Wave shooter

See also: Shooter and Virtual reality game

A wave shooter is a type of virtual reality shooting game in which the player stays in one place, or moves only within a small area, while successive waves of enemies attack from several directions. The term is a genre label used mainly in VR games coverage. UploadVR described the common pattern in 2016: enemies "attack from a multitude of angles", the player often has an assortment of weapons, and "Most of them don't let you manually move yourself around, locking you in place." A 2017 UploadVR review summed up one example as "a first-person wave shooter that uses position-tracked controls to simulate a gun and, in this case, a shield".

The format became common in 2016 and 2017. Games such as Space Pirate Trainer, Raw Data and Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope appeared while developers were, in UploadVR's words, "still figuring out how to let players move around without getting sick". By 2017 the press described the genre as "flooding the industry", and later commentary associated it with low-effort releases. Reviewers in the 2020s still use it, and some credit the format with being easy for newcomers to learn.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Every quotation, date, author and game detail checked against the 15 cited press articles and Steam store pages, and the Evans et al. 2021 study checked against its Europe PMC abstract. About review dates.

Characteristics

Wave shooters share a short list of traits: the player stands at a fixed point or inside a small play space, and enemies arrive in groups. UploadVR's David Jagneaux wrote in 2016 that "At their core, they're all the same", with enemies attacking from many angles, a set of weapons to fight back with, and sometimes several levels or environments over a short experience. Kent Bye, host of the Voices of VR podcast, described the same trope during a GDC 2016 round table as "you're standing in the middle and things are coming at you".

Because the player does not travel through a level, combat relies on tracked motion controllers rather than on artificial locomotion. In VR Invaders the controllers act as a gun and a shield, and Space Pirate Trainer is built around escalating waves of enemies. The Sixth Axis called Space Pirate Trainer "the VR equivalent of a score attack game from the arcades of the 80s and 90s" and noted that "the waves of enemies have a logical escalation pattern to their design". Some games center on score chasing. Holopoint, an archery game released on Steam on 4 April 2016, has an Original mode of sixty waves and is "designed so that only a few determined archers will reach the last wave", according to its store page.

Developers have combined the format with other genres. The examples below are ones that reviewers explicitly called wave shooters or compared with the genre:

Game	Variation on the format	Source
Raw Data (2016, early access)	Road to VR wrote that although it "is essentially a wave-shooter", it blends in tower defense, unlockable special moves and multiplayer; players defend data cores from robots.
Arcane (2016)	Players fight with swords, shields and gauntlets instead of guns; UploadVR noted that it does not use the science fiction setting "with lasers and robots" common to its competitors.
GORN, Hellsplit Arena	UploadVR cites these arena games as examples of the wave format spreading to melee combat.
Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever	Before release, Road to VR described it as appearing to be "a standard wave shooter" designed around a shooting-based race course.
Mothergunship: Forge	UploadVR called it "as much a rogue-lite as it is a wave shooter".
Gun Jam	Rhythm mechanics: shots fired on the beat of the music do more damage and score more points.
Skytail	A "bullet hell wave shooter" in which the player rides a flying creature and fights with telekinesis.

History

The genre took shape around the launch of the HTC Vive in 2016. At GDC in March 2016, Kent Bye discussed the genre with Road to VR's Ben Lang and Scott Hayden; Bye's summary of the episode describes "a theme that's emerging in VR game play where you have to survive waves of enemies coming at you, or you might be able to teleport to different areas giving you some feeling of agency around locomotion". Lang linked the trend to the popularity of first-person shooters with existing players and suggested that this survival format was "maybe starting to become the VR FPS"; the games mentioned included Arizona Sunshine, Raw Data and Space Pirate Trainer.

Several early titles were released on Steam around the Vive's launch. Holopoint came out on 4 April 2016. Space Pirate Trainer by I-Illusions "came out in Early Access back at launch for the HTC Vive", in the words of GamesBeat, and left early access on 12 October 2017. Survios released Raw Data in early access for the Vive on 15 July 2016, with Oculus Touch support following on 16 March 2017. Steam lists 20 September 2017 as the release date of Croteam VR's Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, whose random mode has players "Fight off random waves of enemies". UploadVR later named Space Pirate Trainer, Raw Data and Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope as the genre's "trendsetters".

The format also reached consoles. Reviewing Pixel Gear for PlayStation VR in October 2016, UploadVR wrote that "For a platform like PS VR that supports the PS Move motion controllers, a simple wave shooter was a no-brainer." By April 2017 UploadVR described the genre as "flooding the industry right now" and said it was "getting increasingly harder to differentiate between games in this genre". In October 2017 GamesBeat wrote that "wave shooters are a dime a dozen in the VR scene right now", and UploadVR's 2018 review of Space Pirate Trainer called wave shooters "one of the most prevalent VR game genres".

In a 2022 preview, UploadVR's Jamie Feltham wrote that there had been "a time when you couldn't swing an Oculus Touch controller or Vive Wand without hitting one of these", but that "that era seems to have subsided". In 2026 the same outlet observed that "'horde' modes are still a go-to feature for many VR shooters and melee combat games".

Reception and criticism

The term is often used critically. Jagneaux wrote in his 2016 review of Arcane that he had "lost count" of the wave shooters he had covered, called the genre "tired", and said that getting "more than an hour or two of novelty" out of one was rare. His Pixel Gear review called that game "a criminally short by-the-numbers adaptation of a tired trope". In the 2016 GDC discussion, Ben Lang said that "the survival-style gameplay, whether it's in VR or not, It gets a little dull."

Later commentary was harsher about the volume of such games. Writing about Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever in 2021, Road to VR's Scott Hayden said that "Virtual reality has been plagued with low effort wave shooters since motion controllers were even a thing" and that selling "the lack of user agency, story, and atmosphere as a positive is pretty suspect". Feltham's 2022 preview said that "The saturation of this genre has long since turned its taste sour" for many players, although he called Mothergunship: Forge possibly "the most fun I've had with a wave shooter". A 2023 UploadVR review of Gun Jam said that it "suffers from the same pitfalls as similar games of this genre" because "Standing in one spot shooting waves of enemies can quickly get repetitive."

Reviewers have also pointed out the format's strengths. UploadVR wrote in 2026 that "Wave shooters have endured in VR for good reason" and that they are "generally accessible and intuitive to play, easy for VR newcomers, and still fun in the right context for VR vets." Individual games have been praised within the genre: UploadVR called VR Invaders "a rock solid example of the wave shooter genre", and Road to VR called Raw Data "more than just a simple wave shooter".

Research

Holopoint, a wave-based archery game, was one of four commercial games in a 2021 exercise study published in Games for Health Journal. Eric Evans and colleagues had 36 participants complete four sessions, each playing one headset game for 15 minutes: Beat Saber, Holopoint, Hot Squat or Relax Walk VR. Only Hot Squat reached moderate intensity measured by percentage of heart rate reserve. Accelerometer data showed more whole-body moderate-to-vigorous activity in Hot Squat than in Holopoint, and more in Holopoint than in Beat Saber or Relax Walk VR. Participants rated Beat Saber and Holopoint as significantly more enjoyable than the other two games, and the authors noted that the highest-rated games "required mostly arm movement and a perceived light exertion". See Virtual reality fitness for other studies.

See also

• Locomotion
• Simulator sickness
• Standing VR
• Room-scale VR