Pistol Whip review: gun fights with nightclub vibes

It’s impossible to play this frenetic first-person shooter and not be viscerally immersed: you really feel like your body’s on the line. In more ways than one. The term “on the rails” refers to video game players being pulled along in a particular direction, often with relation to narrative outcomes, and in Pistol Whip those rails are almost literalised. We’re pushed forward in a straight line, dead in the center of the playing space, through hectic environments populated by faceless foes who shoot at us unless we shoot ‘em first. They have a flickery, silvery complexion, like glitching ghosts, and are human-shaped but devoid of distinguishing features, making them eerily nondescript—similar to the villains in Superhot and Synapse. 

This game is positioned in the Venn diagram overlay between “gun fight” and “nightclub party,” delivering an arcade-like combination of bright colours, bouncy dance music and bam-bam-bam, reload, duck, bam-bam-bam, reload, duck, repeat. Pistol Whip’s developer Cloudhead Games describes it as a collision of “film-inspired gunplay and blood-pumping beats.” This is a game, like Beat Saber, that makes you feel like a total badass—like a freakin’ superhero—while playing it. But anybody watching from the outside will observe what looks like a flailing moron whose lost control of their limbs, or is having some kind of seizure.

The sensation of being pushed forward through virtual environments will never drop out of fashion in VR—though the same can be said of physical reality. The simple process of being propelled forward is embedded into our lived experience. From our youngest ages we’re pushed forward in prams, then of course other vehicles—cars, trains, buses, boats, bicycles etcetera. In VR, remaining physically stationary while the virtual tableau continually moves is one of the medium’s four key visual configurations, as identified by academic Laurent Lescop in his 2018 paper Narrative Grammar in 360. It’s an evergreen setup, continuously repackaged and redecorated.

Memorable examples of a good old fashioned push forward being used for narrative purposes takes place at the beginning of each “saga” in the epic RPG Asgard’s Wrath 2. We find ourselves on the back of a huge bird, whooshing through an environment that folds  together various scenarios, characters and expositional information—the equivalent of a cutscene, but with the rush of a rollercoaster ride. 

There’s a couple of narratively thin campaign modes in Pistol Whip, accessible after completing a certain number of individual levels, which are labeled “scenes.” In one campaign mode (these were added to the game in several substantial updates) called 2089 we play a transhuman cyborg-ish character, who fights roots in a world where he’s treated like a laboratory rat. Throughout its second level—or “scene”—this character, John Asimov, has no ammo, declaring “it’s going to be a brawl.” This leads to some very entertaining gameplay: lots of dodging and smashing baddies. In the next level, he describes the gun we’ve acquired as one that “seems to have a mind of its own,” which is a fun trajectory—jumping from no weapon to an uncontrollably wild one. 

Even more fun is a second, similarly short campaign titled Smoke & Thunder, in which we play a dual pistols-wielding cowgirl blasting her way through a wild west-ish world, with lots of tumbleweeds and baddies on horses. I didn’t expect the boss battles in these campaigns to work as well as they do; these bosses whiz around our peripheries, firing away and dropping things to dodge. It’s a wild ride and you’ll get a workout. The developers deliver a pulsating testament to one of virtual reality’s foundational truths, as stated by the scholar Marie-Laure Ryan: that in VR, as in real-life, all action runs through the body. 

Pistol Whip is a good example of establishing a format that works well in the nascent medium, then maximizing it—cranking the dial to 11 without jeopardizing its underlying simplicity. This simplicity is core to its charm—and also why you probably won’t spend dozens of hours playing. It’s a lean, mean, snackable experience.