Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades

While looking for some games to play with my HTC Vive, I read a lot of people recommending Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades. An Early Access Steam Game, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades, or H3VR as the community calls it, gives you various environments and weapons to have fun with. The combination of motion controls, room scale gaming, and the virtual reality headset for the Vive seemed like a perfect setup for this game.

I picked up a copy from Steam and was blown away at how fun this gun range game was. First off, it’s done by a very small team. This small team has gone and made an incredible game with a lot of polish and thought in simulating real life firearms. Second, it gets updated every week with new weapons and features. Third, the developers do take a lot of suggestions and incorporates it into the game, Fourth, firing guns is a ton of fun and you get loads to fire. Finally, the game looks great and really takes advantage of all the features of the HTC Vive.

Each gun is modeled in very great detail and you’ll go through all the necessary steps to fire one just like in real life. Having fired a few of the guns featured in the game, it didn’t take me long to load a mag, pull the slide, take the gun off safety, and fire off a few rounds down a range. This is done through various combinations of buttons presses and physically interacting with the gun with the motion controllers. Yes, you have to grab a virtual magazine and slide it into the gun. Grab the slide and pull it back just like in real life. The controllers shook on each round being fired. It all adds up to make it seem like you are really holding a gun in your hand.

Guns with a rail system can be outfitted with various scopes and sights and you can even build upon some of them. Outfit some of the guns with a few different sights to make a gun be effective in both short and long range. The developer did a marvelous job at crafting a realistic attachment system that is both fun and effective to use.

With the scopes, I actually closed one eye and held the gun up to my face to get a better view. The game does a great job at showing magnification in the scope and I was surprised at how lifelike it felt to shoot a gun this way. I even found myself tilting my head as if I had a gun up against my shoulder and was taking aim.

Plenty of guns are in the game ranging from pistols to shotguns to assault rifles. Guns aren’t the only items available for you to play around with. Grenades, dynamite sticks, and even a laser sword gives you a variety of ways to cause mayhem in the environments. I particularly like that you have to pull out the pin and toss the grenade with the option to even cook the grenade with a press of the thumbpad. There’s a lighter or matches that you can use to light the sticks of dynamite and yes, you flick the thumbpad on the controllers to turn on the lighter.

There are a few different types of ranges and game types that’s in H3VR and the developer seems to add more each week. There’’s the typical target gun ranges, but there’s a building that you can simulate a siege and something the developer calls a GUNasium. Here, there are targets which you can shoot and you go through the course by grabbing on handles or ledges and pulling yourself through the game space. It offers up a surprisingly intense workout and you’re timed going through the course. Over the course of the few months after I purchased the game, there’s been a boatload of new stages, weapons, and features that the developer has put in. It’s great to see a developer updating the game at a constant pace that offers great value for both current and future owners alike.

H3VR does have a lot going on but there’s very little in terms of documentation or tutorial in the game. I had to go on the developer’s YouTube channel to figure out how to use some of the guns because the button combination needed to reload was different. Putting sights on the rails was also a little challenge until I dug around some videos and forum posts. Some things in the environment aren’t explained as well so you don’t know what they do or how they are even used. It’s understandable given that there’s one person working on this so he’s focusing more on the features rather than making in game instructions on each and every single item. Because of that, some people might find it a little frustrating, but you definitely want to take the time to watch a few of the developer’s videos so you can get the information needed on a few of the weapons in the game.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades is definitely one of my go to HTC Vive games to play. With the frequent updates the developers put out, it’s a game that has paid off in spades since I bought it a few weeks ago. I look forward to each new update and how it improves on a game with great mechanics already. One of the great Early Access games out there, H3VR is a definite pickup for Vive owners.