Mixed Realms, developers behind the samurai-style action-adventure game Sairento VR (2018), announced that its follow-up, Hellsweeper VR, is set to release on major VR headsets in September.
Update (June 8th, 2023): Hellsweeper VR is coming to Quest, PSVR 2, and SteamVR headsets on September 21st, 2023. You can pre-order now on Steam, and wishlist on PSVR 2 and Quest.
The studio also released a new trailer showing off some of the high-intensity gameplay, embedded below this update.
Original Article (June 9th, 2022): The game, which is currently planned for Early Access release on Steam sometime later this year, is also coming to Quest 2, slated to arrive on the standalone “soon,” the studio says.
Published by Vertigo Games, Hellsweeper VR is a roguelike first person combat game where you take on the role of an undead immortal.
“Traverse the underworld where every step brings a challenge or a chance. Gain mastery of your weapons and elemental magic, or fall to the unrelenting onslaught of dark creatures,” Mixed Realms says.
In it, you’re tasked with gaining mastery of a wide range of weapons and elemental magic. As you’d imagine, upgrading your gear as you take on undead immortals along the way is supposedly a big part.
Here’s what the studio says about Hellsweeper VR:
“Hellsweeper VR came about from our desire to improve on what made our first game, Sairento VR, a huge hit with fans,” Mixed Realms says. “We wanted to build upon a core tenet of Sairento – an intense no holds barred locomotion system that offered wall-running, power-sliding, backflips and more – all while improving its arcade-style action with semi realistic physics, allowing you to pull off even crazier moves. Juggle enemies in the air. Lop off a limb and use it as a club. Land on an enemy and use them as a bloody surfboard – yes, you read that right.”
Joy Way, the studio behind STRIDE and AGAINST, revealed a new VR game which seems to combine the web-slinging action of Spider-Man with the demon-slaying melee carnage of DOOM.
Called Dead Hook, the studio calls the upcoming Quest title an “explosive mix of roguelike and shooter genre with brutal combat and captivating storytelling.”
Prior to Dead Hook, Joy Way released a game called Outlier on Steam Early Access for PC VR, which was then cancelled shortly thereafter. At the time, the studio cited “overestimated demand” as a reason for pulling the plug on the alien-centric roguelike. Joy Way says it has since reworked the mechanics, storyline, and overall gameplay of Outlier to create Dead Hook.
In Dead Hook, you take on the role of Adam Stone, a mercenary, smuggler, and thief. In it, you explore the elder planet Resaract, collect legendary weapons and customize your character with what the studio says is “100 buffs and permanent upgrades to make each run unique.”
Enemies include regular and elite elders, which try to stop you in the air and on the ground as they defend their tombs, the studio says. Joy Way also says there’s bosses too which have “multiple phases, making each encounter feel tense and exciting.”
The roguelike shooter is also set to have a story. In it, you’ll “uncover the secrets of Resaract and AI duality, facing tough choices and unexpected twists along the way,” the studio says.
The Light Brigade is a roguelike shooter that I would mostly describe as a spiritual successor to In Death: Unchained, the critically acclaimed bowshooter from Sólfar Studios and Superbright. While at times a little less visually polished than In Death, the game’s variety of upgrades and array of WWII-era weaponry gives it a definite Wolfenstein bend that fans of the shooter genre will instantly be able to click into.
Available On: SteamVR, PSVR 2 & PSVR, Quest 2 Release Date: February 22nd, 2023 Price: $25 Developer: Funktronic Labs Reviewed On: Quest 2 (native), Quest 2 via PC Link
Gameplay
There’s a definite story in The Light Brigade, although past the opening scene I really couldn’t remember what was actually at stake up until I completed my first full run. The game doesn’t chock too much story your way (or over tutorialize either), leaving you to just fight the bad guys while you save the culty good guys. Really, all you need to know is the demon-eyed, Nazi-adjacent baddies aren’t friendly, and the hellish fantasy-scape composed of discrete and sequentially connected levels must be cleared out and scoured methodically for loot.
It’s just pure action-adventure fun, as the meat of the game presents plenty of interesting upgrade paths which not only prolong your current run, but importantly give you enough reason to come back for more upon your inevitable death.
The Light Brigade feels forgiving enough to really keep you grinding for that next gun mod or class upgrade too, which gives you access to cooler-looking and more powerful versions of each weapon. Meanwhile, the game is busy serving up a good difficulty ramp that means your next run may not be necessarily easier despite progressively wider access to guns, magic, and upgrades.
That’s all well and good, but what about the guns? Thankfully, The Light Brigade really gets its WWII weaponry right, providing physics-based rifles and pistols which each come with their own immersive reloading mechanics. Loading and shooting the M3 submachine gun requires you to grab its stick-style magazine and chunk back the charging handle to chamber the first round, while shooting a K98 rifle is totally different, making you jam down stripper clips to feed the bolt-action rifle.
Practically speaking, sticking to a single class isn’t a terrible strategy as you get your grips with the game, as you’re probably looking to maximize your rank and unlock permanent upgrades since they don’t sync across classes.
In practice though, you’ll probably do a fair amount of class hopping once you progressively unlock the next available class, taking you from the starter Rifleman class with its semi-automatic Gewehr 43 rifle all the way through the other iconic WWII weapon-wielding classes the game has to offer, including the Sturmgewehr 44 submachine gun, the M3 submachine gun (aka ‘Grease Gun’), the powerful K98 battle rifle, and even a class that has dualie Colt 1911s for some John Wick-style madness.
As for enemies, the world’s baddies come in a pretty standard range, starting with your standard goons, which include shooters and archers. You’ll eventually come across shielded goons, tanks, and versions that fly, snipe, and lob bombs too. There always seems to be a new type added to the mix after each attempt though, so there may be more I don’t know about.
By this point, I’ve already made it through one full run, although that was after many (many) failed attempts spanning over about eight hours of gameplay—another thing that makes The Light Brigade a little more generous than In Death, which is probably there to keep it a little more of a fast-paced experience.
Levels are fairly linear, although there’s plenty of cover to hide behind as you make your forward march. That also means finding the remaining enemies can sometimes be tough, but thankfully prayer actually works in this universe, helping you to locate remaining loot and baddies. Enemies are revealed by showing you small red dots while chests are yellow.
And once you’ve finally cleared out the level’s baddies—you get a big ‘LEVEL CLEAR’ popup—then it’s time to scour for loot, oftentimes hidden in breakable vases and chests.
Here, you can find gold to buy consumables, weapon upgrades like scopes and magical trinkets, souls which increase your rank level, and the occasional key, which can open locked chests.
Mostly though, you’re looking for souls, the whispy white things that you’ll earn after killing enemies or finding soul containers. There’s also cards that give each run a unique set of possible upgrades. Choose one of three presented to you, and you might just significantly increase the damage you can deal, injecting a bit of luck into each run’s loot haul.
It’s not all WWII guns and demon Nazis though. The world is also magic-based, giving you upgradeable magic wands that can do things like provide shields, shoot fireballs, etc.
All of this effectively combines to offer a good selection of gameplay styles, letting you attack the world as you want.
Still, I have my gripes with The Light Brigade, the worst offender being its inventory holters attached to your belt. In practice, this makes reloading quickly and consistently an absolute pain. Instead of having a fixed area where you can reliably train muscle memory, shifting your body around physically or virtually with any of the artificial locomotion schemes has a funny way of shifting the belt holster around your waist in weird an unpredictable ways.
I get it: you should be covering and assessing your ammo situation at all times so you don’t run dry during critical moments, but having to crane your neck down every few seconds to make sure your hand is actually hovering over the right area is decidedly a dull spot on an otherwise shining example of great VR gaming.
I’m still working on getting the last remaining achievements and consistently beating the first boss as I attempt my successive runs. Considering the array of gun upgrades and magical weapons to explore, it’s safe to say I’m nowhere personally finished with this well-crafted roguelike. I won’t talk too much about bosses, although they are hard, and offer up unique bossy ways of dealing out damage—pretty much what’d you expect from a fantasy shooter, i.e., they can shield, do magic, and surprise you throughout the encounter, so they aren’t just glorified bullet sponges.
Immersion
I get it: The Light Brigade is all about bringing light back to a dark and corrupted world, but it is very dark. At times, I felt it offered less visual contrast than Quest 2’s LCD displays can rightly handle, making some levels appear more muddy and generally more difficult to resolve visually.
Road to VR has a PSVR 2 in hand, although I don’t personally. I have had a chance to preview the headset though, and its OLED displays with HDR will undoubtedly be more capable of serving up better visual contrast. Still, if you’re playing on Quest 2 natively, or any number of PC VR headset running the Steam version, you may find later bits of the game very difficult to resolve visually.
Image courtesy Funktronic Labs
Were it not for the beady red eyes that shine in the darkness, enemies would be maybe too difficult to make out in the ever-present fog of war. Still, it’s a fairly muddy palette any way you slice it; level design and variety as you move forward are always interesting at least.
The star of the show though is inevitably the game’s weapons, which provide subtle articulations that really make it feel more of a realistic experience. For example, you can cycle a magazine’s worth of cartridges just because you mechanically can. You don’t need to, but the fact that The Light Brigade’s guns functionally work like real guns means the player should be able to if they want to. See my magazine empty as I eject unfired bullets:
Another immersive touch is the gun’s physical weight, which affects how you hold and steady it. A pistol requires a steadier hand because it’s lighter and easier to swing around, while a rifle is more forgiving with movement since the game registers as it being substantially heavier in the player’s hand. Suitably, some guns let you steady with your non-dominant hand, providing discrete attach points to do so.
I was hoping for some amount of melee, although there’s none present to speak of, meaning if your gun runs dry, you better find cover and reload, or pull out your trusty sidearm.
A note one positional audio: enemies provide good spatial audio cues for their relative locations—something important once levels start getting more claustrophobic, like in the sewers.
Comfort
The Light Brigade has a good swath of standard comfort options which, include optional smooth or snap-turn, and smooth locomotion or teleport.
Playing seated is possible, and the game comes with a seated mode, although it’s not advisable since your belt holster may be awkwardly positioned at any time, making standing play the least encumbering way to interface.
The Light Brigade’ Comfort Settings – February 15th, 2023
Turning
Artificial turning
✔
Snap-turn
✔
Quick-turn
✖
Smooth-turn
✔
Movement
Artificial movement
✔
Teleport-move
✔
Dash-move
✖
Smooth-move
✔
Blinders
✔
Head-based
✔
Controller-based
✔
Swappable movement hand
✖
Posture
Standing mode
✔
Seated mode
✔
Artificial crouch
✖
Real crouch
✔
Accessibility
Subtitles
✔
Languages
English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional) , Korean, Japanese
Slated to arrive on all major VR headsets later this month, The Light Brigade is well positioned to make a name among the top VR roguelikes, as it follows most visibly in the footsteps of bowshooter In Death (2018) in all the right ways. In our hands-on, we got to see just how Light Brigade is setting itself apart though with a strong focus on an array of realistic WWII-era weapons and magical upgrades galore.
Coming February 22nd, The Light Brigade is the latest VR title from Funktronic Labs, the team behind Fujii (2019) and Cosmic Trip (2017). With a few hours of Quest 2 gameplay under my belt, I can say that The Light Brigade is certainly something to watch out for when it lands on PSVR 2, PSVR, Quest 2, and SteamVR headsets in the next two weeks.
Although The Light Brigade isn’t related to the award-winning roguelike bowshooter—In Death was developed by Sólfar Studios and Superbright—there are more than a few comparisons here to make. The Light Brigade similarly features a high degree of visual polish, well-realized enemy classes, and a fun array of weapons that make you really second guess stepping out from behind cover.
It’s also culty as all hell, as you battle it out as an acolyte warrior of light on a quest to pry the world from the grasps of the (totally not Nazi-inspired) Obsidian Forces.
What the hell does that all mean? I can’t say just yet, but it all ends up feeling like a cool mix of World War-inspired trench warfare mixed in with a heaping dose of medieval-style religious quackery and magic.
The Light Brigade tosses a smorgasbord of realistic weapons your way, all of which require a deft hand at manually reloading in the middle of a firefight. You’ll get your hands on rifles and pistols, all of which are upgradeable. Besides the Mauser C96 (aka ‘Broomhandle Mauser’), most everything is what you’d consider WWII standard stuff, including Gewehr 43, Sturmgewehr 44, Colt 1911, M3 submachine gun (aka ‘grease gun’), and Nambu Pistol Model 14. Guns have a virtual weight to them too, so you won’t be waggling around a 10-pound rifle or running too fast either when you’re supporting the gun with your non-dominant hand.
Each gun has three upgradeable power levels, which also let you tack on things like red dot scopes and powerful trinkets that allow you to charge and execute special shots. There are also so mini potato masher-style grenades, health kits, and interesting tools like deployable decoys which draw enemy fire away from you.
You’ll have to grind it out to level up each gun, which usually means sticking with the corresponding class long enough to generate points to sink into upgrades. The game’s actual difficulty seems to scale relative to your weapon’s current upgrade level, giving you more and different baddies to encounter as you head back in after your inevitable death—although that’s a bit of speculation on my side. There are two user-selectable difficulty levels though should things get too tough, ‘Arcade’ and ‘Realistic’.
Levels start out fairly small in size, although all of them encourage exploration thanks to the important items that can be found around every corner, such as the game’s tarot card upgrades that you’ll find in glittering chests. These buffs stay in effect for your entire run, and are automatically applied when you choose one of the three presented to you from each chest.
Image courtesy Funktronic Labs
My typical level run goes more or less like this: kill every enemy in the level, comb the entire level again for lootable chests and other goodies, and then summarily step into a trap, like the sort of couter-weighted log traps Arnold Schwarzenegger tangoed with in the original Predator (1987), or even a simple bear trap.
Once I’ve dusted off my stupidity, it’s time to head to the level gate, which requires you to bring your hands together in prayer to activate—a really cool and immersive touch. There are level bosses, although I only ever made it to the first, which I won’t spoil for your here.
Image courtesy Funktronic Labs
Meanwhile, I’ll be playing a lot more of The Light Brigade’s and reserving my thoughts on game mechanics and immersion for the full review later this month. Still, it’s safe to say I really enjoyed the entire vibe.
One thing to note is that Funktronic Labs included a good number of comfort modes, including smooth turn, variable snap-turn, smooth locomotion, and teleportation. Currently, the game’s inventory system includes a hip-mounted holster, which can be difficult to access whilst seated, making standing gameplay recommended at the time of this writing. We’ll have more info in our deep dive review when the game launches on February 22nd.
In the meantime, you can wishlist the game on Steam (PC VR), pre-order on PSVR 2 and PSVR, and pre-order on Quest 2—priced at $25. Also, in case you missed out on the announce trailer, take a gander below:
