Forefront Hands-On: The Battlefield Multiplayer Experience In VR

2023 saw Triangle Factory release Breachers, a popular 5v5 tactical shooter often described as VR’s answer to Rainbow Six Siege. Now, the studio is scaling up its ambitions with Forefront, a 32-player shooter that aims to bring the large-scale warfare and destructible environments of games like Battlefield to virtual reality.

Recently launched in early access, I’ve spent the past week storming the beaches of Forefront, and it successfully replicates many of the elements that make games like Battlefield so compelling. With just a few small changes, I can see Forefront becoming one of the more popular and successful VR games of its type.

The Premise

Forefront takes place in the near future of 2035, a time when an energy corporation known as O.R.E. has declared war against nondescript local governments over control of a rare mineral. The story is perfunctory, a plausible backdrop for vague military entities to shoot at one another. You play as a dude on one side of the conflict, and you’ve got to shoot the dudes on the other side.

It’s structured around large-scale, squad-based multiplayer battles that pit infantry and land, sea, and air-based vehicles against each other. Each match unfolds with two 16-player teams fighting for control over sprawling maps full of semi-destructible environments.

Players choose to play as one of four (currently) classes: assault, engineer, medic, and recon (sniper). These class types will be familiar to most who have played shooters in the last 25 years, and each comes with their own sets of primary and secondary weapons, equipment, and abilities, and supplementary equipment. For example, the assault class can toss down an ammo resupply box while a medic can bring defibrillators out to revive fallen teammates.

Much of this will read as standard to the genre. And it is. The difference comes from VR.

Gameplay

Forefront is rich with tactile mechanics. You manually reload weapons, grabbing and tossing an empty mag, replacing it with one ripped from your flak jacket, and chambering a round. Tossing a grenade requires stowing your primary weapon, yanking the grenade from its place on your body, and pointing with your free hand to direct where and how far you want the egg to go. Zip lines and parachutes need to be gripped.

Weapons respond differently depending on how they’re held (one or two-handed), and physical movement plays a large part in whether you’ll win a firefight. This immersion is a real strength. ADS (aiming down sights) feels realistic in VR. Tossing a grenade feels weighty. Despite a learning curve and the occasional awkward fumbling inherent in complex VR environments, the hands-on gameplay works really well to engage you in the moment.

The arsenal of weapons and vehicles is vast and impressive. Shotguns, SMGs, handguns, RPGs, assault rifles, and sniper rifles – everything that shooter fans likely expect is here. Tanks and helicopters and gunboats allow for drivers, passengers, and gunners to rip across the large environments fast and loud. There’s even a jet ski for when you want to fire up the Wave Race 64 soundtrack and take a break from all the fighting.

Progression is also familiar. Accomplishing in-game objectives, eliminating enemies, earning assists, etc., award experience for both you and your weapons. Leveling up provides character upgrades, load-outs, equipment unlocks, and more weapons.

Online network issues were non-existent in my time with Forefront on Quest 3S. There were plenty of available lobbies and matches, sessions packed with full squads, quick matchmaking, and reliable connections.

Visually it’s impressive, the lighting is generally striking, and if we take a moment to notice, the environments are actually rather beautiful. Sound design is handled well, with directional audio being well-implemented.

In short, the structure and mechanics of Forefront bring together the tactical class roles, robust gunplay, vehicular warfare, and compelling progression mechanics of the established games in the genre. If the developers’ target was “Battlefield in VR,” Forefront is mostly dead on. It’s a great and uniquely effective game that brings VR shooters to a more even footing with their flatscreen counterparts.

But Forefront is not perfect.

Collateral Damage

The Recon class is woeful, almost useless. Sniper rifles are the only primary weapons that the class can use, and as these guns stand right now, they are currently underpowered (not a one-shot kill) and almost impossible to use effectively compared with other classes.

While aiming through the scope is novel, since you have to physically raise the gun up to your eye like we’ve often seen in VR, actually hitting your target is extremely difficult. I’ve made some absolutely ridiculous snipes in non-VR gaming, but holding the rifle here feels jittery and imprecise with no aim smoothing option like Sniper Elite VR offers. You could argue that this makes sniping more realistic, but is Forefront a marksman training app or a video game? After a few hours with the sniper rifle, I abandoned the class secure in my opinion that the devs should add a very subtle aim assist.

I could also complain about the vehicles being rather pointless, since they’re extremely fragile and short-lived. Also, the fully interactive guns can be finicky to use – instead of grabbing the stock, for example, our in-game hands grip the magazine or bolt. I’d also love to see the landscapes more densely populated by buildings and foliage.

Beyond these issues, which could be described as nitpicks or simply not my flavor, are several other almost glaring omissions of established genre norms. For example, Forefront doesn’t currently have any meaningfully implemented directional damage indicator, which means that you often can’t tell which direction you’re taking fire from. This is pretty irritating. There’s no pinging system, which makes communicating with teammates difficult for those who don’t want to mic up. Hit markers are vague, almost to the point of total irrelevance. There’s no party system.

Of course, Forefront is currently in early access, so there’s still room to grow. Forefront’s current roadmap is extensive and displayed prominently on a whiteboard propped up on the deck of the virtual aircraft carrier that serves as the game’s main menu, and some of my issues are already noted. If Triangle Factory checks 60% of these boxes, they’ll have addressed 99% of the game’s current shortcomings.

But don’t be misled by those last few paragraphs of complaints; we’re striving for balance, and the problems noted are ultimately minor. Forefront’s core gameplay is solid, almost perfect for what it aims to be. Combat is exciting and tense, its VR gunplay is tactile and satisfying, and its environments are dynamic and engaging. Currently, it’s difficult to recommend another large-scale shooter over Forefront.

Forefront is out now in early access on Quest, Steam, and Pico.