Fixer Undercover Review: This Escape Room Puzzler Nails It

Fixer Undercover is a terrific escape room adventure limited only by your tolerance for jank.

Are you a fan of the I Expect You To Die trilogy, but always wish you could get up and walk around the room to figure out what to do? That’s Fixer Undercover in a nutshell, an escape room spy thriller using handyman tools (a wrench, hammer, pliers, electric drill, and grinder) along with whatever happens to be in the room to get to the next room. Fixer Undercover adds full artificial locomotion to IEYTD’s established formula and the ability to move around and get more hands-on with the environment is both a strength and a weakness.

Fixer Undercover stars a character codenamed, wait for it, The Fixer, a secret agent for an unnamed organization sent to a prison under the guise of a handyman. We’re not alone though as a cute drone named Winston accompanies us for the duration of the game. Winston serves multiple functions: an extra set of holsters for tools, the source of the game’s soundtrack via a radio it carries (with multiple stations to choose from), and the game’s built-in hint system via a projector for a UI.

Fixer Undercover’s story is told in media res, meaning most of the narrative has already happened and intermissions between chapters see Fixer and Winston recounting the mission and reading news articles written about it. It’s an interesting choice because it removes virtually any sense of peril. For players who don’t like to feel a time crunch or danger in their games, like a wall of lasers bearing down on them while trying to decipher a code on a keypad, this could be a good thing.

It’s a narrative choice I’ve never really cared for, but it doesn’t drag the game down at all. Fixer Undercover’s tone is mostly light anyway, with Winston’s stellar voice acting doing most of the tone setting. The story is perfunctory at best and I had already guessed the villain’s true plan hours before it was revealed, but Fixer Undercover’s gameplay is where it shines. Walking around a room looking for clues, places to use your tools (most of the time clearly marked yellow), or other random objects to get to hard-to-reach places is a genuine joy. The dopamine hit when finally exiting a room (even if a hint was used) was always there during my six hour playthrough.

The aforementioned weakness stems from something most VR players are used to: jank. Have you ever opened a drawer in VR and reached inside only to get a hand stuck and watch it violently vibrate and contort into inhuman angles before it snaps back to normal? There’s a lot of that here. If two items are near each other, it’s a coin toss on which one gets grabbed. More than once, I got a chair or a barrel or box stuck to my hand and had to move it completely across the room to avoid triggering it again.

If this is something you’re used to from other games, it won’t hinder your experience. This is the unintended side effect of allowing a VR player to be more hands-on with everything. It thankfully never prevents solving a puzzle, but getting a pair of jumper cables stuck on a chair one too many times can become a nuisance.

Graphically, Fixer Undercover is your average standalone VR game. Everything has that plastic looking sheen most Quest players will be accustomed to. I’m interested to see if the visuals get an uplift when the planned PC VR and PlayStation VR2 ports are released down the line. Ironically, that actually helps when solving puzzles. Items that cannot be touched are very easy to distinguish, which saves time that could be wasted trying to open or mess with anything non-interactable. Most of what can be touched, aside from all the food laying around, serves some sort of purpose.

Fixer Undercover, jank aside, is also a clean experience. No major bugs or performance issues to speak of and the game only hitched very briefly during scene loads. The only glitch I experienced was when I replayed the first room to record it. I moved a little too fast since I already knew what to do and one of Winston’s lines (“you know you can open that flap, right?”) got stuck on a loop for the rest of the room, repeating roughly every 30 seconds. There were times when lines of dialogue trampled one another, but that happens to me personally quite often because I move around a lot during chatty scenes and sometimes trigger a proximity based line.

Fixer Undercover Review – Final Verdict

VR has always had a penchant for great puzzle games and Fixer Undercover is no exception. The heavy emphasis on VR interactions and encouragement to think outside the box on solutions makes for a highly entertaining spy caper. The game is only held back by a healthy dose of grab jank, average graphics, and a fairly predictable story. None of those should be dealbreakers though. Fixer Undercover is a worthy addition to any puzzle lover’s library.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.