UNDERDOGS

Introduction

UNDERDOGS asks a simple question: what if you were five tons of angry metal, and the only thing standing between you and the next rung of an underground fight club was a jungle of robotic dogs, insects, and rival mechs to smash through with your bare fists? Made by Israeli VR studio One Hamsa, it released on 25 January 2024 as a VR-exclusive physics roguelite and has held an Overwhelmingly Positive 97.3% across 2,211 English reviews ever since — a rare figure for a genre, physics-based VR combat, that has burned a lot of players on nausea and jank. Reading through every English-language negative review the game has ever received — a genuinely small 60 of them — confirms the headline score is earned, and turns up a clear, current story: the single-player game most reviewers are rating is a near-unanimous success, and the freshest source of real complaints is a multiplayer mode the developer shipped less than a month before this review went to print.

Punching above its weight in VR comfort

The single hardest problem in physics-based VR combat is comfort — free movement through a 3D space tends to make people sick, which is why so many VR games either restrict you to teleporting or accept that a meaningful share of players will bounce off the motion. UNDERDOGS' own review corpus treats its solution as close to a solved problem: one of its most-upvoted positive reviews, at 112 votes, describes the game as "Thrill of the Fight, Gorilla Tag, and GORN if they had a threesome baby," and multiple others single out the locomotion specifically for feeling "beautifully fluid" with nothing that "pops around weirdly or glitches out of place." That matters because it's not a small technical footnote — it's the thing that lets the combat itself land. You grab, throw, and pile-drive robotic enemies with real physical weight behind every hit, and reviewers across the positive and negative columns alike agree the moment-to-moment feel of combat is genuinely excellent, even when they have complaints about everything built around it.

A junkyard full of ways to break the game

Underneath the combat sits a real roguelite structure: more than 130 weapons and power tools to draft between fights, layered on top of a 2D-illustrated story mode where you deal with 40-plus NPCs, hire hackers and saboteurs, and work your way up New Brakka's underground fighting scene for the sake of a little brother watching from the sidelines. Community tag votes on the store page — VR, Action-Adventure, Physics, Roguelite, Mechs, Action Roguelike — confirm the blend the developer is going for, and it mostly lands: multiple reviewers describe losing hours to experimenting with absurd item combinations, and Steam's achievement data backs up a playerbase that sticks around to do it, with no-damage boss-clear challenges and rare kill types still sitting in single digits of completion. The complaints that do surface here are specific rather than vague — one detailed review describes build variety and item synergies losing their punch after the second boss, "all of a sudden [everything] disappears as you're mowing through basic enemies" again, and another points out that despite the "mech fights" framing, most of what you're actually punching is robotic dogs, rats, and insects rather than rival mechs. Both are real, specific gaps in an otherwise well-loved package rather than reasons to avoid it.

The new kid in the ring: multiplayer

The freshest and most newsworthy part of UNDERDOGS' story is one Steam's own announcement feed dates precisely: a free online multiplayer mode launched 16 July 2026, with a follow-up "Episode 01" update on 30 July and two further patches in August. That timing lines up exactly with where this review's negative sample clusters its complaints — every review mentioning multiplayer problems is dated July or August 2026, none earlier, which is exactly what you'd expect from a mode that is weeks old rather than a longstanding issue. The complaints themselves are consistent: reviewers describe PvP movement as closer to Gorilla Tag than the single-player's careful locomotion design, a young and sometimes openly toxic player base, and no option to set up a private lobby with friends, which one reviewer calls the mode's single biggest missing feature. None of this touches the single-player campaign the game built its reputation on, and it's worth reading as exactly what it is — a brand-new free addition still finding its footing, not evidence the core game has changed. Worth watching, not worth marking the game down heavily for yet.

Price, support, and who needs a headset

At NZ$43.59, UNDERDOGS sits at premium VR-game pricing, and a couple of early reviews from launch week call the unique story content thin at that price. Steam's patch history since then tells a different story about ongoing value: a steady run of content updates through 2024 and 2025 — a Combat Boost balance pass, a Buzzsaw weapon addition, a soundtrack release, a "BALLTAG" minigame mode over three patches — followed by this year's multiplayer launch, adds up to two and a half years of a studio still actively building the game buyers paid for once. The one loose thread worth flagging plainly: a single reviewer's request for larger in-game text got an initial reply from the developers before going quiet, which anyone with vision-related accessibility needs should weigh before buying, since there's no evidence the request was ever acted on.

Final Verdict

UNDERDOGS is a genuine standout in VR physics combat, and its review history backs that up with uncommon consistency — sixty negative reviews out of well over two thousand, most of them minor gripes rather than fundamental problems, and a developer that has kept adding to the game for two and a half years rather than walking away after launch. The single-player roguelike is the reason to buy it: smooth, comfortable locomotion solving VR's oldest problem, combat that lands with real physical weight, and enough item and build variety to keep experimenting for a long time. Treat the brand-new multiplayer mode as a promising but rough-edged bonus rather than the reason to buy in, and if you own a VR headset and want to know what the genre's ceiling currently looks like, this is a strong place to look.