DrillsVR: your headset decides whether the shot lands

Some players swear the shooting feels like the real thing; others call the game the worst virtual reality experience out there. The split comes down to the headset in use, not to anyone's aim.

Practical shooting between four walls

DrillsVR was built to recreate, inside a virtual-reality room, the kind of event that IPSC and 3-gun shooters run at an actual range: timed courses, real firearms rebuilt in data, and stages that demand movement, reloads and accuracy against the clock. Team B Laboratory's pitch is training and competing against shooters worldwide without leaving the house, using your own body to aim, pull the trigger and shift position.

The game shipped with more than 20 stages unlocked at launch, grouped into packs of rising difficulty, and the studio promised to keep feeding the stage library after that. It runs in virtual reality only, is designed for a single player, and supports controllers just partially — part of the gear behaves one way, part another, depending on what you strap to your hands. Released on June 28, 2018, it carries the action, simulation and sport labels on Steam itself, and that middle ground — neither arcade shooter nor box-ticking drill — is where it tries to keep its footing.

The pack born out of the space nobody had

In the first days after launch, Team B Laboratory treated its news hub as a direct line to the people playing: it admitted in public that the Oculus Rift touch controllers threw the aim off, and a later update shipped an angle adjustment built for that headset. The more telling move was a different one. Players reported that the courses asked for more floor space than a home can spare, and the answer did not arrive as fine print — it arrived as a new pack: five stages designed for anyone with less than 1.5 by 1.5 meters of clear floor. That fix landed while the game was still only days old.

When the aiming wins people over

Players who recommend DrillsVR land on the same point: pointing and firing feels close to the real thing, even when the rest of the game stumbles. One shooter with 4 hours in the simulation calls it good practice for anyone who fires a pistol in real life, and blames many of the poor scores on people who had no patience for the tutorial. Their caveat, posted on May 22, 2024, is the weight difference between the grip point of the virtual gun and that of the real one — the kind of habit that can turn into a bad reflex away from the screen. Another player, with just 1 hour logged, puts the same idea bluntly: movement and aim follow the body almost exactly as in life. That review is dated January 24, 2026.

Not every endorsement is pure praise. A player who tried the Samsung MR version, in a review from December 18, 2018, cut the session short almost at once — the real room at home left no choice — yet kept the feel of aiming as a plus. Some recommend the game by elimination. In a bilingual review in Polish and English, dated April 4, 2021, the author admits that the free-play levels would not load after the tutorial, and that if the game asked for money the verdict would be negative; with nothing to pay, they push their score toward neutral rather than toward good.

Two by two against five by five

The complaint that repeats most among those who do not recommend it has nothing to do with shooting physics — it is about the size of the room. In a review written in traditional Chinese a day after launch, the player says they could not even walk inside the game. The courses looked designed for someone with a clear 5 by 5 meter area. Theirs measured 2 by 2. Even so, they grant that the firing felt good — the room size simply ruined everything.

The harshest verdict does not come from someone who quit early — it comes from someone who spent 4 hours trying to like the game. That review, from June 17, 2025, calls the result shoddy work, holds the studio to promised features that never arrived — online competition against other players among them — and describes the weapons as low-quality models, probably leftovers from another project. On the other side sits a run of write-ups with under 1 hour played, telling the same story in short form: a controller that never shows up, a texture that never loads, a mechanism that stays locked on Quest 2, a session that freezes on the first try. Little of it is about aim — it is about the game never letting the player reach it.

Made for the space you have, not the space you wish you had

DrillsVR suits people who already shoot IPSC or 3-gun for real and want to run stage after stage without booking a slot at a range — and people willing to spend the first few minutes on a tutorial that much of the complaining crowd never finished. It also suits owners of an HTC Vive or similar gear with a generous clear area: that is the setup where the aiming seems to replicate the real gesture, according to the players who have stuck with it longest.

It does not suit anyone who measures a room in square meters counted rather than square meters dreamed of: the complaint that surfaces most among those who walked away is not about difficulty, it is about having no room to plant an elbow. Nor does it suit anyone drawn in by the Oculus, Rift S or Quest name without checking whether the studio has already sorted out the alignment of that particular headset, on dates spread across the years. Here the target is almost never missed because of the player's aim: it is missed because of the device in their hands and the floor under their feet.