When you miss the times of Time Disaster, Virtua Cop, and even Duck Hunt, then Arkade Gaming Gun is a PC peripheral that needs to be firmly in your sights. At this week’s Gamescom Asia x Thailand Recreation Present 2026, I managed to get a brief hands-on demonstration with this motion-controlled gun controller that’s resulting from launch someday in 2027 and got here away with a powerful first impression regardless of taking a number of moments to wrap my head round its distinctive management setup.
What’s nice concerning the Arkade Gaming Gun straight off the bat is that its proprietary expertise doesn’t require a webcam or Wii-style sensor bar to make it work along with your show. It’s fully plug and play, you join its charging dock as much as your PC by way of USB-C, and it doubles as a wi-fi receiver for the gun itself. A tool supervisor means that you can customise its button structure and calibrate the monitoring efficiency, and away you go.
You principally cradle the Arkade in a two-handed grip. The D-Pad or WASD-style motion of your character is dealt with by a thumbstick jutting out the facet of its chunky barrel – which pulses with customisable LED graphics like a billboard in a Blade Runner skyline – with a pair of buttons on the opposite facet used for different strikes like leaping, and controls on the rear for weapon-switching.
In any other case the precise aiming is dealt with by bodily pointing the gun itself at your goal, and that’s the place issues turned initially disorientating throughout my transient hands-on. Dropped right into a demo of Prodeus, a boomer shooter from developer Bounding Field Software program, it took a second for me to get comfy with strafing and aiming on the identical time. This was largely as a result of to activate the aiming means of Arkade that you must flippantly grip the capacitive contact floor of its set off. Relaxation your finger on the set off and the onscreen crosshair will transfer to no matter goal that you just goal the gun at. Take your finger off the set off, nevertheless, and also you’re principally locked within the path that you just’re going through, as if you have been enjoying with a mouse and keyboard and out of the blue slipped your hand off the mouse.
As soon as I did get a really feel for it, although, it largely turned second nature. I even began instinctively re-centring myself on the fly with refined actions of my set off finger, not not like once you’re aiming with a mouse and also you’re pushing in the direction of the sting of the mouse pad, and also you decide it up and place it again within the center with out actually interested by it. It’s a reasonably tough factor to clarify, however principally as soon as it clicks it feels extremely enjoyable to see down the Arkade’s sights and blaze away at a room of Doom-style demons with no noticeable compromises to the liberty of your actions. I particularly like how its set off options two levels of operation – a half-squeeze principally mimics a proper mouse-button by zooming in barely in your goal, whereas a full squeeze fires the shot.
In accordance with its creator and CEO Joshua Fuchs, the Arkade Gaming Gun isn’t solely designed for first-person shooters. Apparently it additionally helps quite a lot of third-person shooters as nicely, from Fortnite to the Resident Evil 3 remake. It will also be used together with different peripherals to additional enhance the immersion, with Fuchs displaying me a video instance of one in all his staff members utilizing the Arkade Gaming Gun in tandem with a racing wheel to execute drive-by shootings in Grand Theft Auto 5; one hand on the wheel and the opposite pulling the set off on the Arkade. I’m unsure how a lot peripheral-juggling and customized controller-mapping can be required to play the whole sport that method, nevertheless it actually instructed that gamers may have numerous enjoyable getting artistic with this gadget.
For now the Arkade gaming gun solely helps PC, Mac, and Steam OS, however Fuchs has hopes of bringing it to consoles in some unspecified time in the future sooner or later. The gun itself feels actually solidly constructed, however mild sufficient that I don’t think about it will turn into too tiring to wield it for prolonged gaming classes.
One factor that does really feel somewhat heavy although, is the value. Arkade Gaming Gun is launching at $399 USD, though there’s at present the choice of scoring one at a reduced fee should you preorder from Arkade’s website. That’s a reasonably hefty value to pay to carry a sense of old skool nostalgia to new college taking pictures, however should you’ve received the finances for it then based mostly on my transient blast with it this mild gun feels prefer it might be value a shot.
Tristan Ogilvie is a senior video editor at IGN based mostly in Sydney, Australia. He has 25 years of expertise protecting video video games, having served as Deputy Editor on Official PlayStation 2 Journal Australia and as Editor of Official Xbox 360 Journal Australia, earlier than becoming a member of IGN in 2009. You will discover him on Bluesky @tristanogilvie.bsky.social