Here’s a pro tip if you’re looking to playVRgames at a gaming convention: get there as early as possible. You might think it’s better to wait until midday to let your body wake up, but trust me - by then it’s already too late. VR is fun, but the headsets can get kinda gross, especially if they’ve been worn by strangers already over the course of a very long week.
So when I booked in to seeAction HeroatGamescomand they offered me the 4pm slot on Friday, right at the end of the convention, I knew it was going to be rough. When I arrived and they told me “you’ll probably get quite sweaty playing this”, I knew I had made a horrible mistake.
They weren’t lying - Action Hero is the sweatiest VR game I’ve ever played. I’ve done everything from sit-down puzzles to boxing simulators, with a healthy smattering of shooters in between, and Action Hero is the biggest workout I’ve ever gotten. But that’s no bad thing - it’s a game that could not exist outside of VR, and that’s always a selling point. Too many games have been clunkily added to the space without purpose, and Action Hero is not that. There were a couple of foibles in its core gimmick, but I left both very happy that it existed, and thoroughly drenched in sweat.
In Action Hero, you play as an action hero. I don’t mean you do heroic actiony things, either. The conceit of the game is that you are a movie star playing out different action genres, and every time you mess up, they do another take. It’s a cool way to frame failure and offers something different to the other shooters out there, as well as allowing it to hop between genres at will. Currently, War and Heist are the two levels in the game, but three more are planned for its still unconfirmed release. At Gamescom, I went to war and still carry the wounds with me (a Quest outline around my eyes).
Action Hero uses theSuperhotmechanic: time only moves when you move. This makes for an intense VR game as there’s no using the thumbsticks to shuffle around - if you want to move sideways away from a bullet, you need to physically move in the real world, so a lot of space is needed. I was constantly mindful of this during my demo, and still hit a wall and had to be directed away by the devs, as well as encroaching near the TV screen, so it takes up more space than the average VR game by some distance.
The movement mechanic is naturally suited to VR, however. Initially I struggled, firing off my weapon recklessly and thus finding it impossible to avoid the speeding bullets coming towards me. But as I learned the art of patience, planning my moves became easier. It opened with me grabbing a gun from beside me and taking out two onrushing enemy soldiers. As they approached, I initially tried to shoot both as quickly as possible, missed, and died. After a few attempts, I could pick the gun up and aim as they Baywatched their way towards me in slow motion, taking them out before they even fired.
This makes Action Hero far more tactical than it seems at first, and my 30 minutes with it wasn’t enough for me to learn all of its secrets. With three scenes per act and three acts per movie (and clearing an act marking a checkpoint), each movie is a relatively short experience - each scene, done correctly, is around 30 seconds - that requires repetition to perfect. That’s another way in which the action movie framing helps the overall experience.
You’re not just shooting enemies while avoiding gunfire, however. You can disarm enemies (like Tom Cruise in Collateral), explode red barrels (like Will Smith in Bad Boys), deflect bullets with your weapon (like Ryan Reynolds inDeadpool), or grab guns in midair (like Keanu Reeves inJohn Wick). Since the War movie also becomes an Indiana Jones' style adventure movie, you can also club enemies with huge bones and unleash dinosaurs on them - the theming is a little inconsistent, but this is undeniably a very cool game.
There are a few issues with the power fantasy at play here, however. In the War level, most of the time you get a revolver with just three rounds, rarely enough to clear the room even if you don’t miss any, so moving (and therefore speeding up time a lot) is necessary. But occasionally you get a golden gun for a scene - mainly RNG but I would guess with a pity mechanic too - which has unlimited ammo, and while it was a relief to clear a scene and move on, having that constantly would extinguish the fun, so a balance needed to be struck somwhere.
A bigger problem came with fully embracing the game. At times when I wanted to grab a gun either from an enemy’s hands or in midair, I was a little too far away, and my instinct was to stand there straining for it rather than physically moving. Staying in the same spot meant I was shot by the time I grabbed it, but I couldn’t quite get the hang of how much you needed to move when I was already ducking, swaying, and weaving all over the place to begin with.
There are also a few moments when you aren’t supposed to move. In one scene, an enemy sets off a trap and perishes, spilling his gun. you’re able to’t do anything until this happens, but it won’t happen until you do something, so I was awkwardly waving at him to speed time up. In another scene, I had to duck under an exploding wall, but while crouched, the explosion wouldn’t happen, so I was spinning my arm around like a moron. It’s not the kind of buffoonery you see Charlize Theron getting up to.
Action Hero is an excellent concept if you don’t get motion sickness, have a big enough room for VR, and don’t mind getting very (very, very) sweaty. It’s a fantastic advert for the possibilities and immersion VR offers, and pretty solid - if slightly uneven - game full stop. Get a Meta Quest and some deodorant ready for this one, and keep a watchful eye on a release date reveal.
