Zero Caliber 2 Review – Made for Multiplayer

TL;DR for Zero Caliber 2
(played on a Meta Quest 3 128 GB model)

Pros	Cons
+ Exceptional gun mechanics	– Poor enemy AI
+ Excellent sound design	– Shallow, tone-deaf storyline
+ Classic FPS multiplayer done well

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Master Sergeant Blake “The Blood-Sword” Hunter is a decorated U.S. Army Special Forces NCO that does shooting bad guys ‘til they’re dead way good.

Graduating top of his class in the SFQC, Master Sergeant Hunter has spent nearly two decades as a leader in the SOF community, fostering an ethos of kicking ass all the time, hard.

His in-field tactical genius and heroic valor was demonstrated unequivocally when—deep undercover in a high-profile intelligence operation in Afghanistan—Hunter frickin’ exploded so many helicopters Commando-style and didn’t even get sad or cry once.

For his bravery in action, Master Sergeant Hunter earned the Silver Star and multiple V devices.

His double-barreled neon-fuschia cheetah print grenade launcher is currently on display at the National Infantry Museum in Colombus, Georgia.

Military sim mechanics meet cheesy action movie antics in XREAL Games’ Zero Caliber 2.

This addictive VR shooter is a paradox: Immaturely mature, it barks silly old songs through terse lips and gritted teeth.

CAMPAIGN

Zero Caliber 2 is—in its bones—a hefty, brutal, and realistic military shooter.

Your character “sprints” as if he’s wearing a hundred pounds of gear, conserving his energy for a prolonged firefight. The lifelike sound and recoil from firing your weapon force a level of focus and immersion beyond mere point-and-shoot. And aiming down a barrel into a scope or iron sights is precise, relying firmly on your own steady hand. 

In short, controlling your character in Zero Caliber 2 is videogame realism done right.

There’s a challenge to overcome and it feels earned because it feels real. It feels human.

Unfortunately, those deep and immersive controls are juxtaposed to—and condemned to exploring—a shallow story with shallow characters. The whole thing feels like playing Battlefield in a pubescent boy’s hazy memory of a John McTiernan movie. It’s a rough-and-tumble military sim exploration of Team America: World Police, but seemingly less self aware.

My experience of Zero Caliber 2’s single-player campaign was one of constant, trickling hope, dripping off into a vacuum of near equally constant disappointment.

Hope, because the controls are always good.

It hardly matters what weapon you have, it feels interesting to shoot it. And there are so many guns and attachments to find and try out. It’s a cavalcade of different load-outs to build in different ways, modular to an absurd degree.

Truly, almost every attachment can go on almost every gun: 

Laser-sighted shotgun with a banana clip? Yup!

Hot pink Sniper-scoped .45 with a bipod? Sure thing!

You remember that double-barreled grenade launcher comment I made in the first bit?

That’s real. That is an option in Zero Caliber 2.

This sheer breadth of differing weapons allows for style, personality, and skill expression and it all feels good to control.

Yes—if your play-through is like mine has been—those oh-so-satisfying controls will ask persistently with every dulcet kablam “what could you and I do together in a better campaign?”

Before I carry on in my critical obligation of airing my gripes with Zero Caliber 2 though, dear reader, let me assure you that I—in fact—like this game. Sounds strange, I’m sure, given the snarky tirade above but it’s true and I need you to remember that going forward.

And we will get to the joy it brings me. But for now, my wrath continues.

I’ve explained that the game’s tight controls are wasted in its lackluster campaign.

But why is the campaign lackluster?

O, reader, let me count the ways!

Zero Caliber 2 hits you with a tried and true formula: Kill enemies to move through levels.

But!
The!
Enemies!
Are!
Bad at the game!

The single-player AI is awful.

They frequently get stuck in loops, shooting at nothing or running into a wall.

They don’t understand cover unless they’re at unambiguously long distances, frequently “hiding” such that all but a sliver of their body is exposed; waiting idly in plain view.

And they do not pursue you whatsoever.

Now this on its own—in my view—hurts immersion. They’ve got me outgunned and running, but if I pull the old crouch-behind-a-box maneuver they’re all just going to wait there for me?
GoldenEye had this AI sorted in 1997.

I mean Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde have been haunting Pac-Man’s labyrinth with their own distinct pursuit patterns for over forty years now!

And this issue becomes particularly egregious given the familiar Call of Duty-style health regeneration Zero Caliber 2 uses, requiring you to be out of combat for only a few seconds before healing completely.

So now we have a game in which popping in to kill a few enemies and then turning a corner to freely heal—knowing that you’re definitely safe to do so—is just as optimal as it is tedious. 

PRESENTATION

The rest of the issues I have with the campaign are more… let’s gently say “aesthetically minded”.

While levels feel distinct from each other, sections of levels are often just copy-pasted; the same buildings and rooms and layouts are rotated a bit, barely shuffled, and repurposed time after time. It’s blatant boring padding.

This applies to decoration as well. Every TV displays either a static newsroom screen that just says “breaking news” or the same repeating bad guy propaganda poster.

Alright. I guess I’ve brought up the bad guys. This feels like as good a time as any to get into it.

Here it comes, gang.

The woke gaming intelligentsia is about to call something problematic. 

Now if media literacy isn’t your bag then feel free to skip forward to the “MULTIPLAYER” heading a few paragraphs down where we’ll dive back into the gameplay. Otherwise bundle up, because Winter’s come early for this snowflake.

This game—let’s assume unconsciously—pushes a xenophobic mindset of American exceptionalism and it’s not even subtle. The USA (now called the OSA, or “Outer States of America”) has been invaded by foreign powers whose only real identity is that they are foreign. Enemy soldiers don thick accents ranging from all over the spectrum of opposition to American hegemony:

You’ve got your classic Russian. You’ve got your vaguely Arab. You’ve got a truly dead-on Ganado from Resident Evil 4 (which is to say vaguely Hispanic.) And of course—in the role of the main baddy, Barak—you’ve got America’s very first enemy, Mummy England.

With the G.I. Joe-like 80s action movie sensibilities of Zero Caliber 2, the main enemy was always going to be a hissing Brit. It doesn’t matter that the enemy regime, the Tlaloki, explicitly grew out of Latin America. 

No, because even in this prepper wet dream where American soil is invaded by a hostile force composed of a different ethnic majority, all the agency still belongs to Western Imperialism; the obvious and default stewards of the future!

The unconscious assumption about who has the power to hurt us is always Mummy.

Mummy doesn’t understand us, but she’s still powerful. She’s still Mummy.

“Oh, but if the leader of the bad guys was Latin American you would be crying xenophobia then, too!” you say, full-saluting the Raytheon stock ticker.

But here’s the thing, patriot. There are lots of games with slightly fictionalized universes where America fights a foreign enemy. Now, that sort of hoo-rah flag wrapping isn’t to my taste as you may have guessed. But if that’s the choice a game writer is going to make then they should at least give that foreign enemy its due agency. Don’t write it into existence and then write away its self-determination.

It’s just not a great look in 2024 making all the lackeys racialized, but not the boss.

Now I truly wanted to let all this slide. After all, gaming is meant to be an escape from this sort of depressing and constant political rhetoric. Yes, I wanted to let it slide and would have if it weren’t for three things:

1. A consumer’s desire to retreat from critical thought into media is when media’s ideological imprint is its strongest. It’s hypnotizing if you don’t approach it consciously.
2. Nobody else seems to be talking about this game’s barely concealed xenophobia at all, which is absolutely wild when you consider that-
3. This is the enemy’s flag.

Sure, there is a perfectly reasonable in-universe rationale for this black face in a feathered headdress with machine guns for ears to be the symbol of the enemy. But at the end of the day it just makes me uncomfortable to play as an American soldier killing myriad racial caricatures who fight under the banner of the ultimate racial caricature.

Curiously, XREAL Games is based out of Hungary. My guess is that Zero Caliber 2 is a love letter to that John McTiernanesque era of cartoonish Americana. But nothing in the way the characters are written, or in the presentation of the game as a whole, implies any sort of self awareness to its cheesy execution.

I find myself wishing that the game was more visually stylized—a la Team Fortress 2—to both make up for the Meta Quest 3’s graphical limitations and lean in further to its two-dimensional characters and story.

Additionally, for a game that very often makes your goal “go blow that up”, the visuals on explosions are just sad. 

MULTIPLAYER

Criticisms toward its presentation aside, Zero Caliber 2 stands out in its terrific gunplay, which shines particularly in its PVP multiplayer; easily the best part of the game.

Playing on release, I encountered FPS enthusiasts sharing their opinions of the game over the Quest’s built-in automatic voice chat (conveniently proximity-based for enemies, but global for allies.)

Those enthusiasts often touted that while certain features and game modes are absent in this title, the gunplay and customization alone made up for that lack when compared to other top-level VR shooters like Pavlov Shack.

Multiplayer is a joy all around; balanced to a degree that allows for competitiveness on the one hand, and ridiculous and over the top builds on the other. It takes all of the excellent mechanics of the game and faces you against enemies who actually present a threat.

That said—as was explained to me by a particularly challenging opponent who couldn’t have been older than twelve—it’s important that you play at least some of the campaign to earn in-game currency. If you don’t then you’ll be stuck with the relatively weak default guns, asking the children who kill you why you can’t seem to avoid a negative KD ratio.

Featuring top-notch gunplay, engaging customizaton, and superb sound design, Zero Caliber 2 makes up for its lacklustre and tone deaf single player campaign with a dynamic and competitive multiplayer mode that kept me coming back for more.

Thanks entirely to its addictive multiplayer, Zero Caliber 2 gets a 7/10.

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Scoring & Rubric

Scores are out of 10, where 10 is a masterpiece, 1 is unplayable, and 5 is just average.
Gameplay is weighted heavier in the overall score.

Gameplay – 7
Immersion – 6
Visuals – 6
Sound – 10
Performance – 9
Replayability – 7