Vanguard V

Vanguard V is an on-rails action shooter from the Korean studio Wemade that took classic arcade rail shooters as its model on Cardboard and transplanted them into a sci-fi setting full of robots, defense turrets, and enemy mechs attacking from different directions. The player moves along a fixed path through an attack base or battlefield and aims with head-gaze, while firing is triggered by a single button on the headset, with no need for any other control.

Visually, the game relied on bright colors and readable enemy silhouettes so that targets were always easy to spot despite the limited resolution of phones of the time, projected through Cardboard's two lenses. The pace was fast, with short waves of enemies, a simple weapon upgrade system, and progressively harder sections, making it a typical representative of the so-called arcade shooters adapted for short play sessions, which mobile VR without controllers essentially required.

Within the early Cardboard library, Vanguard V was among the titles demonstrating that the shooter genre could be transferred to the platform if it were stripped of the need for free movement and replaced with a fixed rail and clearly readable targets. The game carried a similar design approach to a number of other on-rails titles of the time and still serves today as a reminder of how developers intuitively searched for genres that worked even with a single button and gaze as the only input, before headsets with full-fledged controllers and spatial hand tracking reached the market. For many players, it was their very first encounter with the idea that you could shoot in virtual reality like in a classic arcade hall, only instead of aiming a toy gun you aimed with your own head, which was still a fairly unusual feeling in 2015. Short missions made it possible to play the game for a few minutes between other activities and return to it again without losing track of progress, which proved to be a practical trait given how quickly a phone slotted into cardboard heats up and how limited battery life is when wearing a headset for longer periods.

Why play it: For collectors of mobile VR history who want to experience how early Cardboard titles tackled the shooter genre with a single button and gaze instead of free movement in space.