Pistol Whip is coming to PC VR and Oculus Quest on November 7 with a PSVR version “coming soon” as well.
The new John Wick-inspired Cloudhead Games title is described as an “action-rhythm FPS” which appears inspired by the art style of Superhot and the global rhythm phenomenon of Beat Saber. While Beat Saber gives you swords, Pistol Whip gives you a gun and its design makes you feel like you’re in an action sequence from a movie.
“There’s all these great action movies. How do we pull a user in a relentless, unstoppable way through an action sequence in a movie,” said Cloudhead CEO Denny Unger. “What people want is the power fantasy of having a gun and feeling like they are a badass action movie hero, but they don’t necessarily have the skills to be a John Wick or somebody like that. People don’t inherently have that accuracy, and the coordination necessarily to do all these crazy things with their weapon, so we just kept pulling back on what the user needed to come out of an experience feeling satisfied and feeling like it fulfilled that fantasy for them.”
The Oculus version of the game includes cross-buy so a single purchase from Facebook’s Oculus should work for both Rift and Quest. You can wishlist the game now on Steam, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest and Viveport. It launches with 10 songs from Kannibalen Records with plans for regular music and level updates.
Cloudhead is known for its early hand-controlled room-scale VR game The Gallery and its sequel as well as the introductory experience it released earlier this year for Valve’s Index Controllers — Aperture Hand Lab.
Here’s the latest trailer for the game along with a brief exclusive interview with the creators:
Cloudhead describes it as “inspired by God-mode action movies like John Wick and Equilibrium, Pistol Whip throws you gun-first into an explosive batch of hand-crafted action sequences each set to their own breakneck soundtrack.” In Pistol Whip you’re pulled down a long corridor with enemies spawning all around you. You’ll need to dodge the incoming bullets and you can either shoot the targets or punch them with your gun if they get in your way.
I’ve put dozens of hours into early versions of Pistol Whip but I’ve agreed not to share gameplay impressions until we’ve played a more complete version of the game. We’ll have those impressions and gameplay footage for you in the coming weeks so check back soon for details.
“There’s a subset of people who we still need to get into VR,” said Designer Antony Stevens. “We still need to get people coming back into VR and Beat Saber is a great example of doing that. It’s great for first time players, its great for return players. It’s a solid product. But I mean — it’s not everyone — and maybe we hit the other side of the coin with Pistol Whip.”
Cloudhead Games, the studio behind The Gallery series and Aperture Hand Labs, today announced that its upcoming ‘action-rhythm FPS’ Pistol Whip is set to arrive on November 7th.
Pistol Whip is said to include cross-buy for the Oculus Store version, meaning you’ll only need to buy the game once to play on either Rift or Quest. The game also supports HTC Vive, Valve Index, and Windows VR headsets via Steam and Viveport.
The studio maintains that Pistol Whip is also heading to PSVR soon, although it hasn’t mentioned any specific release window yet.
In case you haven’t seen the game’s E3 2019 reveal back in June, the unique action-rhythm shooter is being billed as ‘part Superhot and part Beat Saber‘; it also includes a runner-style movement scheme that sends you hurdling through an abstract crystalline world that’s teeming with baddies that need to be shot—and providing they’re close enough—pistol whipped to pieces.
Cloudhead says they were also inspired by action films such as John Wick and Equilibrium, and if the new trailer is any indication, it’s pretty easy to see how.
“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 favorite action hero, planted in the center of an unstoppable action sequence,” said Denny Unger, Cloudhead CEO and creative director.
To supply the rhythm-based game with music, the studio has partnered with Montreal-based Kannibalen Records to deliver what it calls a “pulse-pounding 10-song soundtrack,” which is said to include music by EDM bands such as Apashe, HVDES, and Black Tiger Sex Machine. Cloudhead says regular music and level updates are planned for post-launch.
You can wishlist Pistol Whip on your preferred platform below:
Canada-based Cloudhead Games is planning to premiere the first full trailer for its upcoming VR game Pistol Whip on Monday, Sept. 23 at 10 am Pacific.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and tune in Monday for an exclusive interview with Cloudhead as the company offers the first detailed look at the game since its reveal during our E3 VR Showcase earlier this year.
Here’s the four-minute segment in case you missed it:
At this point we’ve put quite a few hours into the John Wick-inspired game in recent weeks but we’ve agreed not to share any impressions or gameplay footage until we have a more complete version of the title in our hands. Cloudhead is a groundbreaking VR studio and their previous titles, The Gallery Episode 1 and 2, are multi-hour puzzle and exploration games in the tradition of Myst. The studio’s early VR design work with room-scale and hand controllers helped popularize some techniques, like their “blink” teleport system.
Earlier this year the team also worked on Valve’s Aperture Hand Labs demo, a short introduction to the new Index controllers.
Pistol Whip is quite the departure, then, from Cloudhead’s earlier work. I decided to visit the studio’s offices on Vancouver Island and interview the creators to better understand how they built the game. We’ll have that for you on our YouTube channel Monday morning and highly recommend subscribing and tuning in. The reveal from Cloudhead should help kick off an enormous week for the emerging VR industry that will see a Sony State Of Play update as well as Facebook’s Oculus Connect 6.
Cloudhead released a 20-second teaser for the game ahead of the reveal.
Keanu Reeves may be coming to Cyberpunk 2077 but there’s only one game at E3 this year that will make you actually feel like John Wick. That game is Pistol Whip from Cloudhead Games.
Pistol Whip closed out our first ever E3 VR Showcase today. For Cloudhead, a team best known for its (excellent) episodic VR adventure series, The Gallery, this is something very different. Inspired by the likes of Beat Saber and Superhot, this is a vibrant, neon-lit first-person shooter. In it, players stream down a straight path, gunning down any enemies that get in their way.
Cloudhead describes it as a ‘music rhythm FPS’. “It’s a shooter that you don’t necessarily have to be dead accurate for to be able to hit,” Cameron Oltmann, programming and design lead, says in our showcase. “And it’s a rhythm game that doesn’t require you to take out enemies in a specific order.”
The focus, then, is all on feeling. Pistol Whip wants to empower players, to give them the invincible feeling of shooting their way through a movie set and looking like a badass while you’re at it. For the music, Cloudhead has partnered with a Canadian label named Kannibalen. The game will utilize the label’s library to fuel the frantic, fun gameplay.
Pistol Whip is due for release on all major VR headsets later this year. Cloudhead isn’t giving specifics beyond that right now. As for our E3 VR Showcase? It just wrapped up, but you’ll be able to watch the entire thing from start to finish right here.
Now that Audica has officially launched on Oculus Quest and is available on PSVR and PC VR headsets, we thought it was the perfect time to revisit our review and update it for the current version of the game with a finalized score.
When Audica first hit Early Access it was early 2019 and Beat Saber fever was still in full sing. Beat Saber was absolutely the VR shot heard around the world and clearly Harmonix was listening closely.
To their credit, they have the most experience with crafting music games out of anyone on the planet. They’ve established their legacy as the music game creation game company with titles like Amplitude, Rock Band, and Dance Central to their credit, not to mention VR games like Rock Band VR, Singspace, Dance Central VR, and even Harmonix Music VR, so it’s no wonder they took note. Since then, Pistol Whip has burst onto the scene as another rhythm-based VR shooter, but that one is its own beat entirely.
Comparing Audica to Beat Saber is inevitable, but it has just as many differences as it does similarities. It definitely offers something distinct and different, but not necessarily better. The relatively unwieldy mechanics and lack of overall fluidity makes it harder to recommend than its main competitor’s dead simple pick-up-and-play approach — but let’s dig into the specifics more clearly.
The basic premise in Audica is that you shoot blue and orange nodes inside VR using motion controllers to the beat of the music. Instead of slicing boxes, punching orbs, or blocking objects, you shoot colorful targets. It’s just different enough to feel unique and challenging, obviously requiring a different type of hand-eye coordination than physically punching or swinging. And when you nail it and rack up a huge combo, it feels extremely satisfying.
Once you get in the zone Audica has a way of feeling almost more like a dance than anything else. You’re not only aiming at targets as boxes close in on the center, but also swinging your arms to swat down orbs trying to hit you and scanning the field with your head to locate the next target. The way the game engaged my head and forced me to move and look somewhere other than straight ahead was definitely an adjustment for games like this. We’ve yet to really see a rhythm music game in VR that takes full advantage of the 360 space, other than 360 levels in Beat Saber, but playing Audica on Quest definitely had me looking from left to right constantly.
When you watch footage of this game it’s a bit hard to tell the nuances of each movement, but there are actually a lot of different ways to shoot a target in Audica. There are basic shots with circle targets, diamond shaped shots that require holding the trigger to channel electricity, as well as dual combo shots, chain shots that require tracing a pattern while holding the trigger, as well as both vertical and horizontal shots. It’s a lot to digest.
Even though the tutorial throws everything at you quickly the actual difficulty stages are pretty diverse. In Audica you have entire new game mechanics to contend with depending on which setting you pick which really does help make it feel like a progression within the game rather than notes just moving more quickly.
As it turns out, gameplay is actually very similar to an obscure downloadable rhythm game you may not have heard of calledOsu which involves dragging your cursor through circles as they shrink and timing it as the outer circle hits the center. Or like in Elite Beat Agents for DS. Basically that, but in VR and with two guns.
I think my main issue with the core gameplay loop is that it doesn’t feel as fine-tuned as it should. For example, with modern VR headsets like the Rift S and Quest, the main two I’ve played this game on, it’s easier than I’d like to miss new targets because of the narrow field of view relative to my actual eyesight. Frequently on the second difficulty tier and above, new targets will appear outside of the headset’s vision. The only indication that a target is there is a faint aura that emanates just before it appears but if you’re turning your head or already looking at an existing target it’s way too easy to miss it. A headset with a wider field of view would help, but I only tried it on Quest and Rift S for this review. It becomes less of a music rhythm game and more of a “quick reflex reaction time” game.
However, the main thing Audica has going for it is a deep and varied selection of songs — especially if you factor in the DLC as well. When you buy the game you’ll immediately have access to over 30 tracks right off the bat ranging from EDM and electronic tracks, as is customary in this genre, but also with a few pop songs and even some metal via Dragonforce thrown in for good measure. They don’t all fit the gameplay that well as far as I’m concerned, but everyone vibes with music differently.
If you add in the DLC, which is reasonably priced at $2 per track or $19.99 for the whole 2019 Season Pass, you get even more variety with artists like Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Imagine Dragons, Post Malone, Fall Out Boy, and more. Having that much to pick from is really, really nice and new track releases happen very consistently.
Another issue is that the key action you’re performing (quickly aiming at and shooting targets) doesn’t feel natural. Usually when you shoot a gun in real life or in other VR games you’re holding it up, arms steady, and taking aim carefully or at least with some stability. On the contrary in Audica your arms are swimming through the air, almost like you’re in a ballet, as you swat away objects and quickly take aim at new targets just as they appear. However, this does foster a need to memorize the song patterns and it becomes a much more skillful game, which will appeal to hardcore players. The skill ceiling feels enormous here.
The pure physicality of hitting things though, the cornerstone of what makes so many VR rhythm games addictive, is all but missing. Pointing and pulling a trigger just isn’t as satisfying as the impact of slashing or punching. Even other shooting games like Pistol Whip manage to be more visceral because of the dodging and active nature. In Audica, you basically just stand still. In this way, it feels like something is missing.
There’s a Campaign mode which splits the tracks up into different thematic categories you progress through, but the bulk of your time will likely be spent in Solo play mastering the various difficulty levels. There’s a Group Play mode as well that’s designed for passing the headset, which works great on Quest especially if paired with Chromecast streaming for parties. There are also leaderboards, naturally.
One very unique feature Audica has going for it is the ability to craft your own beat maps for songs directly inside the app itself, which is really unique and fun. However, it does not have anywhere near the same level of custom beat map modding support that Beat Saber does. If you don’t like the songs included in Audica, you should skip it entirely instead of expecting the community to mod in songs you want.
I hate to have made so many comparisons to Beat Saber in this review, but especially on the PC side of things where the active modding community is providing Beat Saber with a near infinite number of songs and so much more, it’s hard not to. For a lot of people the question is: Why should I buy Audica if I already have Beat Saber? And that answer is gonna be very different for most everyone.
Audica VR Review Final Verdict:
As it stands Audica is definitely something different, for better and for worse. The gameplay mechanics are enough to make it stand out, especially if you dedicate the time to really dig into it, but in a crowded VR rhythm game market the circumstances surrounding how and why it’s different aren’t always in its favor. If you’re a big fan of VR rhythm games, make no doubt: there is plenty to sink your teeth into and you’re gonna have fun, but if you’re picky about finding your flow in a game or already enamored with Beat Saber, there may not be enough to pull you in
Audica is available now on Steam for PC VR headsets, Oculus Home for Rift, PSN for PSVR and Oculus Quest at a price point of $29.99 on all platforms. This review is primarily based on the Oculus Quest version of Audica, but we’ve played it on PC via Rift and Rift S as well.
Editor’s Note: The first version of this review was published in March, 2019, when the PC Early Access version of Audica released. As of today, February 4th, 2020, the review has been updated and rewritten to account for the launch version of the game.
Cloudhead is known for its early hand-controlled room-scale VR game The Gallery and its sequel as well as the introductory experience it released earlier this year for Valve’s Index Controllers — Aperture Hand Lab.
