The consumer VR battle is hotting up, and while it does so we’re seeing a bunch of new VR games jumping into the fray. Gazzlers is just one of those titles, bringing shooting thrills with a side order of Roguelike to PSVR 2 and the Meta Quest platform.
Gazzlers is gloriously straightforward, and to be honest it’s refreshing to find something that’s thoroughly clear on what it is and what it’s doing. You are a gunner on an epic train journey across Gingko, aiming to discover the Machine God. While you’re hanging out at the back of this locomotive you’ve been tasked with protecting it from Gazzlers, a horde of angry red creatures that seem to be the hairless cousins of those loveable/annoying Rabbids.
You’re given a basic firearm to start with, a solitary health pack to your right, and a steady stream of ammunition on your left. You’re then beset by wave after wave of Gazzlers, and you’ve got to shoot them and/or their vehicles to stop the pursuit. You do have the benefit of a shield you can project with your left hand, blocking enemy projectiles, but it can overheat with overuse, whether that’s blocking one too many shots or simply having it powered up for too long.
So, you’re mostly balancing attacking the eternally antagonistic Guzzlers with protecting yourself, and as more and more vehicles appear, streaking across the land and the sky, or you come across turrets atop nearby cliffs, Guzzlers becomes utterly frantic.
Your first run is likely to end in ignominious defeat, and I struggled initially with the pairing of the shield to the left trigger, and grabbing reloads and health packs with left bumper of the Quest controller. Something just feels a little off with the layout until your muscle memory takes over as you try to keep yourself from dying at the hands of a squat crimson rage creature.
Once you’re in the thick of it, Gazzlers feels great, and it’s really rewarding and enjoyable blowing the annoying things out of the sky.
Variety comes in the shape of mid-run upgrades. When you complete each wave, you’re given a choice between two random upgrades, with a healthy amount of luck liable to dictate how far you get on this particular run. You can hugely increase how much ammunition you can carry, add explosive effects, or make yourself more resilient, though there’s often some downside to each selection that you need to weigh up.
After you can’t take any more and your health has toppled to zero, you return to the start, but any scrap you’ve collected on that run will be added to your total. Scrap then allows you to buy permanent upgrades, adding health, damage, or increased luck to your character, giving you a greater chance of making it that little bit further next time.
There’s a number of different biomes on your journey, inhabited by some different Gazzlers too, with each area culminating with an overpowering boss character at the end. Whatever they might look or move like, you’re still just aiming to blow them apart, and without any movement to mix things up Gazzlers is fundamentally a VR shooting gallery. That’s not a bad thing by any means, and there’s a real arcade spirit to the gameplay that reminds me of classics like Point Blank and Time Crisis, albeit with a mob of horrible red monsters running rampant through it.
Visually, Bolt Blast Games has opted for a chunky and easily read cartoon artstyle that broadly suggests Borderlands. The over-the-top enemy characters have plenty of life about them, and they manage to avoid straying into annoying territory – more than can be said of the Rabbids.
