Firewall: Zero Hour wants to be VR’s next great shooter

Author: David Jagneux / Source: VentureBeat

Image Credit: First Contact Entertainment

When developers first started theorizing the modern era of virtual reality headsets, I’d wager that shooters were a big part of the design discussions. Most of the great shooters are first-person games, which naturally lends itself to VR, and motion controllers are a great fit for holding things like gun in your hands.

They even have triggers on them, or can be enjoyed with a gamepad and still feel good — especially if the game is focused on a cockpit.

When the PSVR launched it came with Rigs, a fast-paced mech shooter that embodied a fake sport with multiple game modes, mech classes, weapon types, and more. It was incredibly fun, but the studio eventually got shut down. The first couple years of VR then were mostly marked by a flood of wave shooters that did little to inspire creativity.

Eventually, Onward released on Steam for Vive (and eventually Rift) to bring hardcore, military-simulation style gameplay to the VR market with slow-paced, realistic firefights that felt like something out of a Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon game. People ate it up.

When the PSVR got its PS Aim Controller, Farpoint, a single-player focused (although it has co-op and limited 1v1 modes) shooter about aliens and space came along with it. It’s a good game, but doesn’t really offer the same type of military simulation thrills. Bravo Team seemed like it might fill that void when it was shown during E3 last year, but that wasn’t the case at all.

Now we’ve got Firewall: Zero Hour from First Contact. ROM: Extraction wasn’t exactly the most robust VR shooter, so I was hesitant at first.

But after playing Firewall twice (both at PSX and then again at a pre-E3 event) I’m extremely optimistic about its future.

“In terms of the core foundational aspect of what a team shooter is we aren’t reinventing the wheel, but we’re putting our own spin on it and we’re trying to do something interesting and unique through VR,” said Adam Orth, creative director at First Contact during an interview. “We want to have the most people playing our game, PSVR has the most headsets in the world, and there is a vacuum where this game needs to be. We saw that early on and based on the history our studio has of what we’ve made individually and together, as well as in VR, and what we wanted to accomplish tech-wise for a shooter, this was the project for us to do.”