Paint The Town Red VR Review

This might be the perfect game I've played so far for people with anger management issues

Paint The Town Red VR on Quest 3 brings the exhilarating and blood-soaked action of the original game to virtual reality, offering a unique and immersive brawler experience. With the freedom of movement provided by the Quest 3, you can unleash their inner fighter and wreak havoc in a variety of challenging scenarios. This might be the perfect game I've played so far for people with anger management issues.

The gameplay in Paint The Town Red VR is fast-paced, intense, and deeply satisfying. There are a couple of different modes to play through from themed levels to gladiator-style arenas, where your objective is to defeat everyone in your path. The combat mechanics are simple yet effective, allowing you to unleash a wide range of devastating attacks, including punches, kicks, and special moves.

The physics-based interactions add an extra layer of enjoyment, as you can pick up pretty much all of the objects in the environment and use them as weapons. With the Quest 3's intuitive controls and immersive VR capabilities, the gameplay feels incredibly immersive and responsive. Hitting dudes with all sorts of things ranging from chairs, stools, bottles, mugs, guitars, microphone poles, knives, cleavers, swords, clubs, katanas or shoot them with a vast assortment of guns will keep you entertained for hours.

But here's the thing, this, what I just described, is the core gameplay loop and if you don't like it, there's not much else that this game has too offer. While the game provides a range of gameplay modes, including Scenarios, Arena, and the in-depth roguelite mode called Beneath, at the end of the day, all you do is pretty much kill everything and everyone that stands in front of you.

The ability to unlock and choose different character classes with slight different stats for your defense and attacks adds little to the variety as again, your only goal is to paint the town red with your enemies' limbs, guts and corpses. The only things that offer up some variety are the numerous modifiers you can toggle on or off in the Scenarios mode that alter the gameplay in fun and unique ways.

You can toggle for example the "Superhot" modifier that transforms the game into the classic Superhot, where time moves only when you move. There are a ton of modifiers ranging from super punches, laser katanas to one where all of the enemies will only attack you instead of the normal "free-4-all" where they will also fight themselves. I just wish that these modifiers had some sort of info text attached the them so you know what they do before you toggle on and load inside a scenario.

Arena is the other mode where you will fight a serie of increasingly difficult challenges inside a gladiator arena. The last mode, Beneath, is a massive roguelite dungeon-crawling mode. You will descend beneath and make your way through massive caves fighting all sorts of monsters and zombies. Weapons are scattered all throughout the enviornments with also different run-specific buffs and abilities to either buy or pickup from pedestals. In a roguelite fashion, there's a permanent progression system too, where you can spend crystals to increase all sorts of stats, but the whole thiing is extremely slow which makes it ultimately unsatisfying. It definitely needs a big rebalancing patch to make it worth in the long run.

Visually, Paint The Town Red VR on Quest 3 looks extremely basic, with simple lowpoly geometry, one color textures and voxel-based designs with impressive gore effects. The level designs are well-themed and complemented by a variety of weapons and objects that fit each scenario. The gore effects are particularly impressive, with detailed voxel destruction and dismemberment that enhance the visceral combat experience. It's extremely satisfying to see heads absolutely explode in tiny cubes when you punch them while Berserk.

Unfortunately, there are some things that undermine the whole experience. The framerate dips a lot during intense combat and since most of the combat is intense, the framerate is all over the place. There's also an obnoxious amount of camera shake whenever you punch or slash an enemy that makes the game borderline unplayable in long sessions. I really hope the devs include a toggle to turn that off completely. Another improvement that I would love to see is a simpler way to execute the special abilities as right now how you do it feels clunky.

I had fun playing Paint The Town Red VR on my Quest 3 for a couple of hours going through the Scenarios trying out different modifiers, completing the Arena once and about 3 runs in Beneath. Having said that, I haven't returned to it since and honestly I don't think I will cause I saw everything that this game had to offer, plus I don't want to go through it with the inconsistent framerate and camera shake. Maybe, when I'm having a really difficult day IRL and I absolutely need to release some steam, I'll load PTTVR and bash the brains out of everyone. This is a hard game to recommend, but if there's a free trial on Meta Quest, give it a try and check it yourself. Thanks for reading!

The game was reviewed on a Quest 3 using a review copy provided by the publisher. Paint The Town Red VR is available now on Meta Quest and PCVR.