Beat Saber. Pistol Whip has a lot of the same core principles, even if the actual moment-to-moment gameplay and level designs are incredibly different.
So that brings us to this week’s topic: Do you think Pistol Whip will have the same impact as Beat Saber? Why or why not? Having played the game a bit, I’m not sure yet. Custom songs won’t be much of a thing and most people agree that’s a huge selling point for Beat Saber, plus Beat Saber is more kid-friendly and it got hot at the same time that LIV was first debuting mixed reality capabilities for content creators.
But at the same time it’s fiercely addictive, makes you feel cool, and is certainly polished to a glistening sheen when compared to most other VR titles.
What do you think? Does it have what it takes to become the next viral VR sensation? Let us know down below!
As the run-up to Christmas begins, the virtual reality (VR) offerings are at an all-time high, with first-person shooters (FPS) and rhythm-action titles particularly popular this week. Make sure to check out our accompanying video and keep following our various social media feeds to get all the latest VR news and updates.
Galactic Rangers VR – DGMA
In this first-person space adventure, immerse yourself into an epic space battle fight your way through endless hordes of enemies and asteroids as you venture deep into space. Made in the spirit of many classic arcade cabinet games, this fast-paced VR extravaganza features a range of different weapons and powerups to assist your adventure.
A mixture of Beat Saber and the classic Shoot ‘em Up’s, set in a huge galactic arena, you fire at different oncoming targets to an original soundtrack. Currently, in early access, the videogame in its present form features 24 tracks of Harmonix’s award-winning music gameplay. This VR “rhythm shooter” features an online leader board, a range of difficulty levels, practice mode and additional environments and weapons.
Supported platforms: PlayStation VR
Launch date: 5th November
Into the Radius – CM Games
Mobile game studio, Creative Mobile (CM Games) presents its first VR title in the form of Into the Radius. In this single-player shooter, utilise a range of realistic guns with equally realistic mechanics to survive in this cold, open-world, post-apocalyptic, ex-soviet setting featuring both a campaign and ‘free-roam’ mode. Currently, in Early Access, the final game is to have over 15 hours of playable storyline.
The newest addition to the ever-growing rhythm-action genre for VR comes Pistol Whip. New from Cloudhead Games, the studio behind The Gallery series, this is an action-rhythm first-person experience where users shoot, melee and avoid targets to your own choice of song. Designed as a ‘pick up and play’ title, Pistol Whip features a simple control scheme and each scene features its own unique soundtrack. Challenge and compete with your opponent’s thanks to online leaderboards and with top-notch comfort-first game design, you are guaranteed an enjoyable experience without the risk of motion sickness.
In this new PlayStation VR exclusive, you play as an injured child, Twine, who has developed an extraordinary ability. While completely bedridden, you have the power to see the world through the eyes of stone golems. You are able to control their movements, as you explore the ruins of an abandoned city and collect artefacts on your travels. First announced back in 2015, this long-awaited title also featuring a new original soundtrack from Destiny and Halo composer, Marty O’Donnell.
There are a couple of exciting virtual reality (VR) titles arriving next week, one of which is Pistol Whip by Cloudhead Games. Due for launch across multiple home head-mounted displays (HMD) on 7th November, the studio has now confirmed that even if you don’t own a headset you’ll still have a chance to play, as Pistol Whip is coming to location-based entertainment (LBE) locations thanks to SpringboardVR.
To help facilitate the arcade launch on 7th November Cloudhead Games is offering free licensing for the first day, with Pistol Whip priced at seven cents per minute thereafter.
The musical first-person shooter (FPS) was designed from day one with both home and LBE gaming in mind, combining light gun titles like Time Crisis and Virtua Cop with the rhythmic flow of videogames like Beat Saber. “We have been analyzing the market for years and have talked to many LBE operators to learn what works and what doesn’t, said Jo Dunlop, Communications & Business Development for Cloudhead Games. “We wanted to develop a game that will work flawlessly in LBE while having extra layers of depth for the home audience.”
First revealed during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2019 in June, Pistol Whip takes place in a highly stylised world where players can shoot and melee enemies to a thumping soundtrack, whilst dodging bullets at the same time. Featuring EDM artists from Kannibalen Records, including Apashe, HVDES, and Black Tiger Sex Machine, players will have access to weapon mods along the way, including dual-wielding. Future updates will include additional songs.
Coming to Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index next Thursday, Pistol Whip adds to the long line of VR rhythm-action titles which are out or coming to headsets. Other titles include Harmonix’s Audica, BoxVR, Synth Riders, Audio Shield and upcoming experience Viro Move.
Making LBE centric attractions is a growing trend amongst VR developers. Most recently Maze Theory revealed a stripped back version of Doctor Who: The Edge of Timewould be rolled out, and Japanese team Yomuneco Inc. planned on bringing Swords of Gargantuato locations worldwide. For further updates on Pistol Whip, keep reading VRFocus.
Cloudhead is revealing half of Pistol Whip’s levels today and allowing the sharing of gameplay videos.
So today I’m sharing five Pistol Whip gameplay videos captured in my living room using green screens, LIV’s mixed reality app, OBS, and a pre-release version of the game. Pistol Whip debuts Nov. 7 for Quest, Index, Rift and Vive (PSVR is in the works), and earlier this week Cloudhead lifted an embargo allowing me to share my initial impressions of the title and break down its shooter-meets-rhythm game mechanics.
The game features 10 levels at launch, with more planned, that amount to colorful and dreamy maps which seem vaguely inspired by action movie scenes with big gun battles or chases in them. Set to thumping music licensed from Kannibalen Records, there’s an auto-aim system in place for the main game as well as a “Deadeye” mode that takes away the assistance for folks who want that accuracy challenge, to train or prefer that play style. I’ve played it for more than 40 hours at this point — most of it in the main game mode — and put all of that time into the maps captured for this page.
I’m starting to suspect Pistol Whip will be my go-to VR demonstration title in the coming months. You can wish list it at the following links:
The first video below is the more challenging Deadeye modifier turned on for easy and medium difficulties on Black Magic — the level I’m most familiar with from the auto-aim mode. Below it is a video of the “hard” difficulty with auto-aim. I can’t yet beat the same level on “hard” with Deadeye enabled. Cloudhead provided the video featuring a beta version of the Replicants level, but the rest are recorded by me. My favorite map so far is the last one below, called Death.
Pistol Whip, the upcoming VR rhythm shooter from Cloudhead Games, is set to launch on November 7th. We’ve got a fresh batch of gameplay, this time showing off the game’s dual-wielding mode which amps up the game’s ‘gun kata’ feel.
As we talked about in our preview of Pistol Whip earlier this week, the game goes beyond merely shooting targets to the beat, it also forces you to dodge incoming fire. By default the game gives you a single pistol, but if you explore the modifier section you’ll also find a dual-wield mode. If the default single pistol mode makes you feel like an agent from The Matrix, the dual-wield mode will make you feel like you’re living a scene from Equilibrium:
Two pistols gives you more firepower but also requires that you divide your attention to independently engage targets with each gun while maintaining an overarching flow between shooting and dodging in order to stay on beat. Master this and you’ll be rewarded with an amplified sense of ‘gun kata‘ not found anywhere else in VR. To give you a sense for what it’s like, we captured 15 minutes of Pistol Whip gameplay using the dual-wield mode on the game’s hardest difficulty:
If it isn’t quite clear from the video above, at many points in this gameplay I’m practically down on my knees as I bob and weave to land shots while dodging incoming fire (and I’ll be feeling it in the morning). Especially on the hardest difficulty, Pistol Whip makes you move a unique and fun way. As we talked about in our preview of the game, this movement is crucial to creating a rich sense of embodiment:
With the incoming bullets, the game forces you to be concerned with your ‘near-field’—it heightens your sense of what’s immediately within arms reach. This leads to embodiment (distinct from mere immersion) which is often a component of the best VR games. It’s this bodily movement (the result of necessary near-field spatial awareness) combined with the ‘arms out and shooting’ gameplay which makes Pistol Whip feel unique and not just ‘another rhythm game’.
Check back for our full review of Pistol Whip when it launches on PC VR headsets and Oculus Quest on November 7th.
Designers at Canada-based Cloudhead waste no time in their latest game. Pistol Whip basically points a gun at your head and says “dodge this.” You better move, or you’re going down like just another agent in The Matrix.
The VR game debuts Nov. 7 across most major headsets including Quest, Index, Rift and Vive (with a PSVR version in the works), and the software wears its inspirations on stylish sleeves. If you’ve played Superhot, you can see that game the moment you hear the words “Pistol…Whip” at scene selection. Beat Saber’s influence is obvious, too, but so are the fantasies of generations who grew up watching action movies like James Bond, Die Hard, Kingsman and John Wick.
That’s the level upon which Pistol Whip’s foundation is laid firmest. It is a VR game made for people who like movies where heroes get things done with a gun. Put another way, it should appeal to almost anyone who thinks Keanu Reeves looks good in a suit.
Symphony Of Bullets
I’ve spent nearly 40 hours with early versions of Pistol Whip on Valve Index and I see no end in sight to my time with the game. As I type this, my hand aches from gripping the controller too tightly, and for too long, replaying a single hard level in “Deadeye” mode.
The game launches with 10 levels, or “scenes” as Cloudhead calls them. Each scene — a catchy song licensed from Kannibalen Records — is mapped to a continuous three-to-five minute path through colorful glowing stages. Each scene amounts to a dreamy re-imagining of chase or gun-battle scenes from action movies. There are easy, medium and hard difficulties for each scene and they are all built around an auto-aim system tuned to help a wide selection of players slip into this power fantasy.
Auto-aim
The auto-aim ensures everyone playing Pistol Whip is a highly skilled marksman relentlessly pulled forward through each level. Enemies sprint into place and align themselves at a series of predefined moments along the path. When they fire you’ve got some time to move your head out of the way. There are really only three main enemy types and they differ visually just enough to tell you they need one, two or four bullets to go down. There are, of course, more of the harder to break baddies on higher difficulties.
I put most of my time with the game into this auto-aim mode. Players are likely to find different play styles depending what you want to do. Going for a high score? Maybe start moving to the beat to help you place your bullets at the right moment. I found a satisfying flow state playing this way — a kind of dance with my heart thumping in my chest and shots colliding perfectly in sync with the music. I haven’t felt anything like it since, maybe, Mirror’s Edge.
Deadeye Modifier
I recently turned on the “Deadeye” modifier and, spoiler alert, turning auto-aim off is like that arc in a comic book hero’s journey where they lose their powers. I can’t yet beat a level on hard difficulty in this mode and I haven’t found that relaxing/exhilarating flow state I did in the main game. Honing my aim, though, also feels like an incredible challenge to undertake as well and one that’s likely to draw me back again and again. It also offers a 20% score bonus.
Pistol Whip Scoring
With auto-aim I’d memorized the spawn beats of enemies to such a degree, and became so aligned with the assistance, that I’d learned to take my shots fast and move my head so little that it didn’t take much energy anymore to dodge the occasional bullet and stay in command of a hard level. There are 200 points possible per shot summed from a combination of accuracy and on-beat shooting. “Deadeye” mode, then, is there for players who want “training accuracy or as a high-level challenge,” according to Cloudhead.
What About Custom Songs?
Some VR players may turn Deadeye on way quicker than I did — it wasn’t in earlier builds I tried — and I’m far from what anyone would call “good” at shooter games. So many players will probably exhaust the game’s levels way faster than me. Cloudhead’s official comment on “custom” music is that “because Pistol Whip levels are complete scenes rather than ‘voids’ like in traditional rhythm games, custom tracks are a more complicated process. However, we have solutions in mind that we are excited to address after launch.”
The studio is also planning “more free and paid songs/scenes for after launch.”
Hype Train Pulling Into The Station
Game reviews are embargoed by Cloudhead until release of the game at 10 am Pacific on Nov. 7. In all my time with the game I’ve only played five of the 10 completed songs. We should have our hands on a finished build of the game with plenty of time to develop a full review, but for now Cloudhead’s lifted the embargo on initial impressions.
So, here it is then. Pistol Whip’s consumed me for much of 2019. Cloudhead announced the game as part of our E3VR showcase this summer and when I went on vacation I took the Valve Index and its base stations with me because I expected Cloudhead to send me a build during the trip. They did, and my family is still mad at me for playing it in the other room so much instead of visiting with them. I was so impressed by what I played I got a passport and booked the multi-flight journey out to visit their office in Canada and interview the development team face-to-face so I could understand their journey toward this game.
For roughly seven years now I’ve obsessed over the promises of VR technology and I’ve been a fair bit skeptical the entire time. I wish VR would allow more people to work from home while empowering more folks to spend meaningful time with their families. Maybe that’s the future of VR — I hope it is — but the fun I’ve found in Pistol Whip tells me something Cloudhead seemed to realize in its journey from two Myst-like VR games and Aperture Hand Labs to this one.
First, we’ll need guns. Lots of guns.
You can wish list Pistol Whip at the following links:
Pistol Whip is described by its creators as a ‘mashup between SUPERHOT VR and Beat Saber‘. While it would be easy to take bits of each but still fail to find synergy, Pistol Whip is indeed a mashup of Superhot and Beat Saber in the best possible sense.
Yes, it seems like there’s a hundred VR rhythm games out there already, and if you’ve already found one you love, it might be hard to see why Pistol Whip would be worth a shot over a myriad of other options. What’s more, shooting and rhythm mechanics have already been mashed together by the likes of Audica and others, so what could Pistol Whip really bring to the table? Quite a bit, it turns out.
While Audica is perhaps the most obvious way of putting the two gameplay concepts together, Pistol Whip presents a more creative approach. Rather than standing in one place and shooting at stationary targets, Pistol Whip has you constantly running forward and shooting at targets that appear around the environment. What’s more, these targets shoot back.
The ‘targets’ here are actually enemies which can take one, two, or four shots to kill, depending upon their armor. And it’s the fact that they shoot back at you which really helps Pistol Whip find a unique synergy between shooting and rhythm concepts. Whereas Audica is essentially a passive experience where you’re shooting targets, in Pistol Whip you need to actively track and dodge incoming bullets while you eliminate threats at the same time.
Enemy bullets fly at you slowly enough to give you time to dodge your head out of the way. As you get used to the timing, you start to proactively move and dodge rather than simply react. As a result you start to ‘flow’ your upper body around as you dodge and shoot your way through each level. You’ll also score more points if you shoot in time with the beat, which means you’ll end up incorporating your own gun movements and trigger pulls into this overall flow. While you’ll surely hear comparisons to Neo’s bullet dodging in The Matrix, the more apt comparison (to be blatantly pedantic) is actually Agent Johnson from the same film; the movement is quite similar:
With the incoming bullets, the game forces you to be concerned with your ‘near-field’—it heightens your sense of what’s immediately within arms reach. This leads to embodiment, which is distinct from mere immersion, and often a component of the best VR games. It’s this bodily movement (the result of necessary near-field spatial awareness) combined with the ‘arms out and shooting’ gameplay which makes Pistol Whip feel unique and not just ‘another rhythm game’.
Pistol Whip is a pretty radical departure for developer Cloudhead Games which is known for its linear, story-driven VR adventure series The Gallery. And yet our time with the game shows a level of polish and thoughtful design which makes it clear that having talent and experience in VR in general is—at this stage—more valuable than having experience in a specific genre.
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Cloudhead hasn’t announced the price of the game yet, but says it will be in line with ‘similar games’ (so we’re guessing $25 or $30). There will be 10 tracks at launch, but the studio says it has plans for more free and paid tracks to be released in the future. Pistol Whip is also slated to come to PSVR at a later date.
Check back for our full review of Pistol Whip when it launches on PC VR headsets and Oculus Quest on November 7th.
If you were already excited for Cloudhead’s Pistol Whip the video on this page may make the next few weeks excruciating ahead of its release on Nov. 7.
Not sure what the game is actually like to play? On the fence? Wondering if it can really make you feel like you’re in an action sequence from a movie? Before I embed the first full level of gameplay from a beta version of Pistol Whip I’m posting the links to the pages for the game where you can wishlist it for every major VR headset, with PSVR coming soon. I think there’s a good chance you’ll want these links when you’re done watching.
Let me also preface the video by conveying that what you’re about to watch is what Pistol Whip mastery looks like after countless plays of a single song. The song is Replicants by Black Tiger Sex Machine, Apashe for the label Kannibalen Records. It is one of 10 songs included at launch with Cloudhead Games planning regular music and level updates.
I’ve put dozens of hours into an early version of the game and, though it made me feel like John Wick even on the easiest difficulty, I took so many bullets along the way and found myself hooked on replaying a single song for hours to try and achieve the highest score possible and a god mode play style like the one depicted here. This video is provided by Cloudhead and Pistol Whip is integrated with the LIV mixed reality toolset so it should be possible for others to capture gameplay footage like this.
During the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2019 in June Cloudhead Games – the studio behind The Gallery series – announced a new virtual reality (VR) title which was completely different to previous projects, a rhythm-action first-person shooter (FPS) called Pistol Whip. Today, the studio has confirmed support for Oculus Quest as well as a launch date for Quest and PC VR headsets.
The rhythm-action genre is becoming increasingly popular in VR, thanks to a mixture of immersive gameplay, music and its fitness characteristics. Described by Cloudhead Games as ‘part SUPERHOT and part Beat Saber‘, Pistol Whip has been inspired by God-mode action movies like John Wick and Equilibrium, pitting players against seemingly endless enemies whilst enjoying some thumping tunes.
Built to be simply picked-up-and-played, Pistol Whip has been designed with a simple control scheme which any player can master. Featuring an explosive selection of hand-crafted action sequences, players have complete freedom to shoot, melee, and dodge targets however they chose.
Armed with a pistol (the only gun shown so far) Pistol Whip is all about racking up those kills and building multipliers in time with the music for an impressive high score. There’s still plenty about the title Cloudhead Games hasn’t revealed including how many levels there are, how the scoring works – do headshots offer more points? – will there be multiple modes, a co-op of some sort (or local multiplayer) and any online options like global leaderboards?
“As a VR-centric studio, we’ve always placed a focus on player agency in VR. With Pistol Whip we wanted users to feel like their favourite action hero, planted in the centre of an unstoppable action sequence,” said Denny Unger, CEO and Creative Director, in a statement.
Pistol Whip will launch on 7th November 2019 for Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index. The PlayStation VR version is now listed as ‘coming soon’. For the launch, Cloudhead Games has partnered with Kannibalen Records to deliver a 10-song soundtrack, with regular music and level updates planned for the coming months. As further details are released for Pistol Whip ahead of and after launch, VRFocus will let you know.
Galactic Rangers VR – DGMA
