I have a bad habit of passing over games because they aren’t all that appealing on their store page. Laser Arena Online for the Gear VR had all the markings of a shoddy VR game. It was an online FPS, it was made by “hardcore gamers”, it used only the touchpad for controls and it didn’t look amazing in the pictures. In the reviews section, people were commenting that it should have controller support and the developers were responding by saying that the controller was inaccurate so they left it out for now but they were working on it. Plenty of other shooting games used the controller so I saw this more as an excuse than a good reason. I passed on the game and didn’t think of it again until someone in a Facebook group asked if anyone was playing it and several people responded saying that they were and that they loved it. Now, I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, but people are getting Gear VRs all the time and when you’re new to VR you generally tend to put up with more faults than a grizzled veteran of four years who has played nearly everything there is to play. I decided to give the game a shot but remained skeptical because for all I knew these people who loved it hadn’t played much else and were impressed by VR more than the game itself. I was the same way when I was new to VR. The crap I thought was amazing back then is almost shameful, but it really does speak to how different an experience VR is that when we are new to it we will play awful games and think they are amazing. But I digress.

I downloaded Laser Arena Online and began to play. The first thing they do is train you. It’s short and easy to grasp, but it’s worth going through because locomotion is handled in a unique way. Instead of running around, you use your gun to shoot the environment which blasts you up in the air and then you swipe the trackpad (on your controller or presumably on your headset if you don’t have a controller) to dash through the air a short distance. It takes time to get used to this method of traversal but before long your flipping around the level like a pro and popping people off while laughing gleefully because you’ve never been good at video games before and you are totally owning these people (experiences may vary).

After the initial training, they put you into an arena on your own. I didn’t realize that is what was going on though so I was waiting for people to join while trying to get my head and hands around movement. The timer ran out and I started a new game. I was still the only person in the arena. I assumed that this was just another case of an online VR game where there isn’t enough people playing to support it. I hit the back button to see if there was a menu and was brought to the title screen for the first time. On the title screen were three buttons, “Play”, “Options”, and “Stats”. I clicked “Play” and saw that there was a lot more to this game than I first thought. Also, there were lobbies with hundreds of players in them. And that was unheard of the last time that I tried to play online. In fact, it’s been so bad in the past that one of my favourite games ever on the Gear VR, Anshar Wars 2, added a feature where the game tweeted when you started a lobby so that anyone following their tweetbot would know that a game was happening and could jump in. So having hundreds of players in the middle of the day on a Tuesday seemed really promising.

I jumped into a game and found myself in the same arena where I had been sent after training, only this time there were people there with me. I was thrown in mid-game and hadn’t really gotten the hang of leaping around without throwing myself off the edge and now I had to deal with getting shot as well. Surprisingly I found this actually helped me and before long I was getting multi-kill streaks and destroying people, which is something new to me and I’m sure it won’t last, but for now I’m going to enjoy it. All of this is to say that the game is a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Having said that, there are definitely areas where the game can be improved. The arena isn’t much to look at, and there is only one as far as I can tell. It’s just a collection of white cubes put together in a modern art sort of way, but it serves its purpose by giving us things to jump around on and hide behind. The game will get dull after a while if there are no other maps though. As far as I can tell, there is no voice chat. Being the introvert that I am I don’t really mind that, but I know other players might. It would also be fun to hear people cussing you out as you kill them for the tenth time in five seconds. Which brings me to the next problem.

The arena is tiny and there is no respawn delay. You get score multipliers for killing people in rapid succession and because the level is so small you can kill someone, then in less than a second kill them again when they respawn. I think I had a four-kill streak on the same person in one game and I can only imagine that person was wanting to jump through the screen and strangle the life out of me. That made me chuckle.

The controls are okay, but they could use work. To be fair, without an analogue stick to work with they have done quite well, but it’s still too easy to rocket yourself off the level and there are far too many occasions when dashing just doesn’t work and you end up getting shot or missing your landing because of it. As it is now your gun will only propel you away from solid objects that you shoot, which doesn’t help much as you’re flying through the air. I think a good fix might be to have forces added to the player whether there is a wall or some ground there or not.

That’s it though. Pretty small gripes for what is otherwise a really fun game. And it’s free. I kind of wish it wasn’t. I don’t know how the developers will continue to support it without some kind of funding and I want it to be supported. I don’t want this game to wither and die over the next few weeks or months because there is no new content added and players tire of what’s on offer right now. But just in case that happens you should download it now and play while everyone else is doing the same. You don’t want to miss this one if you are a lover of competitive FPS games.