Gamers are always looking for the next level. A bigger sword, a more powerful gun, magic that turns your foes into globs of pink mush. But what about levelling up your gaming setup? A headset would always be my first call, and then maybe a pro controller or high end mouse, but what then?

Woojer have their own ideas on that, and they’ve been toting their haptic-infused devices for several years. While the Woojer Vest – now on its fourth generation – is the headline grabber, the Woojer Strap is the more accessible option, giving gamers and music lovers an extra layer of immersion by strapping a single device to your body, its haptics shocking, rumbling and thumping in time with the action.

Priced at £124 – with a healthy holiday season discount down to £95 – the Woojer Strap 4 is the latest iteration of the single-unit device. In the box, you’re getting the Woojer Strap 4 central unit, an elasticated strap to wrap around your body, a USB-C to USB-C charging cable, and a double-ended 3.5mm cable to physically connect your audio devices.

As gaming devices go, the Strap 4 is pretty straightforward. The unit itself has some weight to it and feels incredibly robust in your hand, crafted from solid plastic throughout, and available in a series of different colours. To the front, there’s a customisable LED ring with rubberised physical volume and intensity controls within it.

The top edge features the power button and Bluetooth pairing button, while the bottom includes a USB-C charging port and two 3.5mm audio sockets, one for input and the other as a dedicated output. I thought the older model’s copper finish looked great, but the addition of RGB allows the Strap 4 to match your gaming setup, and the extra layer of customisation gives you some individuality too. If you’re not an RGB fan? You can just turn it all off.

You’ll need a mobile device for the Strap 4 setup, and it proves pleasingly simple to connect the device to the Woojer app, where it takes you through pairing to your device, and then the secondary pairing of your headphones to the Strap 4. This all worked first time, which almost never happens, and you then find yourself with the main control page, which gives you an input and output display, as well as power remaining and the current latency setting, which you can alter if you find that the Strap 4’s haptic output doesn’t quite match up with whatever visuals you’re looking at.

Besides that, you can directly control the volume and the intensity, though there’s physical buttons for these as well, and, if needed, you can dive into the haptic sensation mode, which alters the behaviour of the haptics through Broad, Focused and Gaming settings.

The app also gives you decent control over the LED lights. There’s a full spectrum colour wheel to dial in the exact tone you want, adjust the brightness, and choose between a series of different effects to keep things interesting. While you’re playing, it’s not exactly something that adds all that much to the experience, but it’s certainly more futuristic, and if you’re out and about listening to music, you’ll certainly turn a few heads.

The Strap 4 experience is definitely easier to get into than the Woojer Vest. It’s small and portable, doesn’t take up much space, and requires minimal setup. You can just throw it on, and start watching, playing or listening to whatever you want, and I really liked how simple it felt. In turn, it immediately lifts your experience, with the added haptic feedback from your audio immersing you deeper in your content than ever before.

You can wear it in a variety of ways, though Woojer seem to recommend particular setups for particular input types, so for music you’d wear it around your waist, or horizontally while playing VR . Fundamentally, you can go for whatever feels best and most natural to you, and I gravitated most towards wearing it across my body, with the strap over one shoulder and the unit in the centre of my chest. This makes the haptic sensation fire directly into your chest, and explosions and heavy hits thump and rumble straight into you. Just like the rumble motors in a controller, it brings the action to life that bit further, and I find it hard to go back to playing without the extra layer it provides.

I loved using the Strap 4 for regular flat-screen gaming, listening to music and rewatching the most recent Star Trek movies, but VR is where it truly makes a major difference. With your senses cut off from the outside world, the rumble feels more nuanced and powerful, and whether you’re playing Beat Saber and throwing yourself directly into the music, or going for something more action-heavy like the new Deadpool VR, the Strap 4 brings a new level of immersion for a relatively low entry price.

While it can’t compare to the full experience you feel with the Woojer Vest, in terms of value for money, I think the Strap 4 hits the sweet spot between what it brings to your experience and the asking price. If you’ve already got a great headset, a pro controller, and a VR setup, the Strap 4 is practically a no-brainer as the next step in your gaming setup.

The only limitation, and this goes for all Woojer devices, is that this is a physical representation of audio output. That means your experience relies on how the audio is delivered, getting the levels right, and it will change on a game-by-game or song-by-song basis. It means there’s a certain degree of variation and inconsistency that some users might find disappointing, and hopefully Woojer can find a way to tap into the rumble and gamepad haptic signals in future. Once you’ve become accustomed to that abstraction, though, I still don’t think you’ll look back.

Sweet Surrender is a VR roguelike, and it comes with everything that label brings. You’ll be making your way through the environment picking off enemies, looking for weapons, cash, and upgrades, and swearing every time an enemy shaves off a bit of your health and you come closer to the end of a run. But it’s all in VR, and it’s cool throwing daggers that are somehow poisonous to robots. Oh yeah, everything is a robot – including you.

Originally launching in 2021 for Quest and PC VR, this PSVR 2 port has come after a bunch of upgrades and additions tot the game. There’s some great twists to the roguelike format and general gameplay, thanks to Sweet Surrender being in VR. The upgrades you can find throughout a level are chips that are fitted into slots by your wrists, for example, but the boosts they provide will only apply to the weapons in that hand, forcing you to really think about what upgrades you’re choosing and where you put them. A revolver that usually only shoots one, very powerful bullet before reloading on an arm with upgrades that triple its capacity and double its damage is a force to be reckoned with, but maybe something that heals you when you find cash would be smarter, to make up for the inevitable health loss.

The weapons themselves are mostly the standard fare – pistol, shotgun, SMG, and so on – but there are more interesting options, such as a katana that burns with plasma when you pull the trigger, or a spear that can shoot electricity. Melee weapons are particularly risky to use, as they force you to get into melee range, giving enemies a good opportunity to shoot you full of holes. Thankfully there are also a bunch of other items you can find, such as grenades, boosters that increase damage, and a holographic shield that feels pretty satisfying to use. At least, until you misjudge it and it runs out of energy in time for a bunch of bullets to the face.

When all this comes together the combat is pretty satisfying, rewarding accuracy for targeting weakspots on the various robot enemies. It’s fast and frenetic, and you can quickly lose a lot of health by getting surrounded. In classic shooter fashion, I found that the best way to fight is to find a bottleneck and take enemies out as they come into view. It does make you feel a bit like a robotic assassin, which is cool, but after a while the temptation to wade in with a plasma sword and a shield comes back because it’s more fun. It’s just that it’s more fun for less time, because you’ll die quicker.

Once you’ve had a few runs, Sweet Surrender starts to feel a bit limited and repetitive. You do have to expect repetition in a roguelike, but you will start to see the same rooms and layouts repeating themselves very quickly. The upgrades and weapons you find can also duplicate and repeat themselves within a run, so there’s limits to how far you can really extend your build.

It doesn’t help that this game has very little of the meta progression that has come to define run-based gaming in recent years – it’s a more classic rogulike than a modern roguelite. There are different classes to unlock – Medic, Grenadier, Sniper and Reaper – but there’s no overarching upgrades beyond that, and they don’t actually change the experience all that much beyond some boosts to certain types of damage or more healing. I’ve settled into building my character with one arm for shooting and the other for healing every single time I play, regardless of the class I’ve chosen. Beyond that, you can get shortcuts to let you skip areas, which is nice, but does mean you’re skipping past the items in those areas as well.

Then there are a bunch of immersion breakers and frustraters. Whilst implanting chips into your arm for your upgrades is cool, the experience of actually doing it is a bit of a pain. Just viewing the UI to see your current upgrades is fiddly, requiring a precise twist of your arm that can sometimes trigger in combat and get in the way. I’ve also found the controls to be very finicky for accessing hip holsters, shoulder holsters, and chest item storage. I’m constantly grabbing the wrong thing, including the rifle on your back when you’re trying to get the pistol from your hip, a good foot away from where your hand is.

There’s also a lot of dropping things, as the game doesn’t use the PSVR’s touch sensitive buttons, so you’re only holding an item if you’re specifically pressing the button properly. This becomes uncomfortable, but if you switch it to toggle it becomes nearly impossible to throw things properly, so you just have to live with it. Two handed guns like the assault rifle can be a bit awkward to aim down the sight on as there’s some jitter to the tracking, though you can just use them one handed like a pistol anyway.

Sweet Surrender does look pretty good, with a pseudo-cel shaded art style that allows explosions and things like electricity to stand out a bit. It’s not going to astonish you, but it suits the style of the game pretty well. There some nice attention to detail as well, such as there being an actual trigger on the plasma sword that is pulled when you trigger the plasma. The sound is decent as well, with the best bits being the gun sounds and the warning sounds of nearby traps. Again, nothing to amaze, but it does its job well enough.

I’ve been fascinated with headphones from an early age. My dad was a broadcast journalist and a real geek, filling our house with space-age tech like reel-to-reel players, condenser microphones, and CB radios. Most important, though, were the headphones. Huge, unwieldy things for my tiny head, they still opened my eyes – and ears – to just how good music could sound, and that fascination has stayed with me ever since.

So my interest was piqued by SIVGA’s latest, the Robin SV021, a closed-back, wired audiophile pair of over-ear headphones, which boast earcups crafted from wood. While they look genuinely beautiful, the sound they produce is even better.

Each of the Robin SV021’s earcups are handmade from Rosewood. If you want a pair of headphones that’s immediately different from the metal and black plastic-toting ones elsewhere, it’s a great place to start. Imprinted with the SIVGA logo, the external surface is perfectly smooth, and the wood carries a warmth and softness that plastic and metal simply can’t. I did worry about their durability, but after cramming the Robin into my bag on more than one occasion, they remained unblemished.

Elsewhere, the headband is wrapped in leather, with a thin slice of memory foam beneath it, while the frame, extenders and hinges are made from rigid, burnished metal. It’s all finished off by a pair of the plushest, softest ear cushions I’ve come across in a while, and they feel absolutely fantastic, moulding around your ears and providing a decent level of passive noise cancellation as well. The Robin SV021 look and feel utterly premium, and they definitely punch above their £150 price point.

Audio is handled by dual wiring to each earcup, with the two ends of the braided cable leading down to a single gold-plated 3.5mm jack. While the braided section is noise-free, the single cabling to each earcup will produce cable noise if rubbing against clothing, which does make it less appealing for listening while on the go.

That’s not its main draw, though. The Robin SV021 are reassuringly universal, and I’ve spent my time hopping between a MacBook, Nintendo Switch 2 and my PC. It has a relatively low impedance at 32 Ohms, and it performed well with every device I tried, with plenty of volume while retaining an excellent level of detail.

The SIVGA Robin SV021 sound excellent. The 50mm drivers are capable of moving plenty of air around, and there’s a wonderfully wide soundstage here, giving instrumentation and audio some real room to breathe. I’ve been playing a huge amount of Octopath Traveler 0 on its way to review, and the orchestral soundtrack has been delivered exquisitely by the Robin SV021, with that wider soundstage making it feel as though you’re experiencing a live recording.

They’re absolutely perfect for gaming, thanks to their lightweight design and ultra-soft ear cushions. I was able to wear them for hours, and they may well be the most comfortable headphones I’ve reviewed this year.

Checking in with my music collection, I loved how enveloping Gunship’s Tech Noir sounded, with the throbbing synth tones delivered with an exacting level of detail. The intro’s sci-fi spoken word sits clearly apart from the ominous notes beneath, while the bass response is excellent, with plenty of warmth and clarity. The Robin SV021 are certainly warmer-sounding rather than clinical, and they’re easy to live with across a range of different genres and content types. Crucially, they make you want to listen to music.

At £150, the Robin SV021 are aimed at the mid-range audiophile who’s looking for something a little different. Despite their closed-back design, they boast a wide soundstage, and their well-balanced tuning provides a hugely enjoyable listening experience no matter what you’re using them for.