Gunman Contracts Known Issues — Performance, Holsters & Bug Reports

Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone is six days into Early Access. That is early enough that the developer has published no patch notes yet, which makes an "official known issues list" impossible — there isn't one. What we can do instead is show you what players are actually reporting, how often, and which complaints are defects versus deliberate design.

Everything on this page is date-stamped, because an Early Access build changes under your feet.

Our rule for this page. We list a problem only if we can point at where it comes from — a developer statement or a countable pattern in player reports. We do not publish invented bug lists, and we do not publish a "fix" we cannot trace to the developer or to a reproducible player report. Where nobody has reported something, we say so.

Official status: nothing has been patched yet

As of September 16, 2026, the game's Steam news feed contains exactly two items, both published on launch day (September 10, 2026). One is the developer's launch announcement, the other is third-party press coverage. No patch notes, hotfix notes or update announcements have been published.

That means two things:

1. Every problem below is still open as far as the public record goes. If a problem you have is listed here, you are not missing a fix.
2. The developer's stated position is that launch feedback drives what happens next: "all the feedback I'm collecting with this launch will directly influence this next phase of development."

The official reporting channel is the game's Discord, which the developer calls "the best place to be a part of our Community". Steam's Community Hub is also monitored in most Early Access projects.

What players report most

We read a sample of 100 of the most recent English Steam reviews (captured September 16, 2026) and counted how many touch on each theme. This is a frequency count, not a severity ranking — a mention can be a complaint, a warning to others, or a passing note in an otherwise positive review.

How to read this table. The sample is recent English-language reviews only, and it is small — 100 out of roughly 1,200. Treat the proportions as "what is clearly a pattern" versus "what one person hit", not as measured rates. Non-English reviews, which are a large share of this game's audience, are not counted here at all.

The complaints in detail

1. Performance and stutter — by far the most common

Roughly one in four reviews raises this, and it is the dominant reason for negative reviews. The specific descriptions cluster tightly:

• Stutter when transitioning between combat arenas, rather than uniformly low frame rates.
• Stutter even on high-end hardware — players with strong GPUs report it and call it minor rather than fatal.
• Lag spikes plus hand drifting in VR, described by one player as making the game "almost unplayable".
• VR is the harder-hit mode. Almost every detailed performance complaint specifies VR; players who play flat-screen mostly describe the game as smooth.

2. Headset and controller tracking breaking down

A smaller number of reports describe tracking failure rather than low frame rate: the headset and controllers "freak out" regardless of settings, including at the lowest graphics preset. This is a different failure mode from problem 1 and worth separating when you report it — note your headset model and whether it reproduces.

3. An infinite loading screen

At least one reviewer reports being unable to get past an infinite loading screen at all. We have seen a single report of this, not a pattern — we are listing it because a hard blocker is worth knowing about, not because it is common.

4. Holster and weapon drawing

13 / 100. The most quoted line is blunt: "I frequently lose my guns." Players describe drawing and holstering as awkward relative to what they expect from modern VR shooters, and one long-time player calls the gun and holster mechanics their main issue with the game overall.

5. VR reload and the magazine

13 / 100. The recurring specific: the magazine catches in the air and needs a short forward-then-back motion to seat properly.

This one is a design choice, not a bug. Several players describe the reload as a chest-based system and dislike it — one calls it "probably the worst and most inconsistent feeling weapon reload mechanism I've ever experienced in VR". But the developer describes drawing magazines from your chest as intended VR behaviour, not a defect. You are entitled to dislike it; it is not broken, and filing it as a bug will not get it changed. This is exactly the kind of thing worth knowing before you report it.

6. Enemy AI behaviour

6 / 100. Three distinct complaints get repeated: enemies walk straight at you in a line instead of taking cover or flanking; enemies spawn on top of the player; and enemies aim at the floor while shooting, which makes threat assessment hard. Several reviewers compare the AI unfavourably to the original Half-Life: Alyx mods.

7. Two-handed weapons and the support hand

5 / 100. Long weapons are described as hard to control, with one player reporting that the support-hand zone is too small — meaning the controllers physically clash when trying to steady a rifle. Others describe hand and weapon smoothing making fast, snappy movement difficult.

Things that look like bugs but are not

This is the part that saves you time. Each of these is confirmed behaviour:

Before you report: a five-minute check

None of these will fix a systemic problem, but they are what the developer will ask you first:

1. Check your hardware against the published spec. The non-VR minimum is a GTX 1070; the VR recommendation is an RTX 3060 with 16 GB RAM. See the VR vs Non-VR page for the full lists.
2. Update your GPU driver. Worth doing before anything else on a game this new.
3. Verify your game files. Steam → right-click Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone → Properties → Installed Files → Verify integrity of game files.
4. Note which mode you were in. VR and flat screen behave differently here, and a report that omits this is much harder to act on.
5. Note your headset model if you were in VR.

How to report a bug so it can be acted on

The single most useful thing you can include is your mode plus your hardware, because most of the open complaints are VR-specific.

A report that can be reproduced usually contains:

• Mode: VR, flat screen, or Steam Deck.
• Hardware: headset model, GPU, CPU, RAM.
• Steps: what you did immediately before it went wrong.
• Expected vs actual: what should have happened, and what did.
• Reproducible? Every time, sometimes, or once.
• A clip or screenshot if you have one — for VR interaction problems this is worth more than a paragraph.

Post it in the official Discord (linked in the footer), or the Steam Community Hub.

What we will not put on this page

• A fabricated bug list. If we cannot trace a problem to a source, it does not appear here.
• Fixes we have not seen work. We will not tell you a setting solves a problem unless the developer says so or players consistently report it does.
• A stale list. Everything here is stamped September 16, 2026, six days after launch. Once the first patch notes land, this page gets rewritten rather than quietly updated.

Sources

• The game's Steam store page Early Access statement, for what is confirmed as intended behaviour.
• The game's Steam news feed, checked September 16, 2026 for patch notes (two items, both from launch day).
• The developer's launch announcement, "Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone" is LIVE! (September 10, 2026).
• Steam review sample: 100 most recent English-language reviews, captured September 16, 2026, out of roughly 1,200 total. Frequencies above are counts within that sample.

Related guides

• Early Access — what shipped, the 1.0 roadmap and the price schedule
• VR vs Non-VR — which mode to pick, and the published spec for each
• Stealth & Takedowns — the detection rules that people mistake for bugs
• Weapons & Gear — the reload and attachment systems explained