Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission

I want to be straight with you: this is not a game built for people who care about netcode, movement tech, or ranked ladders. It is an on-rails light gun revival from Taito's 1987 arcade cabinet, rebuilt by Virtuallyz Gaming, and it plays exactly like that sounds. The game moves you through six missions, each split into multiple stages, across jungles, weapon facilities, slums, and industrial zones. You are not navigating. You are pointing and shooting, and the game is very clear about that contract from minute one. The weapon loadout gives you four options swapped on the fly: a Beretta pistol with unlimited ammo that is essentially your last-resort fallback, an Uzi that sprays fast and rewards aggression, a shotgun that hits hard up close but becomes nearly useless when enemies are spread wide, and an M16 that earns its keep at range and against vehicles. The pistol being infinite sounds generous until you realize it cannot meaningfully dent helicopters or boss units. In practice, most players end up defaulting to the Uzi and M16 for almost the entire run, which is a weapon balance problem the game never quite solves. You also carry grenades for crowd-clearing and can earn pickups by shooting environmental objects, chickens, pigs, and explosive barrels included. Hostages appear too, and freeing them by shooting cabin doors rewards medkits. It is silly, it knows it is silly, and the parody-style voice acting commits to the bit. The campaign runs roughly ninety minutes to two hours at most. There are boss fights at the end of each stage, and a few of them drag badly, hitting bullet-sponge territory where the fight stops feeling tense and starts feeling like a chore. Enemy density can spike hard without warning, and on the non-VR PC version specifically, reviewers flagged frame drops during crowded moments and hit registration that is not always trustworthy. The VR build is generally considered the stronger version of the two. Beyond the campaign, there is an All You Can Beat survival mode that throws escalating enemy waves at you until you go down. It extends the session count but not by a huge margin. A score-rank system grades each run on combo kills, damage taken, and medkit usage, so there is a reason to replay if you care about chasing an S rank. For a shooter specialist, the honest answer is that the flat PC version has real rough edges that the VR build masks through immersion. On a monitor with a controller, the on-rails restriction feels exactly as limiting as it sounds, especially when enemy bullets come from off-screen directions you cannot react to. If you have a VR setup, the experience is meaningfully better, full stop. The cartoonish art style has some charm and the on-rails movement is smooth enough to avoid motion sickness issues that plague less careful VR shooters. The loading is fast, and the moment-to-moment shooting, when it clicks, genuinely delivers that dumb 1980s action movie energy it is chasing. This is a game for a specific kind of player: someone with nostalgia for the Taito original or a genuine appetite for short, score-chasing arcade runs. If you came up on Time Crisis or House of the Dead cabinets and want that hit again, First Mission scratches the itch, briefly. If you are here for depth, replayability, or a competitive hook of any kind, you will have burned through everything on offer before your session timer hits two hours.

Fred · Scout Team

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