New VR game lets you shoot your way through a supermarket job
Clean up on aisle five.
Developer nDreams has announced its latest VR game, Shooty Fruity.
Shooty Fruity is set in a 1950s-style American supermarket. You are an employee going about your day job - oh, and shooting mutant fruit that's trying to take over the store.
The game is a job simulator meets shooter game, with both aspects being equally important. In my hands-on demo, I scanned groceries at a checkout while fending off fruit.
I started the demo behind a checkout. In front of me was a till, to my left a conveyor belt for moving groceries and, to my right, three shoots. The job part of the game is fairly simple: pick up the items which come on the conveyor belt, scan them and throw them down the shoot. Simple right? You wish.
When the fruit starts to attack, things become less straightforward. Above, there is a moving line which brings different weapons to the player. While still scanning groceries you must grab these weapons and try to kill the fruit before it gets to your checkout and starts destroying it.
As you scan groceries, the items appear on your checkout screen along with the amount of money you have gathered. The more items you scan, and therefore money you gather, the more you progress towards new weapons. You can see your progress below the till screen.
There is a large arsenal of weapons and power-ups in the game. Power-ups wreck havoc on both your enemies and the environment, adding extra damage to your shots. Weapons I caught a glimpse of included a pistol, revolver, shotgun and grenade. However producer Patrick McGuigan assured me you discover a larger amount of obscure weapons as you progress. Players will also have the chance to customise their weapon load out.
Some weapons are more effective on certain fruit items than others. The more you play, the more you realise which weapons work best for certain fruit types. For example, I spent a long time trying to shoot a massive grinning watermelon with a pistol only to realise a shotgun did the job much easier, however the shotgun didn't work so well on fast moving fruit, such as limes.
There's a large variety of fruit, each with its own behaviour and strategy, and as you work your way through the level, fruit attacks become stronger and more frequent. McGuigan emphasised nDreams wants to make players adapt to different jobs and new challenges, adding new dimensions to what could be a boring concept.
The checkout level is only one of many. The full game will have a multitude of different levels, each with its own environment, fruit and weapons, and each time the player will have to undertake a different supermarket-affiliated job.
Shooty Fruity is due out this winter on HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR.