FRENZIES is a new arena shooter from VR veteran studio nDreams that’s launching into early access for free today, bringing a ton of visual flair along with an ample list of game modes fans of the genre know and love.
I got a chance to go hands-on before today’s launch, and while it was a very solid experience all around, what Frenzies does next will be more important, as it needs to continue to set itself apart from the long list of well-meaning, but ultimately dead arena shooters. Read on below to find out more.
Firstly, if you’re looking for a VR game radically different from your typical arena shooter, Frenzies isn’t that. It’s all about packaging some pretty standard weapons and game modes into a surprisingly solid, VR-native gameplay experience. If that’s all you care about, then you’ll find the download link at the bottom of the article.
What troubles me though is we’ve seen that before in other, similarly high-profile VR games not too long ago, such as Ready at Dawn’s Echo Combat (2018) and Ubisoft’s Space Junkies (2019), both of which are now defunct for their own reasons. Having seen many in the genre come and go over the years, I had some well-founded apprehension before popping into the game’s neon-soaked arenas, and I can’t say that feeling has fully left me after playing a good slate of rounds against a few other journos.
Thanks to being free and supporting Quest out of the gate (PSVR 2 support at full release), it’s safe to say Frenzies probably won’t turn into a ghost town, though. Still, I’m waiting to see what the stylish arena shooter can do to evolve the genre in a meaningful way.
Here’s the breakdown of how Frenzies works: the game’s 6v6 team-based matches consist of five rounds of randomized game modes, which for now is around 10 different modes. nDreams is adding more before full launch, which still hasn’t been announced.
Two of the most inventive game modes are Glitter Pig, which is a play on capture the flag—run around holding a giant, squealing piggie—and Friendly Fire, which tethers you to a team mate so you have to cover each other and communicate where you’re going. That said, many of the classic game modes are there, such as team deathmatch, king of the hill, etc, so fans of everything from Unreal Tournament (1999) to THE FINALS (2023) should know the score.
Both the nDreams-owned studio Near Light and the parent studio as a whole have a ton of experience in the shooter genre, and it definitely shows in Frenzies.
While I would describe Frenzies’ shooting experience as pretty middle-of-the-road, this isn’t a bad thing. Reloading isn’t fully manual, however it seems to hit a good balance between speed and immersion. When you run out of bullets—indicated by a big zero on your ammo counter and a red ‘no ammo’ sign on your aiming cursor—you simply smack the floating magazine in and you’re ready to start blasting again.
Granted, it’s not nearly as satisfying as physically reaching for a mag and chambering a round like more ardent mil-sims, but it’s way more immersive than simply hitting a single button. You can even reload by smacking the magazine against your other gun, which makes for a fun dualie-reload gesture when you’re out of juice on both weapons.
Notably, the game’s cover system, borrowed from the studio’s single-player shooter FRACKED (2021), also allows you to quickly dip behind chest-height walls, or around a corner for a cheeky game of peek-a-boo by grabbing one of the many orange handles placed tactically around levels.
In total, there are seven guns available which you can mix and match depending on your style, all of them single-handed affairs, and skinnable to fit your overall look. Those include a double barrel shotgun, semi-auto shotgun, semi-auto pistol, full-auto pistol, revolver, tiny SMG, and a bigger SMG.
You won’t be aiming down iron sights either: it’s all about keeping an eye on your reticle cursors, which is a mostly understandable design decision that unfortunately comes at the expense of immersion.
More importantly, Frenzies looks great and plays very smoothly on Quest, which will likely service the majority of players when the full version launches at some point. It also packs in all of the locomotion options you can eat, including snap-turn with varying levels of vignettes, and smooth turn with no vignettes for the iron stomachs among us. You can also swap between head and hand-oriented movement.
As you can tell from some of the gameplay clips above, I used snap-turn and minimal vignettes, which was very comfortable. Although you can’t jump in the game, you can activate a dash move, which gradually recharges so you can’t spam it too often, leaving it only for covering distance quickly and getting out of hairy situations. That leaves some good opportunities to ramp off stuff too.
In all, Frenzies is a very promising arena shooter with a solid foundation, and one created by one of the most veteran VR studios. For now though, it feels like Frenzies still needs to hit the right level of stickiness with the addition of new and more unique game modes, gadgets, and possibly even some choice on game modes and what team you’re on.
A constant stream of fun and memorable updates will also determine whether Frenzies can really hit the mark and attract the critical mass of players in the long-term that arena shooters so desperately need in VR. At the same time, it also needs to build the sort of community that’s willing to fork over cash in its (very likely) cosmetic-driven monetization strategy yet to come.
As it is though, Frenzies is off to a great start, and I’m definitely going to play more.
Update (3:24 PM ET): Included an opinion regarding the game’s gun design, which uses reticle cursors instead of more immersive sights.
You can play Frenzies for free in Early Access right now, downloadable on Horizon Store for Quest 2/3/Pro.
