Vendetta Forever

You never take a step in Vendetta Forever. Movement is welded to killing: drop an enemy and you occupy the space they were standing in, weapon and all, which turns every room into a chain of positions you have to solve rather than a space you walk through. It sounds like a gimmick for about ninety seconds. Then you start reading rooms differently. The guy on the balcony is not a threat, he is a staircase. The one hiding behind cover is a dead end you need to clear before you commit to it. Once that logic clicks, this stops being a shooter with an odd control scheme and becomes something closer to a spatial puzzle played at full speed, where the wrong kill order strands you in a terrible spot and gets you shredded before you understand why. The structure is arcade to the bone. Scenarios are short, self contained and obviously built to be replayed, with Steam leaderboards and achievements hanging off your performance instead of any campaign progression treadmill. You get a scene, an arsenal that changes to suit it, and a clean run to chase. Firearms handle with the loose, generous feel of a light gun cabinet rather than a milsim, so there is no fussing with magazines when the point is rhythm. Blades and thrown weapons show up to break the pattern, and the best moments come when a room forces you to mix them: pistol the near guard to close the gap, then throw something at the one who would otherwise have a clear line on you. Runs that go well feel choreographed, because in a sense they are. You are not improvising a firefight so much as performing one you already worked out. The presentation leans hard into cult action cinema pastiche and mostly earns the reference. Stylised, low detail environments keep the framerate steady and the read instant, which matters enormously when your entire plan depends on spotting the next body you intend to occupy. Enemies are silhouettes with guns, and that is the right call. The tone is playful rather than reverent, closer to a fan edit of your favourite shootouts than a careful tribute, and it rarely stops to explain itself. There is no meaningful story here, just scene after scene. Whether that reads as a strength depends entirely on what you want out of a VR action game. Where it wobbles: the central idea is brilliant but narrow. Because you can only be where a dead enemy was, the level design has to funnel you, and after a while you feel the seams. Rooms resolve into the same handful of shapes and the discovery of the first hour flattens into pure execution. A lot of deaths are trial and error rather than skill, since you cannot scout a scene you have never seen, so restarting to learn placements is the loop whether you enjoy that or not. It is also more physically demanding than the store page suggests. You will be twisting, ducking and swinging your arms across your body constantly, and the snap between positions is not a gentle transition. Anyone who gets queasy in headsets should treat this as a test case, not a safe bet. It is single player only, VR only, with no flatscreen fallback, and short enough that its long tail is entirely score chasing. The Steam consensus sits in Mostly Positive territory on a fairly small pile of reviews, which reads about right to me: players who bounce off the movement bounce hard, and everyone else finishes grinning. So who is it for? Anyone who liked the compressed puzzle-shooter thinking of Superhot but wanted something faster, sloppier and louder, and anyone who treats VR as a twenty minute burst rather than an evening commitment. If you want a campaign, a plot, or gear progression, this will feel thin within an hour. If you want one exceptional mechanic executed with real confidence, plus a stack of leaderboard times to argue with, it gives you considerably more than its running time implies. Rare thing, a game with exactly one idea that is good enough to carry the whole build.

Alex · Scout Team

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