My favorite virtual reality games to date are the ones that find the middle ground between giving you full control over movement and having you stand in place. Pistol Whip deserves comparison to virtual reality highlights like Beat Saber and Astro Bot: Rescue Mission thanks to a similar approach to camera management that moves everything around you in order to let you focus on where it excels: the shooting and the intense, driving soundtrack.
Pistol Whip takes the familiar but largely forgotten genre of the arcade on-rails shooter best known for Time Crisis and House of the Dead, places you in a strange, pulsating environment, and couples it with score incentives to fire your bullets on a rhythm. You won’t find a story conceit for why you’re steadily floating along a series of abstract, predetermined paths where bad guys want to shoot you, and that’s just fine. The look of the world and thumping soundtrack are enough to keep me engaged and firing at enemies, and making their low-detail forms collapse into a pile of pixels is rewarding every single time.