You only get hit if a laser tags you directly where the sensors detect your HMD (although that didn’t stop me from spinning and worming my arms around incoming fire), and while you can just hold the shield up over your face in the early stages making it an easy-yet-blurry cakewalk, the powered buckler is relatively small, so you have to keep an eye out in later levels as projectiles will be coming in quickly and often from 180-degrees and sometimes from above.

In shield mode, the volton will deflect incoming projectiles, and if you get lucky you might just strike a few drones on the return trip.

Reach over your shoulder and you can swap out your gun for the most interesting – and in my opinion the most challenging yet also most fulfilling – weapons in Space Pirate Trainer: the volton, an energized baton that can transform into a shield, a melee weapon, a lasso and a mobile battery. Your pistols have a variety of fire modes – single-shot, pulse, beam, scattershot, rail, grenades and so on – that can be switched on the fly. The concept is simple: grab a gun (or shield, but more on that later) in each hand and blast as many droids as you can out of the air as fast as possible. The swarm-like, increasingly difficult waves of enemies remind me of a virtual reality Geometry Wars, but with distinct levels and populated with droids and drones instead of shapes. Now one of the earliest and most recognized – Space Pirate Trainer (SPT) – has just made its debut as a full-release game after being in early access for well over a year.Īt its heart, SPT is very similar to the aforementioned arcade games: fast, frantic and frenetic. Some 30 years later, wave shooters are one of the most prevalent VR game genres.

I’ve always been enthralled by video games, and I spent the better part of my childhood in arcades lining up quarters on the glass screens of shooters like Space Invaders, Galaga and Phoenix to mark my place in line. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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