About SHOOT OUT:
The Copper Canyon Shoot Out is yet another wave-based shooter for virtual reality. This time, however, instead of sending hordes of zombies and monsters your way, the game takes place in the wild west and sends hordes of robot cowboys to gun you down instead. There are three levels, with the first being unlocked by default and the following two being unlocked once you beat their predecessors. There’s some replayability as well, thanks to the scoring and timing systems. There are three major problems with this release, all which contribute to a very underwhelming and frankly frustrating experience. First and foremost is the awful, clunky teleportation system that you have to use to move around. On the HTC Vive, you have to click the trackpad and move your thumb to rotate your in-game self; or move your head in the direction that you want to end up facing. Whichever way you do it, you never end up facing the way that you really wanted to since any slight movement of your thumb will screw up the facing direction of your teleport. It’s really disorienting for a mechanic that’s so necessary, since this game expects you to move around the map so that you can hide behind cover. Flaws two and three come as a pair and boil down to lack of variety. There’s a big lack of variety not only in the enemies, but in the weapons that you’ll use as well. You start out with two pistols that can hold twelve rounds each, and you can find one-handed shotguns strewn around the levels. As far as shotguns go, they’re ineffective at long range and the pistols don’t do enough damage, so pick your poison. While I was able to clear the first level of the game with relative ease, the second level had an absurd spike in difficulty that came simply from throwing ten times the robots at me during each wave. It also doesn’t help that some of the robots explode, and take with them health pick-ups that take forever to regenerate. I also found that my bullets were traveling through the robots instead of actually hitting them on numerous occasion. You can shoot their heads and limbs off, which will just send them into a frenzy of random gunfire, or you can shoot their “boilers” (midsection) and make them explode. I found that when I was aiming at their midsections that I’d be lucky if my bullets made contact. It caused my death several times over, which is frustrating since shooting their heads off is so much easier although it just makes the robots go absolutely feral and then they take forever to die. It’s clear that the developer, Black Dragon Studios Ltd, did put a lot of love and effort into The Copper Canyon Shoot Out. It has pretty nice graphics, decent level design, and a good amount of replayability. It just suffers heavily because of both its teleportation system and its insane difficulty spikes. After trying about half-a-dozen times on the second level to get through a big open area of spawning enemies, I gave up. Anyone can die from being overrun by a bombardment of foes. In the end, if you’re looking for a western themed shooter, Guns ‘n’ Stories: Bulletproof VR is the best you’re going to find, followed up with High Noon. Rating: 2.0/5.0 – It’s not awful, but it’s not great. The VR Network Curator | Group Click for More The developer provided a free copy of this game for review, through The VR Network’s Curation page.
