Firewall Ultra PS VR2 Review

Within the first hour of Firewall Ultra, I had this immense feeling of disappointment settle in. The game which is sort of like a sequel but also a remake and reboot to one of PlayStation VR’s best shooters just isn’t good. I don’t use the word “best shooters” lightly here. Firewall Zero Hour is a triumph in VR gaming and its fanbase is larger than any other VR series on PlayStation. Sadly, Firewall Ultra doesn’t seem to follow the same path and in fact, I don’t know how things got this bad.

Firewall Ultra dropped me into a training area within the first few minutes of the game. Here I had to fiddle around with some gameplay mechanics and learn to shoot a gun or two. I also picked up some throwables and tossed them around. Nothing really fancy going on here except for how this introduction shows the game’s worst feature – the lack of interaction.

I was surprised to see how little I could actually interact with Firewall Ultra. Reloading is a press of a button, picking up a throwable relies on holding down L1 and even throwing it is done without an arm swing but rather another press of a button. It is almost as if Firewall Ultra has been designed for the DualSense Controller and not a robust, motion-enabled PS VR2 system.

Sure, First Contact Entertainment promises to add an “Ultra Mode” somewhere down the line which adds a manual reload option but the game’s issues stem far beyond just the lack of manual reloading. Mostly everything I did in Firewall Ultra felt incredibly stiff. Walking feels unnatural, aiming a gun was clumsy and had issues with tracking and the eye-tracking is also just gimmicky (yes, I did calibrate it again – the same result).

Instead of using my arms to grab my gun from my back and hip, Firewall Ultra uses a button to bring up a menu and then my eyes need to choose what I want to use. Be it a gun or a throwable. I am flabbergasted as to why a VR game would break the immersion with a simple menu instead of body movements.

To make matters worse, the menu is clunky. Why can’t I just have a weapon shortcut on one button, a grenade shortcut on another and the flashlight on another? Why do I need to go into this menu to choose what I want? I feel like this whole feature was forced on by Sony to incorporate some sort of eye tracking in Firewall Ultra even if it ruins the experience.

I had times in a gunfight where my weapon would move to my left hand and I could not for the life of me swap it back to my right hand. I also had times where the PlayStation Sense Controllers would literally be right on the headset but the game would refuse to replicate the same ADS movement.

These cumbersome controls feed into the whole experience. Even closing doors and multi-tasking with other mechanics, you know, as someone would naturally do, didn’t work. The ADS system also feels janky due to the extra step involved in grabbing the weapon.

You see, you don’t just need to grab your weapon in Firewall Ultra, you also need to grab the gun stock and then hold down L2 to bring it closer to your face AND THEN close one eye to see where you’re aiming. For a tactical shooter where every second counts, this doesn’t work. I get the immersion of the one-eye thing but the rest isn’t great at all.

Tossing grenades is another problem. Instead of grabbing it from your chest or belt as you would expect in a VR shooter, you just press a button and the grenade/throwable shows an arc where it will be thrown. You let go of R2 and it automatically tosses it.

Besides the mechanics that don’t feel like VR at all, Firewall Ultra also needs work on the content front. Every map is dark and feels like a copy-and-paste of one other. You can’t interact with anything in these maps either and the invisible walls break the VR immersion too.

When I wasn’t in a match, I was sitting in a lobby waiting for a full 2-minute countdown to end. I can’t wrap my head around this timer. Why lock players out of a match for 2 minutes? You know you can’t play VR for hours on end without a break, right? For every three matches, my team sat in the lobby for six minutes. Not to mention the wait time causes players to leave so this can increase. The lobby timer has since been reduced to 30 seconds as of update 1.04. 

Matches are also very short with a best of 3. This should be the best of 5 to at least make the experience last a bit longer.

The only thing I thought was clever in Firewall Ultra was the social hub aspect. Here I could walk around and make a loadout while the team would pick sides. However, the excitement dies out very fast when you’re standing around for minutes on end waiting for a match to start.

Firewall Ultra’s progression is also a slog. Weapons are locked for the majority of the game. The loadout system isn’t explained at all and of course, there’s a whole in-game currency system too. A simple attachment will also take you dozens of hours to unlock. After a few days with the game, I was only on level 7 and some attachments are available at level 39.

I was hugely disappointed in Firewall Ultra. For what it could have been – a sequel to the best VR shooter around, it is a shallow and abysmal attempt to capture the magic from the first game. Everything about it feels lacklustre. As if all the basic VR features you’d expect have not been developed into the game.

I think the saddest part of this game is how horrible shooting feels. It is the one thing Firewall Zero Hour nailed down. To see it in this state is shocking, to say the least. I obviously had too much faith in Sony’s “only other PS VR2 game” of the year.

This Firewall Ultra review is based on a code sent to us by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The game is available exclusively on the PlayStation VR2 starting at R719.