Wolf & Pigs: Out for Vengeance is fundamentally a game about movement and grappling hooks in VR.  Whenever someone is pitching a VR game they almost always start by saying that you have to get the movement right, or everything else falls apart, and Wolf manages to do that one thing so amazingly well.  The problem quickly becomes that it does nothing else well after that.

The head tracking, and side to side movement when the enemies toss items at the player works well, and objects are entirely able to be avoided by physically dodging them in the real world.  The grappling hook is fun to use when zipping around the world as well.  The moments when everything comes together, the game actually feels like it has something special going on, a mix between Bionic Commando and Spider-Man.

The problem quickly becomes two fold, though.  The first issue comes in the form of checkpoints in the game.  Good checkpointing either makes or breaks an entire experience, forcing players either entirely too far back, or throwing them into way too much trouble without the chance of preparing.  Wolf & Pigs manages to do the first, in that on death,  it can toss the player a rather punishingly large distance back from that instance. This quickly makes chunks of the game feel entirely insufferable.

The second is that the game likes to make the player solve puzzles, as if this wasn’t an action platformer.   Timing is one thing, when you are moving about in the world of a video game, but VR kind of changes that as it relies on actual body movement to succeed in many ways.  So requiring the player to time swings, or solve problems after a tutorial basically instructing them that this is going to be an action orientated game is misleading at best, and implemented poorly most of the time.

There are minor offenses as well, like requiring the player to throw things — something that has never worked correctly in any VR game I have ever played.  The problem is that Wolf  has so much that seemed like it should have gone right for it, but instead it just kind of fizzled out pretty quickly.  You would have to be pretty hard pressed to need a VR game badly enough to pick up this title, even if it was deeply discounted on sale.