Forefront VR Review: 32-Player Battlefield Chaos, Somehow Running on Standalone Quest
Large-scale multiplayer shooters have always been the thing VR couldn’t quite pull off. Forefront doesn’t solve that problem so much as it barrels through it, bugs and all, and the result is some of the most purely fun multiplayer VR we’ve played this year.
The pitch is almost absurdly ambitious for a standalone headset: 32-player battles across sprawling maps, four distinct classes, vehicles ranging from jeeps to helicopters, destructible cover, proximity voice chat, and full objective-based match structure — the kind of scope you’d expect from a AAA console shooter, running entirely untethered on Quest hardware. We spent close to twenty hours in matches across a two-week window, and came away simultaneously impressed that it works at all and mildly frustrated by the rough edges that come with that ambition.
First Impressions: It Actually Feels Like Battlefield
Drop into your first match and the comparison to large-scale military shooters isn’t marketing spin — it’s the accurate description. Squads spawn in, vehicles roll out toward capture points, helicopters buzz overhead providing air support, and the map genuinely feels large enough to support all of that simultaneously without collapsing into a single chokepoint. The sensation of ducking behind a crumbling wall as a tank rounds the corner, in VR, at full scale, is something this genre has promised for years without delivering. Forefront delivers it.
Gunplay and Movement
Shooting feels weighty and physical in the way good VR shooters have to. Two-handed weapon grips, actual reload animations you perform with your hands rather than a button press, and recoil that you have to physically compensate for all combine into gunplay that rewards real practice. Movement uses a hybrid system — smooth locomotion for general traversal, with teleport options available for players prone to discomfort — and it strikes a reasonable balance between immersion and accessibility.
The four classes — assault, support, recon, and engineer, in all but name — each carry distinct enough toolkits that team composition actually matters. Engineers repairing vehicles mid-fight or throwing up quick fortifications change the flow of a match in ways that go beyond simple damage output, and a coordinated squad using voice chat to call out flanks feels meaningfully different from a group of strangers randomly converging on the same objective.
Vehicles: The Best Idea and the Biggest Problem
Vehicles are where Forefront is simultaneously most impressive and most in need of a balance pass. Piloting a helicopter and providing air support for a ground push is genuinely thrilling — one of the best vehicular VR experiences currently available on standalone hardware. But right now, vehicles dominate matches too heavily. A team that controls the map’s tank spawn early tends to snowball an advantage that ground troops have limited tools to counter. Anti-vehicle options exist, but they’re underpowered relative to how much damage and map control the vehicles themselves provide. The developers have already announced balance patches addressing this, and it’s the single biggest thing standing between “very good” and “great” right now.
Vehicles can dominate too hard, helicopters need better counters, and audio awareness needs work — but the foundation underneath all of that is genuinely excellent.
Rough Edges: Bugs, Audio, and Polish
This is not a polished game, and pretending otherwise would do readers a disservice. We encountered occasional collision glitches with destructible cover, a couple of instances of vehicles clipping through terrain, and positional audio that struggles to clearly convey directionality during the chaos of a full 32-player firefight — a real problem in a genre where sound cues are often the difference between reacting to a flank and getting blindsided by it. None of these issues were session-ending, but they’re frequent enough to notice, especially in longer play sessions.
Performance on Standalone Hardware
Running this scope of game untethered on Quest-class chipsets is a genuine technical achievement, and it mostly holds up — frame rate stays playable even in the busiest engagements, though we did notice minor resolution downscaling kick in during the largest vehicle-heavy pushes. Players connecting via PC link for higher fidelity will see cleaner visuals with no gameplay differences, since match logic is standardized across connection types.
The Social Layer
Proximity voice chat adds an emergent, slightly chaotic social dimension that elevates matches beyond pure mechanical shooting. Overhearing an enemy squad’s radio chatter as you approach a contested objective, or coordinating a last-second defense with strangers who happen to be nearby, produces the kind of unscripted moments that this genre has been chasing in VR for years without quite landing. When it works, it’s the best argument for why large-scale multiplayer belongs in VR at all.
Map Design and Objective Variety
Across the current map rotation, the strongest levels are the ones that give infantry meaningful chokepoints and cover options even when the enemy team controls the skies — dense urban maps with multiple building interiors to fight through tend to produce the most balanced, memorable matches. The weaker maps lean too heavily on wide-open terrain where vehicles simply dominate sightlines from spawn to objective, and we found ourselves quietly hoping for one of the better-designed maps to come up in rotation rather than actively wanting to queue for anything. Objective types currently rotate between straightforward capture-and-hold points and a escort-style mode where one team pushes a vehicle convoy toward an extraction zone; the latter produces some of the tensest, most memorable matches we played, largely because it forces both teams into predictable engagement zones that reward tactical positioning over map-wide vehicle dominance.
Progression and Loadout Customization
A steady unlock system gradually opens up weapon attachments, cosmetic loadout options, and minor class perks as you play, without ever gating core weapons or vehicles behind a paywall — everything meaningful to actual gameplay balance is earned through play rather than purchased. Cosmetic-only microtransactions are present but easy to ignore entirely; we completed our full test period without ever feeling nudged toward the storefront to stay competitive, which is worth noting given how aggressively monetized some competing VR multiplayer shooters have become.
How It Compares to Other VR Shooters
Set against the current field of VR multiplayer shooters, most of which cap out around eight to twelve players per match, Forefront’s scale is simply in a different category. That comes with tradeoffs — smaller-scale competitors tend to feel more tightly balanced and polished precisely because they’re managing far less complexity — but for players who specifically want the sensation of large-scale combined-arms warfare in VR, there currently isn’t a real alternative on standalone hardware. If your priority is tight, competitive, esports-style balance, a smaller-scale shooter will likely serve you better today. If your priority is scale and emergent chaos, nothing else on the platform comes close.
Where It Falls Short
- Vehicle balance heavily favors early map control, with weak counterplay tools
- Positional audio clarity struggles in dense firefights
- Occasional collision and clipping bugs, particularly around destructible cover
- Matchmaking queue times can run long outside peak hours
Where It Excels
- Genuinely large-scale, 32-player combat running on standalone hardware
- Weighty, physical gunplay with real reload mechanics
- Distinct, meaningful class roles that reward team coordination
- Proximity voice chat that creates real emergent moments
The Verdict
Forefront is rough around the edges in exactly the ways you’d expect from a game this ambitious — but the foundation underneath the bugs is some of the most exciting large-scale VR multiplayer currently available on any platform. If the developers land the promised vehicle balance changes and tighten up audio clarity, this has a real shot at becoming a genre-defining standalone VR shooter rather than just a very promising one. Even in its current state, it’s worth your time if you have a squad willing to coordinate.
Update Roadmap and Developer Communication
The development team has been unusually transparent about known issues, publishing regular patch-note breakdowns that acknowledge the vehicle balance concerns directly rather than downplaying them, alongside a rough public roadmap of upcoming maps and class additions. That level of communication matters more than it might seem for a game this early in its post-launch life; it’s a strong signal that the current rough edges are being treated as a priority rather than left to fester while the studio moves on to unrelated content. Based on the pace of updates so far, we’d expect at least one significant balance patch within the next month or two, and we plan to revisit this review once that lands.
Squad Up Before You Queue
One practical piece of advice from our testing: this game is meaningfully better with a coordinated squad than with random matchmaking. Solo queuing into a match against an organized team controlling vehicles from the opening seconds is a genuinely rough experience, while playing with even two or three friends on voice chat transforms the same match into some of the most fun we’ve had in VR this year. If you’re on the fence, round up a squad before your first session rather than judging the game entirely on solo queue matches.
Helyvo Score: 8.2/10 — Recommended, with the expectation that balance patches will meaningfully improve it over the coming months.
