The Light Brigade

My instinct going into this was skepticism: VR roguelites have a thin track record, and most collapse under the weight of clunky locomotion or half-baked progression. The Light Brigade is the exception that embarrasses the rule. Funktronic Labs built something with the tactical patience of a Souls-adjacent game and the run-to-run variety of a proper roguelite, and wrapped it inside physics-based WWII gunplay that actually respects the hardware it runs on. The loop starts simple. You pick a class - Rifleman is the default, armed with a Gewehr 43 and not much else - and move through procedurally generated levels using a teleport-dash that is tighter than it sounds, punishing you if you try to zip around to dodge instead of using it for deliberate repositioning. Enemies hold position until aggro'd, so each room becomes a small tactical problem: where is your cover, where are the archers, and how many shots do you have left. Rush in like an arcade shooter and you die fast. Play the angles, manage the ammo pockets on your physical belt, and the combat clicks into something genuinely tense. The physics-based reloads deserve credit here - the M3 submachine gun and the K98 bolt-action each have distinct, weapon-specific animations that make switching classes feel like learning a new instrument rather than just swapping a stat sheet. Progression is the part that will hook the strategy-minded. Souls collected per run feed into permanent class upgrades, while per-run tarot cards layer modifiers on top - paralysis procs, soul-intake boosts, hypnosis effects on bullets - that interact with your class abilities in ways you have to learn by doing. The eight available classes (scout, pistoleer, rifleman, assault, militia, sniper, breacher, engineer, and the post-launch hunter and saboteur additions) each carry different spells and weapon setups, and the meta-progression means your fifth run with the pistoleer feels structurally different from your first. The post-launch 'Memories of War' update added the Engineer's pilotable drones and the Breacher's shotgun toolkit, while the 'Phantom of Time' patch layered in the Saboteur - a revolver-wielding stealth class with a cloaking ability and a decoy mechanic. Funktronic Labs has treated this as a live game without charging for any of it. The criticisms are real and worth flagging. The visual palette is muddy and dark by design, and on lower-powered headsets that darkness can make enemies genuinely hard to read until you spot the beady red eyes in the fog. The belt-based ammo system, where you have to physically load up your pockets before each run and crane your neck to confirm the slot, is a friction point that never fully disappears. The narrative is thin enough that it functions mostly as aesthetic scaffolding rather than actual story. And players who bounce off the slow movement speed during two-handed weapon handling will have a bad time early, though that friction eases as upgrades accumulate. For anyone comparing notes with In Death: Unchained - which sits in the same spiritual neighborhood - The Light Brigade trades the bowshooter precision for broader class variety and a more forgiving early-run difficulty curve. The autosave between levels means you can quit mid-run and return to the same checkpoint, which matters for VR where sessions have a natural time ceiling. The Steam community sits at 88% positive across over a thousand reviews, and that consensus tracks with the actual depth on offer. If you own a VR headset and have any tolerance for deliberate, cover-based combat with RPG-style run construction, this is the clearest recommendation in its category. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Unsupported. Runs great on Linux after minor tweaks. Based on 11 ProtonDB community reports.

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