How To Turn Pistol Whip Into an Intense Workout | VR Exercise Guide

The Oculus Quest 2 has brought the possibilities of Virtual Reality fitness to light and made VR exercise possible with no wires to get in the way of flailing arms or legs. Of course, the headset on its own is nothing without games that make exercise fun and exciting. Pistol Whip by Cloudhead Games is one such game, and among VR fitness titles it is often overlooked and underutilized.

Pistol Whip is, whether you know it or not, a fantastic cardio and leg workout on the Meta Quest 2. You just need to know what settings to use to make the game as intense as possible and you’ll be sweaty and sore in no time. Here we’ll show you how to turn Pistol Whip into a workout.

How Can Pistol Whip Be A Workout?

At the end of the day making a VR game a workout is really not complicated. Just apply the correct settings to arcade mode, and turn a game that can be a standing and pointing simulator into a Quad and Glute stimulating sweatfest. Before we get into what settings to use though, you should know what the goal of these settings are. Basically, you want the game to force you to move as much as possible.

In Pistol Whip the game makes you move your arms to aim and shoot your guns, and also move your head out of the way of incoming bullets. While swinging your arms around to shoot isn’t much exercise, it is fun and will keep you engaged and entertained. Dodging is also fun, and forces you to use your leg muscles to duck, dip, dive, and move out of the way as quickly as you can. Both of these motions together burns a lot of calories and becomes a lot of exercise over the course of a level.

The Right Weapon for Sweatin

When you open Pistol Whip go straight to Arcade Mode. Contracts vary widely in intensity and some levels of the campaign can be very intense on harder difficulties, but not always. To guarantee good exercise, stick to Arcade mode. Now that you’re there, go to the settings panel on your left and select the “Customize” tab. Here is where the magic happens.

Start with the weapon you will be using, by default it will likely be set to the pistol, but you want to use revolvers. That’s right, plural revolvers, dual wielding one in each hand. Why dual wield six shooters you wonder? Glad you asked. First of all you want to dual wield so that you keep both of your arms lifted up during the course of a song, and keep both of them engaged.

This way you won’t favor one arm over another. Also using the Revolvers means that you will have to reload each gun after six shots, which means you will need to move your arms more, since you will have to reload more often. Most importantly having only 12 total shots at your disposal before reloading means that if you are very good at shooting in Pistol Whip you won’t be able to easily shoot all of your opponents before they have a chance to shoot at you. This means more bullets coming at you, and more reasons to move your body to dodge out of the way.

Important Magic Modifiers

So you’ve got your weapon selected, but surely just using dual revolvers doesn’t turn Pistol Whip into a great VR exercise game? You would, of course, be right, the real magic happens in the modifiers section. Just a couple of modifiers turns Pistol Whip from a boring slog where you spend most of your time standing still, into a Quad Blasting masterpiece.

The first and most important modifier is Vengeance. Turning Vengeance on means that every time you shoot an enemy, a bullet is immediately fired back from that enemy towards you. This means that no matter how good you are at shooting, how quick you are to on the draw, there will always be bullets coming at you.

This is important, because it means you will never just be standing still shooting whatever comes in your way. The constant barrage of bullets that are coming at you, even if you shoot every enemy before they have a chance to shoot you, means that you will be constantly engaging your legs and back by dodging out of the way.

That’s what you want, to be forced to dodge and move as much as possible by the game, but not so often that you just lose super quickly every time. Depending on your level of skill in shooting you may or may not want to also activate the Bullet Hell modifier. This makes it so that every enemy will fire a constant stream of bullets towards you rather than one shot at a time.

If you tend to shoot enemies very quickly, then Bullet Hell makes the whole experience a little more tense, and forces you to dodge a ton when you miss an opponent. If you tend to miss enemies a lot then the amount of bullets that the Bullet Hell modifier brings to you might be overwhelming. Either way it will definitely get you moving.

With these modifiers the game becomes a sort of dance, a constant symphony of ducking and weaving between the punctuation of the violent bursts from your guns. There is an agility and grace to the game, and in that a deep sense of satisfaction in its mastery that many a Virtual Reality commentator has described as “feeling like John Wick.” You will find with these modifiers, and the harder you push yourself in this game, the more satisfying executing a perfect dodge by windmilling your whole upper body around a stream of bullets before returning fire with precision.

There are also a number of other modifiers that you can add if you would like, like Disorder (which mixes up enemy types) or High Velocity (which increases bullet speed forcing you to dodge more quickly) but Vengeance and Bullet Hell are by far the most important to keep you moving constantly during Pistol Whip. With Vengeance alone you are in for a workout for sure, and both together will get your legs burning.

Difficulty and Level Selection

Difficulty is simple, because you’re here to get some exercise. Crank the difficulty up as hard as you can without instantly losing. Hard difficulty is preferrable, if there was an extreme difficulty that would be even more recommendable, but Hard is as far as it goes.

If you’re newer to Pistol Whip going to Hard difficulty instantly might lead to you just dying a lot and not having any fun. In that case stick to Normal or Easy for a while, whatever is a good mix of challenging and engaging for you. Just remember that fitness requires pushing yourself, and so you should up that difficulty as soon as possible. The higher the difficulty the more enemies there will be. The more enemies there are then the more bullets coming at you. The more bullets coming at you the more you have to move to get out of the way and the more calories burned.

Which level you select also factors into difficulty. Some are naturally harder than others. “Black Magic” for instance, is one of the easiest levels by far, and is a great warmup round. While “Religion” is the hardest level in the game, and has an extremely difficult part at the end which will not fail to either quickly defeat or exhaust you. When you’re looking at the level select menu they will generally be harder the further to the right and down you go. Except, weirdly, for “The Fall”, which is actually incredibly easy.

On a related note the game is generally more fun when you vary up the levels that you play, and even when you vary modifiers. Just make sure you keep Vengeance and Dual Revolvers on at a minimum and you will be burning some calories for sure. Other than that feel free to experiment and keep it fresh.

Pistol Whip and Virtual Reality fitness in general is about making exercise more fun by playinga game that will make you want to move, so that you win that game. VR just gives us the games that involve using our whole body and not just our hands. Keep it fun and keep it interesting.

So that’s how you turn Pistol Whip into a super effective cardio and leg workout. Have fun out there and stay fit!

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Pistol Whip by Cloudhead Games can be bought on the Oculus store or Steam for $29.99 and it is worth every penny.