Diesel Express VR

I came into Diesel Express VR genuinely curious about the premise: an armored train called a Dreadnought thundering through a wasteland ruled by a doomsday cult, while you lean out and pick off bandits chasing you in diesel-punk vehicles. That setup has real pulp energy, and for about the first twenty minutes, the VR framing sells it. Standing inside the train car, pistol raised, watching enemy cars race alongside the tracks - there is a fleeting moment where the physical act of aiming and ducking behind cover clicks into something that feels exactly like the scrappy Mad Max B-movie it wants to be. The mechanical loop is straightforward cover-based shooting. You fire through the train car's openings, duck obstacles to avoid incoming fire, and can target both the driver and the gunner on each bandit vehicle to disable it faster. A pub hub lets you pick your mission and select your weapon before each run, and a shooting range serves as a warmup space. Six missions spread across three maps form the full content spread, with a small arsenal of unlockable weapons - including a 1911 pistol added in post-launch updates - gated behind rank progression. Easy and hard difficulty modes exist, though the difference amounts mainly to whether a large red reticle is cluttering your view on easy. The problems accumulate quickly past that honeymoon window. Enemy variety is essentially nonexistent - the same bandit vehicles attack in the same patterns across every mission, and the three maps do not offer enough visual or mechanical contrast to disguise the repetition. Community feedback consistently flags bland environments, pop-in on background assets regardless of settings, and enemy AI that never meaningfully escalates. The weapon unlock curve is slow relative to how short the experience is, so most players will finish the content before the arsenal opens up. Average playthroughs sit somewhere under three hours, and the community has gone quiet since the last update. What Lazylab Games got right is the tactile physicality of VR aiming - pointing and firing a pistol from a moving train is genuinely more satisfying in VR than a flat-screen equivalent would be, and the diesel-punk aesthetic, while rough around the edges, has a specific visual personality you do not find everywhere. The concept is solid. The execution stopped well short of fulfilling it, and without ongoing updates, that gap is not closing. If you are a VR headset owner with a specific itch for on-rails train defense shooting and want something brief and unpretentious, Diesel Express VR scratches it - just barely. Everyone else should wait for a significant sale or move on to more polished alternatives in the VR shooter space.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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