Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone

Introduction

Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone, developed by solo developer ANB_Seth and published by 2080 Games, entered Steam Early Access on 10 September 2026 at €25.49. It's a from-the-ground-up expansion of two well-regarded Half-Life: Alyx mods by the same developer, "Gunman Contracts – Chapter 1 & 2," rebuilt into a standalone single-player shooter playable in both VR and flatscreen. Players take on the role of the Gunman, a hitman working for a shadowy order, taking on a criminal operation called the Collectors across a safehouse, a harbor warehouse district and a mob-run restaurant. Between contracts, players return to the Hive, the Gunman's home base, to unlock and customise 18 weapons, train in a shooting range, and tackle two additional challenge modes with Steam leaderboards split between VR and non-VR play. The Early Access launch ships with three connected story missions, with three more promised as free future updates before the price rises toward a full 1.0 release. Reviewers repeatedly describe having tracked the project for years since the original mods, and it launched with a large, genuinely divided review base for a day-old release: 423 total reviews at the time of writing, 327 of them favourable, landing at Mostly Positive on Steam's own scale.

What's working: gunplay reviewers call the best they've felt in VR

What comes through most clearly across Gunman Contracts' large review sample is just how consistently reviewers single out the feel of the core gunplay, independent of their views on the game's other rough edges. One reviewer sums it up plainly: "john wick VR, gunplay feels good, and gameplay loop is fun," specifically adding that the game avoids making them "feel like a deranged psycho like Hitman VR made me feel," a direct point of comparison to a genre peer that recurs elsewhere in the sample. A separate reviewer goes further, calling it "the sole reason I came back on VR," adding that "none of the other games feel like you can pull off being John Wick," while praising the atmosphere, immersive look and voice acting. Another reviewer with extensive playtime describes the voice acting, gunplay, enemy AI and mechanics as "all a 10/10 for me," despite noting bugs elsewhere in the same review.

Beyond the core shooting, reviewers repeatedly credit specific systems for elevating the experience. One detailed review specifically calls out the game's custom music feature, which lets players choose between six in-game soundtracks while working through missions, describing it as adding to "the whole experience" alongside a strong voice-acted story. Players running on strong hardware describe the game as visually striking and technically impressive when it runs well, with one reviewer reporting "100+ fps max settings in 4k, also 100+ fps while in VR" and no notable issues at all. Across the sample, the game's status as a one-person development effort, working with a small publisher, draws consistent, specific goodwill, with reviewers repeatedly framing its ambition and scope as remarkable for its team size even when raising other complaints in the same breath.

The honest problems: widespread performance issues, VR control jank, and thin day-one content

Set against that praise for the core gunplay, Gunman Contracts' review sample carries an unusually large and specific volume of technical complaints for its size. Performance is the single most repeated issue, and reviewers report it across a genuinely wide spread of hardware rather than only on weak machines: one reviewer specifically notes running "both ran poorly, low fps and game crashes" across two separate PCs, an RTX 4080 system and an RX 6800 system, while a different reviewer with an RTX 4080 reports needing to drop to "Potato settings in Virtual Desktop just to get a relatively stable" result. A further reviewer with a Meta Quest 3 describes "unplayable amounts of stuttering and framerate issues" even at the lowest settings, adding that the experience "made me incredibly motion sick" despite ten years of VR experience.

Control friction forms the sample's second major cluster of complaints, concentrated specifically around VR interaction. More than one reviewer reports hands getting stuck behind doorframes and other static scenery, and a detailed review breaks the holster system down directly: "you have to accurately place the gun or it falls down," describing the long-range item pickup as similarly clunky compared to Half-Life: Alyx. A reviewer who played both the original mods and the standalone release is candid that "this needs more work, the controls does not feel natural," while a separate long-time fan writes plainly, "I find this way less polished than the two chapters of Half-Life: Alyx. The animations, physics, level of detail... everything feels several steps behind." Beyond control and performance, more than one reviewer flags the Early Access launch content itself as thin, with one writing that "with only 3 contracts, the entire game can be completed in a single evening, which is disappointing," even while adding they hope the developer continues expanding it. A separate reviewer reports a specific soft-lock bug tied to a particular in-mission choice on the third contract, and multiple reviewers note subtitle and text issues throughout.

Verdict

Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone backs up a large, genuinely divided Early Access launch with real, specific substance on both sides. Its core gunplay draws consistent, enthusiastic praise, with reviewers repeatedly reaching for John Wick as a point of comparison and crediting the game with some of the best VR shooting they've experienced, and its status as an ambitious one-person project earns real goodwill even from critical reviewers. But its honest problems are just as concrete: a striking volume of performance complaints spanning weak and high-end hardware alike, recurring VR control friction around grabbing and holstering, and a launch content package multiple reviewers call thin for the price, even before weighing in reviewers who specifically found the standalone release less polished than the mods it grew from. None of that undoes what its gunplay is clearly delivering for a large share of its players, but for an Early Access shooter asking full price on day one, the technical rough edges are real and worth going in aware of. This is a cautious recommendation for VR and flatscreen shooter fans willing to accept genuine growing pains.

Wanderer callout

A reviewer running the exact same build on two separate high-end PCs, an RTX 4080 machine and an RX 6800 machine, and getting poor performance on both, is exactly the kind of controlled, concrete evidence Wanderer treats as more informative than a single complaint: it rules out one bad PC as the explanation and points squarely at the game itself.