Sweet Surrender VR Review: Roguelike Shooter With Room to Grow (Oculus Quest)

Ever desire to shoot robots through a gauntlet of randomly generated levels with a limited health pool and permanent death? Sweet Surrender, a roguelike shoot em-up for VR, gets a lot of things ‘right’ in its current iteration for PCVR and mobile platforms. The game offers a multitude of well-crafted, pseudo generated challenges in the form of rooms filled with fast-firing robots, challenging players to react quickly and plan their next move carefully. Armed with a variety of sci-fi firearms, as well as a small selection of melee weapons, Players will need to find ways to dispatch or sneak past the enemies.

Sweet Surrender is available for $24.99 on Steam and Oculus platforms. Also, you can read more VR reviews here at KeenGamer.

Story – Minimal and Text-Based Notes

Sweet Surrender’s story is fragmented and must be put together by the player from a series of notes found throughout the randomly generated levels. Players start out at the bottom of a huge complex of various locales, requiring an elevator to progress to the next location.

Sweet Surrender’s gameplay loop is centered around a roguelike dungeon progression, with the only things saved on death are story bits unlocked and non-usable trophies detailing what weapons players have encountered thus far in the game. Thus, due to the physical nature of VR, as well as the daily challenge system, Players are encouraged to get as far as they can with one attempt per day. Those daily attempts are recorded and put up on a daily highscore board, showcasing players who’ve gotten far with zero deaths.

This structure encourages careful play and attention to detail on behalf of the player. Players, especially those new to first person shooters, will find that death comes quite easily, especially with no regenerating health and a small health pool, coupled with fast firing, accurate enemies.

Toxic Gas

Gameplay – Satisfying

Sweet Surrender’s controls are relatively standard for a VR FPS shooter, with a small selection of melee utilities as well. The melee of Sweet Surrender seems to be its simplest aspect, serviceable but no complex actions like blocking or physical dodging. The options menu offers HMD/Controller led smooth locomotion, teleportation, or a mixture of the two.

Holsters can also be configured to either a high-medium-low setting, and there is a seated gameplay option as well.

Upgrade Modules

A unique aspect of Sweet Surrender that sets it apart from other roguelikes is its unique, wrist-based upgrade system. In the wrists of the player model are four slots that can take upgrade chips. These upgrade chips provide a wide variety of upgrades/gameplay modifiers that will make the ascent much more manageable, potentially making/ or breaking a run. These include simple modifiers like more damage per shot (but less ammo in the gun), a chance to fire an EMP round to stun the robotic enemies, to recovery modules that improve the paltry healing given by health stimpacks, to health recovered upon critical damage to enemies. The modules that returned health upon damage were the ones that extended my runs the most.

At the end of each level, players will have an opportunity to purchase a randomized selection of health stimpacks, upgrade modules, and weapons with gears (the game’s currency) that they find throughout the levels. Gears are small and pretty hard to spot, so players will have to search each room carefully in order to find them.

Enemies — Lethal AI 

The enemies of Sweet Surrender are ruthless, accurate, and quick moving enemies that will send you back to the respawn room. The game rewards aggressive play, for the longer the enemies are around, the more likely they will fire projectiles that are nigh impossible to dodge.

You’ll start off facing against robots that have pistols: they react fast, but deal relatively low damage, and once you’ve done a few rounds, you will be able to recognize and dodge most of the shots.

There will also be a large, brute-like enemy that attacks with melee and has a high health pool. They have a weak spot on their back if you decide to sneak up on them.

Later on, enemies – identified by their color-coding, will possess more damaging weapons, including shotguns and sniper rifles. Turrets, which fire in a fixed pattern on the lower levels, become sentient and track your movement on higher levels.

Additionally, at the end of each themed area is a boss, waiting to surprise you with the ramped difficulty. Yet, the game could be improved with more variety in the environments and the gameplay. The environments in the game are all very similar, and the gameplay can become repetitive after a while. I would also like to see more variety in the game’s enemies. Sweet Surrender receives relatively constant updates, so the game’s future looks bright in this regard.

Grappling Hook!

Weapons

Sweet Surrender boasts several gun types as of writing, including a pretty unique grappling hook. Players will have two holsters on either hip, as well as a back slot for large guns.

Pistols will be what you start out with. They are small and compact but have high accuracy. These pistols can be used as a backup weapon when procuring larger guns later on. However, their damage output is quite low, as well as a low magazine capacity.

Shotguns are the typical high damage, widespread affairs making them great for close-range combat. Their slow rate of fire and small clip size make them tricky to wield.

Submachine guns come in several variants, all possessing a high rate of fire and a slightly better spread than the shotguns.

The best weapon for the player will depend on the playstyle and skill of the player. I personally found the assault rifle which is usually found in boxes on mid-level stages. The rifle was the weapon to carry me all the way through the endgame.

Akimbo

Graphics and Sound – Serviceable

Sweet Surrender has serviceable graphics and sound for a game that runs on mobile and PCVR platforms. The developers have managed to hit a sweet spot where the industrial setting does not indicate the optimizations taken for the smooth performance. However, the visuals are simply not that interesting as of writing. One wishes that there was more to do in the many rooms of Sweet Surrender, aside from shoot robots.

I reviewed Sweet Surrender on both Quest and PCVR.