System: HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £14.99
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Arena Shooter,
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Standing
Multi-Player: Yes
Age Rating: PG
Description: Team-based action game with insane physics-driven power-ups. Shoot, duck behind cover, and coordinate with teammates…all in glorious VR! Smashbox Arena is a team-based action game with insane physics-driven power-ups. 2 modes of play: Singleplayer Story Mode and Online Multiplayer (AI Characters will join teams if there aren’t enough players)! Easy to learn, difficult to master — Fast-paced, multiplayer designed from ground up for VR headset and touch controllers!
Review: Did playing the Online Multiplayer paintball action of Rec Room leave you wanting more? Then it is time to rejoice because Smashbox Arena is like that, only much, much more besides. This team-based action game sees you going up against several human or bot opponents. This idea is to kill them with balls or the many other powerup items available to you. You can teleport around the arena and even catch an opponents ball firing at you (if you are quick enough).
Starting off in some sort of monorail station you have a few options like training, single-player mode or online multiplayer mode. While the training and the story mode are little more than warm-up sessions the main part of the game is the online action. It’s fast, often very strategic fun that will often see you working as a team rather than going at it alone.
Let’s get a few of the negative points out of the way. The ‘Story Mode’ is little more than a self-discovery tutorial mode and the AI is not great of the bots in both story mode and online mode. They seem to be super sharpshooters or total ideots. But those little niggles are just about all I could find at fault with this game.
With a currently thriving online community of players, it means there are plenty of people playing online matches and that is good news as that is pretty much the only mode worth bothering about. I think this game is just about as close to Splatoon as you are ever going to get in VR. with fast-paced gameplay and a large element of strategy over gameplay skill, this is the multiplayer action shooter your VR system has been waiting for. I just hope it keeps active and grows with more arenas and weapons.
