The first time I booted Cyberpilot, I expected to be the Nazi-killing machine. Instead I spent the opening ten minutes in a chair, pulling a lever to ride an elevator between floors of a Resistance bunker, reaching out to tighten a bolt on a robot dog. That’s the whole game in miniature: Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot is about remote-piloting the war, not fighting it. You’re a hacker in 1980s Paris, and when the shooting starts, you’re watching through the eyes of the metal you’ve hijacked.
That distance is the thing you have to make peace with before you spend a cent.
What it actually is
This is a VR-native spin-off from 2019, built by Arkane Lyon with MachineGames and published by Bethesda — no flat version exists, and it never needed a mod or an injector to get into a headset. It launched on PSVR and on PC through Steam on the same day. On PC it runs through SteamVR and officially supports Vive, Windows Mixed Reality, and Valve Index; Oculus Rift and Rift S work through the OpenVR pipeline but Bethesda never gave them a stamp of approval, and the studio said outright at launch that support could break with a future patch.
Setup is the easy part. Console players plug in a headset; PC players install and go. You aim with a controller stick on both platforms — PlayStation Move controllers add some reach-out interaction in the hub, but the combat aiming is stick-based, not hand-presence.
The campaign is four missions, three pilotable Nazi machines: the flamethrower Panzerhund, the heavy Zitadelle mech, and a small cloaking drone built for a stealth-hack level. Between missions you putter around the bunker. Total time is somewhere in the one-and-a-half-to-three-hour range depending on platform and how much you poke at the hub — I was done well before lunch.
How it plays
Here’s what surprised me: the presentation is genuinely good. For a 2019 VR title it looks sharp, and the cockpit framing — you seated, screens and controls around you — does a real job of grounding you through movement, with smooth-locomotion-only travel and snap-turn plus FOV/vignette options to tune the ride. The drone level, where you cloak and slip past patrols to hack terminals, is the standout: it’s the one stretch where the remote-piloting fantasy clicks and the game feels like something its bigger siblings couldn’t do.
The combat itself is a linear shooting gallery with the threat dialed low — enemies catch fire or short out and drop, and because you’re piloting from afar, you never feel the weight of pulling the trigger. That’s the thin spot, the one caveat standing between this and a full recommendation. But piloting the machines is its own pleasure: the flamethrower Panzerhund, the heavy Zitadelle mech, the cloaked drone — each handles with weight and a little personality, and Cyberpilot plays like a compact, arcade-flavored mech romp in the spirit of Archangel. The spectacle and the motion carry it even when the systems stay shallow, and the shield mechanic is a satisfying panic button when a squad corners your chassis. There’s no real pushback and no reason to master the loadouts, but for what it is, it’s a fun ride while it lasts.
What’s worth your time
At its $19.99 launch price this was a hard sell — a couple of hours with no replay is a stretch for that money. But at $10 or less on sale, it’s an easy, fun afternoon. For that price a Wolfenstein obsessive gets a short, stylish session of piloting mechs through Paris, and the drone mission is a genuinely different flavor of the franchise. The visuals look good, the premise is fun, and it runs on modest VR hardware (a GTX 1070-class card meets the minimum).
The honest caveats are about shape, not quality. The remote-piloting conceit that makes it novel also keeps you outside the fantasy — you’re not in Wolfenstein, you’re watching it through a robot’s eyes. The campaign ends right as it gets interesting, and there’s no multiplayer or endgame to extend it; what ships is what you get. The Rift crowd also lives one patch away from a broken launch, since Bethesda never gave that headset official support.
Who this is for
If you’re a Wolfenstein fan, a mech-pilot fan, or just after a stylish arcade robot-fight for an afternoon, Cyberpilot is an easy recommendation on sale at $10 or less — a solid, worthwhile few hours. The drone mission alone is a genuinely fun detour in the universe. If you came here for the boots-on-ground, blood-on-the-walls Wolfenstein presence, this isn’t that game, and no amount of flamethrower dogs will make the chair feel like the battlefield. That’s the one caveat that matters. For what it sets out to be, though, it’s an enjoyable ride while it lasts, not a saga.