I have this game and at the time I remember being into these vertical scrolling games. One of my favorites of all time was an unlicensed NES game called Galactic Crusader. I struggle to find many people that have even heard of it... anyway I remember hoping Vertical Force would be just as fun but also 3D and being let down by the 'VR' part of it. As you mentioned, it just didn't make good use of what the hardware could do. As you can imagine, I didn't play it a whole lot.