Balloon Chair Death Match

My honest first reaction to Balloon Chair Death Match was that someone at Climax Studios lost a bet and accidentally made something interesting. You sit in a chair held up by party balloons, float above a city skyline, steer with a virtual joystick on the armrest, and shoot out other players' balloons until they crater into the pavement below. That premise should be a one-joke tech demo. It isn't. The core mechanic is tighter than it has any right to be. Your balloon count controls your altitude, and altitude is actually strategic here. Higher up means you're exposed and slow. Burn through balloons taking hits and you drop lower, but the city geometry down there gives you cover to regroup. Losing balloons also makes you faster, so the last-man-standing clutch scenario, one balloon left, enemy raining fire from above, feels genuinely tense in a way that translates well through a headset. Threat awareness is a real skill too. Coming under fire from 360 degrees in VR forces you to actually physically look around, and the audio cues matter. It's seated, no room-scale required, which is sensible design that opens it up to more headset owners. The weapon roster runs from a six-shooter up through a pigeon launcher and a laser gun, five total, and the five pickup types add enough chaos without turning matches into a lottery. The single-player side covers a 14-mission campaign spread across two city maps, plus bot deathmatch and team deathmatch. For what it is, the campaign works as an extended tutorial that actually has some replay value chasing gold medals. The problem is everything past that. This game released in 2017 and the multiplayer population evaporated fast. Community posts from the early days already read like notes slipped under a door of an empty apartment: great concept, no one online. That situation has not improved. If you fire up a live lobby today, you are almost certainly playing alone. The bot modes exist and function, but bot AI in a game like this has a ceiling and you hit it quickly. From a VR comfort standpoint, the seated design and joystick locomotion were deliberately chosen to reduce motion sickness, and it shows. The controls are reportedly responsive with no major input lag complaints from early players. There are comfort settings in the options. Cross-platform play between Oculus Rift and HTC Vive was present at launch, which was a smart call for a niche VR shooter trying to scrape together a playerbase. It just was not enough. No post-launch updates of any significance landed, the dev has gone quiet, and the community hub is essentially a small memorial. If you own a VR headset and want something weird to show visitors for twenty minutes, this delivers. The concept is fun, the balloon-popping feedback is satisfying, and the verticality-as-strategy angle gives it more depth than the goofy premise suggests. But as a multiplayer shooter in 2025, it is a ghost town. There is no ranked mode, no matchmaking infrastructure worth speaking of, and no sign anyone is coming back to fix the occasional spawn orientation bug that throws off your aim entirely. Treat it as a solo or couch co-op curiosity, not a competitive game.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

Be the first to comment on Balloon Chair Death Match.