Gun Club VR Oculus Quest Review – Right On Target

Sometimes, you just want to shoot things. Sure, a captivating narrative, deep progression systems, and richly detailed worlds are nice, but every now and then, a simple but satisfying shooter is all you need. Gun Club VR succeeds in bringing the shooting range experience to the Oculus Quest, complete with a bevy of varied modes and a huge arsenal of interesting weapons.

Game Name: Gun Club VR
Platform(s): Oculus Quest (Reviewed), PC, PlayStation VR
Publisher(s): The Binary Mill
Developer(s): The Binary Mill
Release Date: July 18, 2019 (Quest), December 4, 2018 (PSVR), August 28, 2018 (PC)
Price: $19.99 (Quest/PC), $24.99 (PSVR)

Gun Club VR is a shooting range simulator, allowing you to wield realistic firearms and shoot targets in various scenarios to rack up a high score. It’s an incredibly simple game at its core, but it provides enough content and weapons to keep the experience feeling fresh for quite some time.

At the beginning, the game gives you a pistol and tasks you with working your way through a few standard shooting range challenges, but things quickly progress from there, and new modes and weapons are made available without wasting too much time. Each weapon class has its own set of challenges to tackle, and there are bonus modes on top of those. Action mode sees you moving from point to point, shooting enemies to progress like Time Crisis and similar light gun games. Zombie mode has you holding your ground against waves of the undead, requiring headshots to put them down. Sideshow mode lays out moving targets for you to shoot, with more points being rewarded for bullseyes. There are more than enough scenarios to keep you busy in Gun Club VR, and going through each of them once will take a good amount of time.

These are the more standard activities available in Gun Club VR, but for those looking for something a little more out of the ordinary will find enjoyment in the Allied scenarios, which take you back to WWII to take on themed weapon challenges as well as new action mode and zombie mode scenarios. This was where I spent most of my time in Gun Club VR, as setting up in destroyed buildings and shooting Nazi targets provided a breath of fresh air after spending a while in the dull Warehouse.

The atmosphere of the Allied missions is owed to Gun Club VR‘s stellar presentation. The weapon models are intricately detailed, environments are more than just flat textures, and the lighting and shading are very well done. This is one of the best looking games on the Quest without a doubt.

While there is a lot of content to get through, most of it blends together and can get pretty repetitive fairly early on. The weapons are the star of the show here, and they’re the key to keeping Gun Club VR fresh and exciting. The assortment of weapons and attachments is impressively large, and they all handle differently from one another.

Gun Club VR‘s weapon customization is one of the most in-depth customization systems I’ve encountered in a VR title. As long as your weapon has a rail (and you can add quite a few rails to each weapon), you can put an attachment on it, and there are very few restrictions as to what attachments can be placed on each weapon. Some of them get pretty silly, like putting a drum magazine onto a pistol with an under-barrel grenade launcher. I even made a Glock 17 with a sniper scope on both the top and the bottom rails just because I could. The only limit to gun modification in Gun Club VR is your imagination.

Acquiring new upgrades and attachments is going to be the key motivator for you to complete Gun Club VR‘s various scenarios. The scenarios reward money upon completion depending on your performance, and there’s a very basic leveling system that unlocks new scenarios as you progress. The level design isn’t anything to write home about, so if you don’t like performing repetitive tasks to unlock new rewards, then this isn’t the game for you.

Still, the gunplay is the main draw here, and thankfully it’s excellent. Headphones are a must to really appreciate the sound design. The integrated Quest audio is serviceable, but to get the full impact of each pull of the trigger, you’ll want a better sound solution. Each gun feels great to shoot, and having to manually reload and charge your weapon adds to the simulation experience. There’s even an announcer that congratulates you on simple tasks like perfect reloads or nice shots. He adds some charm to an otherwise drab experience, but purists who want a completely realistic experience can turn him off in the game’s settings.

Pistols are the go-to weapons right now though, because unfortunately, two-handed weapons don’t handle the greatest. Without a stock, it’s difficult to keep your arms aligned and quickly aim rifles and shotguns accurately. It’s doable if you take the time to line up your shot, but it can be frustrating at times, especially in fast-paced scenarios. The angle also feels a bit off when you grip the weapon with both hands, and the game is in desperate need of a “virtual stock” setting like Pavlov has on Quest to alleviate aiming issues.

Gun Club VR knows exactly what it is. It’s a game that lets you shoot cool guns so you can unlock even more cool guns to shoot. It’s a solid shooting range simulator, but the scenarios can start to feel generic and repetitive fairly quickly. The excellent shooting and deep customization help to keep the experience interesting for a while, but unless you’re really into guns, you won’t find a lot of reasons to keep coming back to Gun Club VR. It’s still an enjoyable title with some solid legs to stand on, and if you’re looking for something to play on your Quest, you could do far worse than this.

Review Disclosure Statement: Gun Club VR was provided to us by The Binary Mill for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please go review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.