Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades
Image: RUST LTD.

It was a pretty low-key weekend, but at least something notable happened on July 4th this year - Rust LTD's Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades finally left early access after a full decade of free updates, expansions and frankfurters. One of VR's true killer apps, H3VR (as it's commonly abbreviated) is a gritty, realistic firearms simulator and virtual firing range set in a very unrealistic and deeply satirical far-future firearms/BBQ styled theme park staffed by the Sosigs - giant ambulatory processed meat tubes.

For those new to the sausage party, H3VR is effectively a gun-themed collection of minigames, although some of then are less mini than others. The centerpiece of H3VR is the Take & Hold mode, which is a challenging tactical roguelike experience that has you fighting through a brutalist megastructure, destroying floating security nodes while fighting waves of chatty sausage foes and hunting for new weapons (mostly realistic, some deeply cursed) to keep up with the rising difficulty curve. It's great stuff, and with a high enough skill ceiling to have a serious competitive scene.

There's also a zombie survival RPG minigame, a comedy puzzle collection inspired by classic flash game The Impossible Quiz, a distinctly ahistorical firearms tour inspired by Westworld, a grenade skeeball course, an open-world expedition into Santa's high-tech North Pole military compound and plenty more. All of this is capped off by the release of some in-game scenario authoring tools with the v1.0 release, allowing people to create basic missions and battlegrounds and share them via the Steam Workshop. But for those willing to dig deeper, there's mountains of more involved mods elsewhere.

Lead developer Anton Hand was keen to stress that just because the game is officially 'done' that support isn't ending for the beloved Bratwurst battlefield simulator. Patches and updates will still be happening for H3VR, but the majority of the studio's attention has now shifted to the recently-announced upcoming sequel.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades is out now on Steam for £15/$20, and works with almost all PC-compatible VR headsets. Check out the launch trailer below - a supercut of ten years of development footage, from early prototypes to today's blowout debut.