Thank you Ginra Tech for providing us with a review key!

Operation Serpens is a VR arcade-style shooting game where you’re an elite soldier whose goal is to eliminate the evil Snakes Organization. There are seven levels each featuring new gameplay mechanics and a different boss to take down. If you’re good, you can complete the seven missions in a couple of hours. To extend the length of the game, you can try different difficulty levels or gameplay modes. Co-op multiplayer supporting up to four players is available, but no one is using it. The Zombie Survival Horde mode is fun and gave me multiple jump scares. Be careful as these zombies wield and know how to use their guns!

The single-player missions are fun and I really enjoyed the variety in them. With that said, I liked some more than others. All of your action movie/war cliché’s are present including shooting down enemy soldiers and helicopters from a moving vehicle, infiltrating buildings room by room to flush out enemy presence, using drones or sniper rifles to pick off foes from a distance, etc. Some levels force you to leave the final boss alive while others encourage you to take them out. If they’re left alive they’ll taunt you to encourage you to fail the level. You’ll have to control your fire to not injure any civilians or inconveniently placed bombs that are taped against the wall.

You’ll get to play with all sorts of guns, explosives, and drones. The story missions are limited on what guns are available, but there’s still a good amount of variety. Each gun type has different ammo capacities and you can usually reload by bringing the firearm to your hip. In the level where you’re in the moving truck there’s a nice automatic rifle with sixty rounds, but I couldn’t get it to reload for the life of me. Not sure if that was intentional or a glitch. The sniper rifles give you one shot and the shotguns let you fire them twice before needing a reload. Despite their limited ammo capacity, they’re super fun to use! You can dual wield pistols, handguns, machine guns, or opt to use a riot shield for cover. When you’re behind the shield you can see your health, ammo level, kill count, and accuracy rating. Without the shield you can see your health and kill count on your wrists. The guns display their ammo levels on them which is helpful.

The Zombie Survival Horde mode lets you select two guns before each wave. However, once a gun is chosen, it won’t be available for future waves so choose wisely! I recommend beginning with handguns and saving the high capacity guns for more difficult waves.

Aside from zombies, there are other moral aspects worth noting in this game. Violence is a given, but it’s not bloody. When you get a headshot, the head pops off of their body. Dead bodies are on the ground for a few seconds before disappearing. One level has an enemy soldier sitting on a toilet and you hear him fart loudly. There is some minor language (h*ll). Lastly, there are not many females present, but when they're shown, they’re wearing tight shirts that accentuate their assets. 

Graphically this game is decent. The levels and obstacles are all unique. I found it funny that all of the enemies both male and female are all bald.

The audio is a bit cringe with the voice to text dialogue used in the tutorial. Thankfully, the voice acting in the game is a bit better. There is no background music in the singe-player but the weapon sound effects are believable. Uninspired and possibly free music is in the multiplayer portion of the game.

The controls are a little awkward at times and some of the weapons like drones are a little confusing to use. I highly recommend turning on the option to automatically grab guns. Even with that enabled it’s still possible to accidentally drop or break them. If you lose your weapon it will often respawn automatically where you originally picked it up. The only problem is that backtracking isn’t always an option. During intense fire/boss fights, I would often accidentally press the PlayStation button on the PSVR2 controllers, which is an annoying design flaw on the controllers; it’s not the game’s fault.

In the end, Operation Serpens is a fun but flawed game. It’s a bummer that it’s more $2 more expensive on PSVR2 than Steam. It’s not ground-breaking, but it’s fun and has enough level variety to keep things interesting. It’s a shame that the online community is non-existent.