If you fancy paying $11 for a boring shooting gallery with three levels that consist entirely of shooting the same few enemies over and over while the same song plays over and over, then get your wallet out for the Move controlled PlayStation VR exclusive Pixel Gear.
Using a single Move controller that acts as a gun you’ll be mowing down waves of slow-moving and boring skeletons, Frankensteins, knights, ghosts, witches, bats and three giant. Thing is, aside from the boss fights, it couldn’t be more dull. Enemies are so slow and unthreatening it might as well be a toy target gallery at your local fair. Bosses are a bit entertaining and feel quite large thanks to VR, but aren’t enough to save this mundane mess.
The art style is all over the place as the levels look like they are made out of voxels à la Minecraft, while most of the enemies and some of the set pieces look like they’d be more at home in a JRPG. There are also cartoony 2D ghosts and angels that come out of chests dropped by the last enemy per wave, for some reason unbeknownst to me. On top of all that, the gun looks like some kind of futuristic tech that doesn’t match the rest of the game’s aesthetics at all.
Each level plays out in waves, and players can purchase upgrades, ammo, and guns between rounds with coins that can be earned by shooting the ghosts that carry them. The other unlockable guns are a machine gun, a grenade launcher, and a sniper rifle, most of which are useless. Your gun has the ability to slow time and rapidly fire like the machine gun, and the laser sight already gives it pinpoint accuracy. The sniper rifle has a scope you can look through, but enemies are so zoomed in that using the sniper is utterly pointless. At least the grenade launcher is useful for the third and final level where enemies sometimes spawn in groups.
With only three levels and a tiny amount of enemies you’d think this would at least be a refined package—but you’d be wrong. In the 30 or so minutes it took to complete the game I saw enemies clip or shoot through walls and enemies standing in plain sight that I couldn’t shoot because the hit detection on objects and walls were larger than the actual textures.
There is no nice way to say it: Pixel Gear is shovelware. A glorified tech demo looking to make a quick buck off people desperate for content to play on their new expensive VR headset. The publisher Oasis Games even brags that this is only the second game it has released of four games it has planned for PlayStation VR—oh joy! Quantity over quality is never a good look.
