Sweaty Palms

I respect the idea here more than I can recommend the product right now, and that tension is basically the whole review. Sweaty Palms launched into Early Access in November 2017 with a movement system unlike anything else in the VR shooter space: you play as a legless upper body, using your actual arms to climb surfaces, fling yourself across the arena, and chain movement abilities drawn from a card deck. Rocket-hand flight, swinging, birdflight, dragon-riding - the ability pool is genuinely creative and the physical engagement is real. For a VR-only multiplayer game built around objective modes, the core loop showed serious ambition. The card deck mechanic is the most interesting design choice here. You build a custom hand before each match and draw abilities live, which means team compositions and counter-strategies exist on paper. At launch the game shipped with 18 ability cards, one arena map, and Team and FFA Deathmatch plus King of the Hill. Capture the Flag, Vroddball, Zombie Escape, and Battle Royale were all planned for the full release. None of that content appears to have arrived. Steam confirms the last developer update was made over eight years ago. That is not a soft abandonment signal - that is a flatline. The playerbase problem is the one that kills a game like this faster than any missing feature. With no bots, no Discord with scheduled sessions, and a tiny concurrent player count, you will load into an empty lobby. Community posts from the early months already flagged the absence of bots as a fatal flaw for retention - if the first five times you boot the game you find nobody to fight, you uninstall and move on. That feedback loop buried this one quickly. The movement system might produce genuinely high-skill expression if two evenly matched players were actually in the same room together - tracking your opponent through three-dimensional space while managing rocket-hand momentum and card draws is a real skill ceiling - but you need bodies in the server to test it. For VR shooter fans who have burned through Echo Arena or Hyper Dash and are hunting for something with a different physical vocabulary, the concept is worth understanding. The arm-climbing locomotion solves comfort by keeping movement grounded in physical gesture rather than thumbstick drift, and the deck-building layer gives it a strategic texture most VR shooters skip entirely. But buying it today as a multiplayer experience is not a realistic proposition. The servers are empty, development is frozen, and the promised roadmap is a ghost.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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