Pistol Whip’s free Wild-West-themed story campaign Smoke & Thunder arrives next week • Eurogamer.net

Pistol Whip, developer Cloudhead Games’ acclaimed VR rhythm FPS, will be saddling up and setting forth for some Wild West adventure when its free Smoke & Thunder story expansion update arrives for Oculus Quest, PSVR, and PCVR next Thursday, 12th August.

Smoke & Thunder – which will be Pistol Whip’s second post-launch story campaign following last year’s retro-futuristic 2089 – tells the story of two sisters in a Wild West “where trains, tech, and explosions set the scene for some exciting surprises”. It features five new stages (each with its own new music track) plus new weapons, mechanics, enemies, and a boss fight.

Smoke & Thunder will be made available to all existing Pistol Whip owners in a free update that also includes an extensive new customisation system known as Styles.

This lets players group together their choice of modifiers and a weapon type to create a preset Style that can be used to remix any of the game’s scenes, with the goal being to massively increase replayability. Each new Style will generate its own leaderboard, and there’ll be prominent Featured Styles with leaderboards for competitive players to scale.

Cloudhead has announced it’ll be raising the price of Pistol Whip shortly after the new expansion’s release to “support the creation of epic content and updates”. From Sunday 15th August, it will cost an additional $5 USD, bringing the price up to $29.99 USD on all platforms.