Review: Merry Snowballs by Hatrabbit Studios

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Paul Trowe

As VR Today's Entertainment Editor, I use my 30+ year tenure in the interactive entertainment industry to research, test and play the latest VR games and applications for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Samsung GearVR head mounted displays. I take notes on various attributes and features, collate my notes and write an article, review, or preview of one of the games or apps after I've done all the research. If it's a review, I give the publication a rating out of our 10 point rating guideline.

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Hatrabbit Entertainment is a new company composed of two people who used to work on AAA games while at DICE and EA. They decided to break off on their own and try their hand at creating some VR games for us to play, and Merry Snowballs is the first one out of the gate.

First off, for a two man team, I think they did an incredible job of creating a game for the Vive. The only thing more impressive than this is when Kelly Bailey of Vanishing Realms created that entire game by himself in less than 6 months.

The Game

The basic premise of Merry Snowballs is to try and hit your friends with snowballs before they hit you enough times and the game is over. The one thing I liked about the game was the gun. It gave me the ability to shoot the bad guys throwing snowballs at me and I was able to nail them so much faster than dodging and attempting to throw my own snowballs at the boys and girls trying to knock me down. Unfortunately, the gun doesn’t last in your hands too long and it’s back to hurling snow balls at your enemies using your dominant throwing arm. For me, it was a real PITA because my arm got tired after awhile and I kept dying.

One cool aspect to the game is that you can raise your hand and block the incoming snowballs so you don’t have to move or hide behind objects not to get hit. The down side of this is that you can’t simultaneously block an incoming snowball and throw a snowball at the same time.

Bonus Items

In addition to the gun, which you need to throw a snowball at to equip it in your hand, there are also presents scattered around the levels you can throw snowballs at and gain points. If I were you, however, I’d avoid the presents since their only function is to give you 100 points and it’s not really enough to distract you from all the other kids trying to knock you out of the game with their incoming projectiles.

Leaderboard

After you get hit with enough snowballs the game ends and you see where your place is on the leaderboard. Since I did so well, I wound up at position 173, an all time high for me with this game! I played the game for about 20 minutes before it got boring and I had to take off my Vive and boot up Werewolves Within from Ubisoft for some different VR action.

Unfortunately, there’s not that much depth to the entire game. It’s basically a snow ball fight with NPCs trying to knock you out of the game. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have a lot of fun with it, but I looked at their reviews on Steam and most of them are positive, so it looks like the community is liking the first game from Hatrabbit Entertainment.

I read the reviews and it looks like the game was priced higher at an earlier point and the community made sure to let them know the game was too highly priced so they adjusted it down to $5.99. Still, I think that’s a bit high compared with some of the games. If you want some simple fun for your kids to play with over the holiday break, then this is definitely a good deal for the kids, they’ll absolutely love it!!!

Review guidelines: This review is made in accordance with VR Today’s official game review guidelines. If you have a review request for a game you’ve developed or published please send an email to reviews@vrtodaymagazine.com

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