The Oculus Quest isn’t in need of more wave shooter VR games, but that didn’t stop Storming Tech from porting down its PC VR shooter, Rest in Pieces, from late 2019 over to the Oculus Quest recently. It’s a pretty basic game, but still has a couple neat tricks tucked away inside its gory core.
[This game is only available as a paid game on SideQuest at the time of this writing, not the official Oculus Home store. You need to sideload the game from a PC. It’s very simple to do, you can find instructions on doing that right here.]
Rest in Pieces, had it released in late 2016 or early 2017, would have likely found a decent-sized audience with its fast, smooth locomotion inside of an arena-based wave shooter. That was an era of consumer VR in which stationary wave shooters that only allow for real-life physical room-scale movement, or in some cases teleporting, were all the rage. Space Pirate Trainer, The Brookhaven Experiment, and Robo Recall are among the best of that era, but the market has mostly moved on since. In that way, Rest in Pieces feels almost like a throwback.
There are three main “mission” levels in Rest in Pieces and three “horde” levels, as well as a shooting range tutorial. Enemy variety is lacking, most levels just feature the same sorts of enemies with slight reskins, such as the zombies at a graveyard looking more like skeletons and mummies in a tomb. Notably though, there is a lot of blood, gore, and violence to go around. Limbs lop off and heads explode quite easily, so if a bit of delicious dismemberment is up your alley Rest in Pieces has that here in spades.
Where Rest in Pieces actually has a bit of an edge over some of its contemporaries though is in the depth of its progression and unlockables. Every stage can be played on five difficulty levels, but you don’t unlock the next grade up until you complete the one you’re on first. Killing enemies and finishing levels earns you points that convert to experience for leveling up. You can then spend those points back at the main menu to customize your loadout, unlock new weapons, and upgrade weapons to be even better.
Between melee, sidearm, and primary weapon slots there are dozens to pick from ranging from pistols and shotguns to scoped rifles and sub-machine guns. There may only be six levels to play, but since the difficulty and enemy spawns are wildly variable there is quite a bit of replayability. There’s an online leaderboard too, which can be very addictive if you’re a high score chaser. Until The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners brings its Meatgrinder Trial mode over to Quest, this the closest rough approximation other than Arizona Sunshine’s horde mode.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_cta h2=””]Rest in Pieces Quest Review: Comfort
For a fast-paced smooth locomotion game, in which you move through the world using the analog sticks, Rest in Pieces actually has a lot of best practices implemented. This type of movement is known to make some people uncomfortable or nauseous very quickly, but there are options to help with that such as the ability to adjust your field of view cone or use “snap” versus “smooth” rotation. However, physically turning since this is wireless on Quest would be better to limit sickness. There is a permanent, extremely translucent, FOV ring you’ll notice in the gameplay video above, I didn’t see a way to get rid of it but I stopped noticing it after a few minutes.[/vc_cta][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Gameplay feels okay, for the most part, but suffers from some real performance issues on Quest. If too many enemies were near me then things would slow to a chug and if an enemy exploded near my face I’d drop frames as well. Turning quickly also sometimes triggered unexpected jitteriness. It’s not unplayable or anything like that, usually, but it could be uncomfortable for some and likely explains why this wasn’t accepted onto the main Quest store.
Every weapon generally feels the same to shoot, like it’s an airsoft gun, although the weapon models look quite nice — especially compared to the environments, which often appear a bit muddy.
Rest in Pieces Review Final Impressions
Despite being one of the first fully “finished” and paid Oculus Quest games with content beyond an alpha testing stage including leaderboards available to purchase on SideQuest, Rest in Pieces is mostly stuck in the past. There is some satisfying progression with a ton of weapons to pick from and upgrade, but getting through the first levels to dig into its depth can test your patience and the frequent performance issues make it hard to recommend in general.
Rest in Pieces is available now on SideQuest to purchase and sideload on your Oculus Quest for $3.99 via itch.io. The game is also on PC VR for $13.99 with vastly improved visuals.
