Test: Duck Season

Actually, with all the shooter fast food for virtual reality, you wouldn't expect remakes of classics. Stress Level Zero, the developers of the multiplayer shooter "Hover Junkers", however, clearly hit the nerve of retro lovers with ambitions for occasional VR excursions with "Duck Season". When the 8-bit arcade shooter "Duck Hunt" was released for the NES after 1984, an additional plastic light gun appeared with the NES Zapper. With the accessory, the retro game quickly gained cult status as one of the top 10 games on the Nintendo console. An unofficial VR mod with the NES graphic as a 2D projection screen have already been made by hobbyists. Similar VR projects such as conversions of games like "House of The Dead Overkill" are not uncommon.

This is what a real gun feels like

Thanks to the room scaling of the HTC Vive, you are immediately teleported into an 80s parlour in which you can move around freely. Surrounded by lots of VHS tapes and game cartridges, you just wait for your mum to come home with the shopping and rub the game "Duck Season" in your face. It was borrowed for a day. So off you go with the game module, which looks a lot like the NES title of those days. Shortly afterwards you are transported into the world behind the tube TV. You receive half a truck of ammunition and are flown around by lots of cackling ducks. You hold the pump shotgun with two hands, of course, so that you can aim accurately.

Do not choose the easy steps

If you choose the easy difficulty level, you can simply shoot at it without having to reload each time. But even then, the right timing is important. The medium difficulty level is more fun. The ducks disappear from your gun barrel only slightly faster. In between sequences or quiet seconds, however, you have to quickly fetch the cartridges from the car with your other hand. Of course, you have to load them one by one and reload the pump with your second hand after each shot. The dog mascot is once again involved as a referee and tells you the rounds. We haven't discovered many achievements yet. When you shoot a double, for example, you are quickly gripped by the ambition to land more such hits.

Variety

The shooting levels are a little repetitive overall. Apart from shout-outs like "Great" or "Fail" at the end of the duck bangs, there aren't many more ranking categories. Outside of "Duck Season", you're a young boy spending your summer evenings in front of the flickering CRT TV with lots of toys and magazines. However, you always look forward to the interludes in which mini-games provide variety. At one point, for example, the whole room is twisted because the boy has dozed off on the sofa and is dreaming something strange. How you wake him up again is not revealed. In addition, there are lots of TV commercials from the Masters of the Universe era and a lot of VHS tapes that you can put on when you're bored. After an hour, however, you've more or less seen it all for 20 francs. The quality, however, is not only on a very high level in terms of game mechanics. What makes for a good atmosphere is the mixture of interactions in the game refuge at home - and of course: the awesome sound of the gun!