Sanlaki design and develop low-cost and easy-to-use 3D printed products to help enhance your virtual reality experiences. Through accessories such as Ping Pong bats, Golf Clubs and mini magnetic gunstocks and grip stocks: Sanlaki strive to deliver the best quality product to augment your needs.

I remember, as a child, holding the SNES Super Scope over my shoulders and feeling an insane level of exhilaration that no kid in 1992 could believe. Prior to the Scope I had only briefly experienced the NES Zapper and Duck Hunt, but I knew at a very early age that gun games were definitely on my horizon and I hoped they would only get better in the future.

Come February 24th 2023, and the PSVR2 gets delivered to my house along with a MASSIVE sense of wonder, and a flagrant disregard for money when buying new games. First on my list was Pavlov, and as many of you may know there is a strong learning curve thanks to the realistic nature of reloading, and the sheer immersion it provides in the heat of battle.

Fast forward approximately six weeks later and I have been hammering Pavlov regularly with no sign of letting up, but throughout my play I was constantly wondering "can this be enhanced with peripherals?". Sanlaki has kindly sent through their Elite VR gunstock for PSVR2 for me to test out and I have definitely put it through its paces.

Adjustable, Adaptable, Completely Refined

The product comes disassembled in a box containing a QR code that leads to assembly instructions, and various adaptors and interchangeable parts to stylise your set-up. Along with the extendable (B5) butt, the main (S4) pistol grip element and the flash muzzle, you also get a built-in cheek rest in the butt stock a (D1) rotational blocker, a rail mountable red dot sight, material strap, a double magnet mount for your foregrip and a magnetic mount for your trigger finger. You can specify on the site which hand is your dominant hand.

Starting off with the materials: Sanlaki use 3D-printed plastics with metal poles along with M5 thumb screws with recessed nuts to bolt it onto your Sense VR controllers. The finish is not the sleekest and you can see each individual line, perfect or otherwise, the printer has made, but it's built to be rock solid. The attachment of the controller to the magnetic mounts is perfectly sculpted to fit exactly on the far outer edge of each Sense controller, and a couple of sticky pads are also provided to help solidify the placement, and avoid wear and tear against your newly purchased white VR controllers.

Screwing the poles into the stock and grip, and attaching all the component parts is quick, easy and very satisfying. It's like you're assembling your own rifle, like a stealthy hitman, and when you're putting it away, it feels like you're tearing down a real rifle ready to stow it away in an attache case or something equally tactical. Be careful not to over-tighten any of the parts because invariably this plastic is not invincible, just tighten enough that nothing feels loose, that's enough.

If you are over 6ft in height it is possible to use the longer of the two poles as the butt stock pole, and the shorter as the barrel, however, this means that you cannot use the anti-rollover piece as it is designed for the longer of the two poles. You can also adjust the cheek rest to enable you to have a full four solid points of contact with the gunstock, and the material strap takes the full weight of the peripherals across your shoulders and prevents you from dropping it mid-game.

A Learning Curve To Pick Up, Hard To Put Down!

In Pavlov, you can enable virtual gunstock (Vstock) in the settings options, and you will need to enable this with the Sanlaki. The offset this provides means that having the physical stock in your hands directly relates to what you see and feel in-game. If you don't enable it you will see your arms flailing around in front of you, disconnected to the sensation of the device you have in hand. Virtual stock changes the way your weapon moves with the front hand controlling only direction, and the rear hand controlling only height, so you CAN still blind fire if you get caught up in some serious heat.

The standard barrel tubing is long enough that you can position the magnet either closer to the trigger for SMG's or further out for holding more substantial rifles. The dual magnet set-up also means that you can twist your grip hand 90 degrees outward from a perpendicular stance and grip it in parallel to the tubing as if holding a pump-action shotgun/sniper rifle forestock.

When reloading you have to roll the magnet off the pole in order to detach it. If you attempt to directly pull the magnet off you will damage the equipment, so learning the correct technique is key to keeping your gunstock nicer for longer. Sliding the magnet up the barrel to reload shotguns also caused a little friction on the pole and thus a little scuffing along it, but I guess it depends on which weapons you specialise in in-game, as to how you will put wear on the Sanlaki. I personally opted for assault rifles and sniper rifles, so I had minimal wear from any pump action compared to those that singularly use shotguns for CQB 24/7.

Thanks to the anti-rollover there is no chance of losing your orientation or the gun twisting in your hands. A perfect example of this is when reloading a sniper rifle. You need to remove the trigger grip from the body by physically rolling the magnet off, slide the bolt action receiver open, reach to your hip for ammunition, insert it into the chamber, slide back the bolt ready to fire, and then clipping the magnet back on. Though there is a small area in which you can re-clip that trigger grip magnet, with practice, you will get used to it and get faster. You are advised to practice these actions to build muscle memory without your VR headset on before entering into VR and struggling to reload when the action gets frantic.

I found myself playing Pavlov longer than usual with the Sanlaki attachment. I normally just have a couple of games of TDM or GUN, but I pushed myself to mould my play to this peripheral. I found myself playing Infection and GUN a lot more and for longer, swapping my grip and reload method frequently in GUN mode and removing the gunstock altogether, throwing it over my shoulder, and using the gauntlets as the monster in Infection mode. The magnets are strong enough to hold it in front of you whilst reaching for ammo, and when supplemented by the strap over the shoulder and the butt stock against your chest: you have complete stability.

While it is heavy having to hold this device up for long periods of time, again, you get used to it by putting in the hours. The Sanlaki gunstock in its current form is AMAZING, but it is not really ideal for casual gamers, it's perfectly suited for those who want to drill down into their favourite games and get more out of them, like me!

A Solid, Recommendable Product, But A Few Small Issues

There are two main issues I have with the Sanlaki as it stands, and honestly, both could be resolved with just one slight change.

Firstly, where the clamps screw onto the controller's IR LED ring, though they are positioned as far as possible to the outer edges, my index finders knuckle continually touched the clamp edge and caused quite a sore divot in my skin. I tried to adjust my grip and mitigate this, however, my natural grip on the controller kept causing me to encounter this issue. While it may not be a problem for people with alternate-sized hands or people who hold the controllers slightly less loosely, perhaps.

Secondly, with the clamps on you cannot physically dock your controllers to the official PSVR2 Sense Controller Charging Station. Again this is a minor issue, however, the act of repeatedly screwing and unscrewing the clamps in order to put them on charge means you will put additional wear and tear on those screws and joints, and potentially damage them. Sure you could use a USB-C cable to charge them, but then you would need two cables or a Y-cable, and you wouldn't be able to use your incredibly convenient, freshly purchased charging station.

My singular solution would be to secure the clamps, with protective sticky tabs, dead centre above the analogue sticks, far out of the way of your trigger finger knuckles, and entirely clear of the area needed to contact the charging station. This might not be the most secure location for the clamp, as currently they clap into outer the edge of the controller's side and don't have the possibility to slide about but they impinge on my anatomy.

With this solution, I believe that you could leave them on permanently, play all other games, charge your controllers and enjoy them more quickly. Perhaps a middle ground can be found?

Overall the Sanlaki Elite is a good step up from the base models, by providing more comfort, more refined control and higher revision parts. With a cost of $149.99 it's not cheap, but the quality of design, the stability of parts, and the adaptability that is bundled into this: it's a fantastic and easily recommendable product to enhance your VR conquests.

Perhaps Sanlaki will produce a revised version with modified or alternate connectors, or even a sleek version of this for PSVR2 that is lighter weight, provides more headset clearance, cheaper and more refined, as they have for the Quest 2: I certainly look forward to see what they do next!