Metro Awakening brings the post-apocalyptic tunnel-dwelling franchise to VR for the first time, but is it a good fit? Read on to find out in our full review.

Metro Awakening Details:

Publisher: Vertigo Games
Available On: Quest, PC VR, PSVR 2
Reviewed On: Quest 3
Release Date: November 7th, 2024
Price: $50

Editor’s note: all clips in this review are from the Quest 3 version of the game. Screenshots are from the PC VR version.

Gameplay

Developer Vertigo Games did a fine job of making Metro Awakening feel like a Metro game, but in VR. Although not nearly as broad in scope as the most recent title in the franchise, Metro Exodus (2019), it captures many of the series’ staples: a gritty, post-apocalyptic setting, interesting improvised weaponry, and a gameplay loop based around the pillars of scavenging, sneaking, and shooting.

The game’s weapons and shooting mechanics are its strengths. You start with a fairly basic pistol and AK-47. I particularly like that enemies stagger visibly when taking shots, making the impact of shooting feel much better than the more often seen bullet-sponge enemies. You’re pretty vulnerable yourself, and will find that squeezing off a few AK rounds into a bad guy and then taking cover is more effective than just standing out in the open. Gun fights feel scrappy rather than bombastic.

Later in the game you find a crossbow and a shotgun. While these weapon archetypes have been seen a hundred times before in VR, these two feel right at home among the uniquely cool makeshift weaponry the Metro series is known for.

The crossbow is a revolver with a pop-out cylinder into which you slide sharp metal rods. Cocking the crossbow requires pulling back a huge lever on top. Because of the weapon’s barebones construction, can watch exactly how the mechanism articulates to lift one of the bolts into position. And dang, it’s sure cool to see.

Like any good crossbow, this thing is quiet. And there’s an absolute satisfaction with not only dropping someone silently from the shadows, but then pulling the bolt from your victim, popping out the crossbow’s revolver-style cylinder, and sliding it right back in for the next shot. Retrievable ammo weapons in games always have that extra layer of fun, but there’s something especially unique about doing this in VR when it’s your own hands removing and reloading the bolts.

The next weapon, the shotgun, is for when you’re ready to go loud. Surprisingly, this one isn’t pump action, but it has a unique design all its own that makes it a standout. And you may know that I have a pretty high bar for what constitutes a great feeling shotgun in VR.

The shotgun in Metro Awakening is actually a revolver like the crossbow. But, interestingly, it has an exposed cylinder, which means you can pop shells into any open slot before pulling the charging handle to load a round. Again, the skeletal, makeshift construction of the weapon means you can really see how it operates, which is just extra cool in VR because you can inspect and articulate your gun however you want (rather than being stuck looking at canned animations).

The game’s final weapon is the blowdart gun, and while I love the idea of physically raising it to your mouth to fire, it doesn’t feel like it fits well with the rest of the game’s weapons. Not only does it feel like an inferior version of the crossbow, it’s just less fun and less satisfying to use.

All things considered, the game’s weapons have a great feel—especially the crossbow and shotgun—even if there are only four primary weapons to be found overall.

Scavenging also feels good. The detailed environments generally give me enough to look at to enjoy peeking around corners and down hallways to see if I can spot some extra supplies.

Scavenging goes hand-in-hand with being prepared, which is a must in Metro Awakening. If you jump into a fight without making sure your mags are loaded, knowing which weapons are equipped, and being able to operate your weapons confidently under pressure, you’ll get overwhelmed and overrun quickly.

I enjoyed the feeling of the scavenging and emphasis on preparedness. I found myself regularly picking magazines off of dispatched weapons to steal the ammo, making sure my health syringe was prepared, and pre-selecting my shoulder-slung weapon depending upon which enemies I expected to encounter.

Rather than just finding extra supplies, some kind of ‘currency’ (ie: ‘weapon parts’) that could be applied to upgrade your weapons would have made for a more exciting scavenging reward, and would have fit well into Metro gameplay tropes.

Though there were ample opportunities to fight stealthily instead of going in guns-ablazin’, I didn’t find the stealth opportunities particularly exciting. Knocking people out with a punch to the head doesn’t feel very satisfying, and it seemed to backfire in many cases, with the bad guy just being confused for a moment before blasting.

Enemy AI was good at least, which keeps combat interesting. The enemies frequently communicate and move around the environment, giving them a sense of intelligence. Some enemies, like the rat mutants, can be a bit annoying because they sometimes come up behind you with little time to react to their presence.

But I do appreciate their behaviors like running away after taking some initial damage and peering around corners before popping out for a bite.

The game has a literal arachnophobia warning at the start, and for good reason. There are several sequences with spider enemies, including times where spiders are literally crawling on your head. I appreciate the creepiness of these moments, but found the actual combat with these enemies more annoying than not. Spiders can leap onto your face or hand, and it isn’t exactly clear what the player is supposed to do about it. I imagine a lot of people will end up smacking their headset once or twice while trying to pull the spider off.

Another annoying enemy were the game’s frequent ‘shadow’ figures which made for some boring and poorly telegraphed gameplay. The figures, which blend quite well into the game’s dark tunnels, will kill you if you stand near them for a few seconds. But given they’re hard to see, and that taking damage from them makes your screen even darker, it’s sometimes hard to tell when you’re even being hurt by them. Oh and there’s friendly shadows that look almost the same, but don’t do damage to you….

Even after beating the game, I’m still kind of unsure exactly what was intended with this ‘shadow figure’ gameplay. Waiting for an NPC to move out of the way so you can get to where you’re going just isn’t fun. Maybe there was some way to dispel them? Shooting certainly didn’t do the trick.

While Metro Awakening has strong VR fundamentals and a compelling first half, the latter half of the game unfortunately lacks the variety for a strong finish. From a story that’s nebulous and difficult to care about, to repeating gameplay sequences that aren’t particularly fun on your fourth or fifth go, to just a lot of needless walking, it felt like a great first half of the game gave way to a padded and uninspired second half.

It took me 7.5 hours to finish the game on medium difficulty, but I would have been happy if they had cut out some of the repetitive gameplay segments for a tighter and overall more fun experience.

Immersion

Metro Awakening isn’t high up there in environmental interactivity, but it does have a great sense of atmosphere. Environments are detailed, decrepit, and feel authentic in the way that much of the world looks like it’s been cobbled together from the remnants of a fallen society.

Although the game looks significantly better in its PC and PSVR 2 version (thanks to better textures, models, and much better lighting), I was generally impressed with the visual presentation on Quest 3. Although not as well lit or textured, environments felt equally dense on Quest 3, without any obvious cases of assets being carelessly crushed to meet the performance budget. The game relies heavily on Meta’s Application Spacewarp tech to run as well as it does on the standalone headset—bringing with it some artifacts—but generally I think it’s a good trade for how the game looks on Quest 3. I haven’t had a chance to test Metro Awakening on Quest 2 yet, so the verdict is still out on that.

For better or for worse, the inherent claustrophobia of being stuck in an abandoned metro really lands in a VR headset. Walking through the game’s labyrinthine tunnels and hallways makes you feel like there’s nowhere to run and that every corner could be hiding a threat. Consistently good ambient sound design helps to sell the game’s well measured tension. Though I didn’t appreciate how the game’s music would frequently kick in and spoil an upcoming encounter that would have otherwise been surprising.

I personally enjoyed getting immersed in this tense atmosphere, but some might find it oppressive.

Although the game’s holster system generally works quite well, the complete lack of a body or any indicators as to the location of the inventory volumes are felt like a miss for a VR game of this scope in 2024. All you see is floating hands… it’s up to you to remember where all the invisible inventory locations are. In the midst of combat, for instance, if you can’t remember exactly how to pull out your weapon backpack (reach over your left shoulder with your right hand), you’re going to be scrambling.

Although the affordances for the inventory system aren’t great, I did appreciate the usability. I haven’t seen a VR game use the gesture of ‘reach with your right hand over the opposite shoulder’ before, but it seemed like the game did a great job of detecting this consistently with few false positives.

I also liked the diegetic inventory design. Basically you have two backpacks: one for guns and one for other equipment like grenades, gas mask, and health vials. In both cases, items are generally represented on your backpacks at full size and their actual count, rather than shrinking unrealistically and ‘stacking’ into infinite piles. So if you have three grenades, you’ll see three full-sized grenades on your backpack. And you can’t fit any more, because there’s only enough room for three.

This makes for an immersive way to not only communicate to the player how many supplies they have, but also an immersive way for players to actually retrieve the items. I also like that the game will give the player key items contextually from the chest inventory slot. If you’re holding a pistol and reach to your chest, you’ll pull out a pistol magazine. If you’re holding the health syringe and reach to your chest, you’ll pull out a fresh health vial. It feels very natural in practice and minimizes the cognitive load of frequent actions like reloading—a smart design that also worked great in Half-Life: Alyx (2020).

As a general framework for VR game inventory, this one has legs.

While the game’s atmosphere is compelling, I did find myself wishing there was more environmental interactivity. This is one of those games where some objects are interactive and some just… aren’t, with little rhyme or reason between what you can pick up and what you can’t. Even if there wasn’t any extra gameplay associated with making more of the world’s objects interactive, there’s so much detail visually in the world that it would add to the immersion to know that I could actually grab and look at all the things scattered about.

Comfort

Metro Awakening offers a full set of modern VR comfort options, including teleport movement. However, its particular choice of setting—cramped environments and quite a few steep stairs—is going to be less comfortable to those sensitive to motion discomfort than an equivalent game with more open environments and less frequent stair motion.

There are several moments in the game where the horizon is shifted significantly. For most, these are brief enough to not be problematic, but such moments can be triggering for certain people (and generally speaking, they could have been executed without altering the horizon).

Metro Awakening’ Comfort Settings – November 7th, 2024
Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages	English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish (Latin America), Czech, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian
Dialogue audio
Languages	English
Adjustable difficulty
Two hands required
Real crouch required
Hearing required
Adjustable player height

Nature Relaxation

Ocean Rift (Quest, PC VR) – $10

Ocean Rift is like an aquarium where you get to swim around with the fish. You’ll get to see lovingly animated sea creatures up close and you might even learn a thing or two with more than 40 narrated points of interest to find. And if you’re on Quest 3, Ocean Rift has a mixed reality mode that lets you turn your own room into an aquarium.

Real VR Fishing (Quest) – $20

You can probably guess what this one is about… but you might not expect that the app has some rather beautiful environments. So yes, you’ll be fishing and you can take it as fast or as slow as you’d like. Consider putting on some music or even a podcast while you relax and wait for the big one. Real VR Fishing also supports multiplayer so you can fish with friends.

Google Earth VR (PC VR) – Free

Google Earth VR is exactly what it sounds like… its Google Earth, but in VR. Beyond being able to explore essentially the entire globe as if you were a giant towering over it, the app can also be a wonderful way to relax. Find yourself a pretty place (there’s some great ones in the ‘Featured’ section inside the app), bring yourself down to ground level, and simply sit as a giant and take in the scene around you. You can even set the mood by adjusting the time of day. It can also be magical to just ‘wander’ starting from a familiar place and see where you wind up. Considering both the quality of the experience and the fact that its free, this one is an absolute must-try.

EarthQuest (Quest) – $10

EarthQuest aims to not only bring the Google Earth VR experience to Quest, but modernize it too. EarthQuest adds multiplayer so you can explore the globe with friends as well as natural language input allowing you to ask ChatGPT to tell you more about the things you find.

Musical Relaxation

Tetris Effect: Connected (Quest, PC VR, PSVR 2) – $30, $40

Tetris Effect is classic Tetris gameplay wrapped in an audio-visual experience which uniquely accompanies each of the game’s levels. As you maneuver the blocks you’ll hear sounds that fit into the beat. Don’t lose yourself too much in the sights and sounds though as some of the levels will take skill and practice to complete, even on ‘Normal’ difficulty. A post-launch update to the game has brought cross-platform multiplayer to Tetris Effect so you can vibe with friends no matter if they’re playing in VR or on a flat screen.

Sheaf – Together EP (SteamVR) – Free

Ever wish you could cruise down an endless highway, watching as the trees, buildings, and city streets pass you by while a synthwave soundtrack perfectly fits the vibe? Artist and musician Sheaf has created just that—a short VR experience which is hand-crafted to fit a three track synthwave album. For the great price of free, this one is a no-brainer.

Creation & Puzzling

Squingle Mini (Quest, $1) & Squingle (PC VR, $15)

Squingle is one of those games that you can look at and still not entirely understand what you’re actually seeing. But once you get your hands on the game all becomes clear: it’s a clever, trippy, and fun puzzle game that plays to VR’s spatial strengths. To put it simply, the goal of Squingle is to guide a pair of spinning balls through a pipe. Sounds easy enough, right? Well like any good puzzle game, Squingle starts simply enough but introduces more difficult concepts as you go—like a button that reverses the spin of the balls or one that changes the axis of the spin. And the pipe? It’s actually a bit more like a cosmic bowel that undulates with twists, turns, and parallel tunnels.

Read Our Hands-on

Puzzling Places (Quest, PSVR 2*) – $15, $20 (*free demo)

Puzzling Places is a series of 3D puzzles made out of 3D scans of real-life places. Going from flat jigsaw puzzles to 3D puzzles will stretch your brain in satisfying new ways as you use all your 2D jigsaw strategies (like sorting by color, edges, and the like) while leaning into your spatial reasoning sense to find the right connections between pieces. Even more satisfying—when you’re done you have a tiny 3D diorama to explore! Since launch, Puzzling Places has been updated with a multiplayer mode so you can relax and puzzle with friends, and mixed reality mode on Quest 3 so you can solve puzzles right in your room.

*Free Puzzling Places demo on PSVR 2

Vermillion (Quest, PC VR) – $20

Vermillion is a free-form painting app designed to replicate the oil medium. You can do everything from basic paint-by-number to completely freestyle painting with color mixing and the use of various brushes to achieve different effects. With a multiplayer mode up to four players total can paint together. You can also paint in your own space thanks to mixed reality on Quest 3, or even do co-located painting with a friend so you’re both painting in the same physical room.

Gadgeteer (Quest, PC VR) – $15

Have you ever wished you had a whole room and a box full of tracks, balls, and dominos to build the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine? You’re in luck. Gadgeteer will let you finally imagine your childhood dream of filling an entire room with a crazy chain-reaction-machine without the cat knocking everything over. Beyond being able to build whatever you want in ‘Sandbox Mode’, Gadgeteer is a full fledged puzzle game with 60 puzzles to complete and a pleasant soundtrack to boot.

Read Our Review

Cubism (Quest, PC VR) – $10

Cubism is a casual VR puzzle that plays a bit like a 3D version of Tetris. Its sleek, casual design makes it great for relaxing seated play. But fear not, while the puzzle concept is simple, Cubism will have you scratching your head in short order as difficulty increases across 60 stages. The bright, void-like environment makes it easy to forget about the woes of the real world as you focus on finding the right fit for the pieces before you to the backdrop of a beautiful piano soundtrack. Thanks to hand-tracking support, you can even play without needing to pick up your controllers. A post-launch update has added a mixed reality mode on Quest 3 so you can solve puzzles from the comfort of your own room.

Vrkshop (PC VR) – $20

Vrkshop describes itself as a “VR woodworking game” and aims to recreate a hands-on woodshop where you can measure, mark, cut, nail, and much more. With a realistic wood-cutting system, the app challenges you to use the tools at your disposal to create furniture and other objects with no explicit instructions.

Color Space (Quest) – $10

Color Space is a virtual reality coloring book where you get to bring life to a full 3D scene rather than just a flat page. Step into one of 26 environments and start adding color as you see fit. As you color the scene, it will start to come alive with animated elements and ambient sounds.

Musical Creation

Electronauts (Quest, PC VR) – $20

Electronauts is like a VR DJ station with training wheels. Though you can take the training wheels off if you’re especially talented, the training wheels are actually part of the appeal; Electronauts does an incredible job of letting you express your inner musical creativity even if you don’t have instrumental talent. The game serves up some 80 tracks, each which function as a custom sound-kit with unique instruments, backing tracks, and more. And as a huge bonus, PC VR version of the game are multiplayer, meaning you can jam out with a friend. The track list is heavy on the EDM side (though there are some chill songs to be found) so if that’s not your cup of tea you might want to look elsewhere.

Read Our Review

Drops: Rhythm Garden (PC VR) – $7

Drops is a musically focused experience where shapes that you place make different sounds when struck with falling balls. With an endless flow of balls, you can construct a cacophony of sounds on the fly, adding new shapes and creating new paths as you go. Think of it like a Rube Goldberg machine, but for making minimal, meditative music.

Continue on Page 2: Meditation, Reflection, Mindfulness, and Exploration »

Meta continues its reign as the XR industry’s dominant player, with its most recent moves signaling a shift into a new era for the company—and thus the industry at large. This year saw the introduction of the Meta Orion AR glasses prototype and the Quest 3S headset—two pieces of hardware that are not only crucial to Meta’s future but will be pivotal in shaping the industry’s direction as a whole.

Meta Orion AR Glasses Are a Flag in the Ground

The News

One of Meta’s most significant announcements this year was the unveiling of the Meta Orion AR glasses prototype. Meta has long been signaling its ambitions in the AR space, and the Meta Orion prototype represents a major step toward that vision. With a compact form-factor and an impressive 70-degree field of view, Meta is aiming to push the boundaries of what AR hardware can achieve.

Why It Matters

Meta’s Orion AR glasses stand as a benchmark for the state-of-the-art in AR glasses today. Unlike similarly sized AR devices—which suffer from a narrow field-of-view that make content appear constrained—Meta Orion’s 70-degree FoV is just scraping the boundary of ‘wide enough to be useful’. Achieving a compact form-factor and a wide field-of-view in the same package is crucial for making AR feel more seamless and practical in daily use.

It will be years yet before Meta ships something like Orion, but it’s an intentional ‘flag in the ground’ moment for the company.

Quest 3S Speeds the Transition Away from Quest 2

The News

Meta launched Quest 3S, a new addition to the Quest lineup that really should have launched alongside Quest 3 in the first place. Positioned as a more budget-friendly alternative to the flagship Quest 3, the Quest 3S comes with a lower price point but still offers significant improvements in performance and mixed reality capabilities compared to older devices like the Quest 2.

Why It Matters

In its marketing, Meta has been hyping mixed reality for years at this point. But the large population of Quest 2 headsets (which really aren’t great for MR) have undercut the company’s push into MR.

The Quest 3S is finally a new headset from Meta that’s comparable to what Quest 2 was in terms of affordability, while including reasonably good MR capabilities too.

With the Quest 2 becoming increasingly outdated, users and developers alike have been waiting for hardware that can keep up with more demanding VR experiences. The Quest 3S hits the sweet spot for many casual users, offering a balance between affordability and performance.

And finally Meta has a flagship game for its Quest 3 & Quest 3S hardware. Batman: Arkham Shadow (which is exclusive to these newer headsets), is just the thing to get VR gamers that are hanging on to Quest 2 to make the leap to newer hardware.

Ironically, the flagship game for these new “mixed reality” headsets (as Meta now usually refers to them) is a pure VR game. Maybe with the next headset launch the company can properly time a flagship MR app with its launch.

More Immersive and Useful Mixed Reality Apps

The News

This year Meta revealed that it will now grant developers access to camera data for creating mixed reality (MR) content. This change opens up new possibilities for how MR experiences are built and how users can interact with their environments through these experiences.

Why It Matters

For years Meta has held out on giving developers direct access to the headset’s cameras. That made it harder for developers to build interesting MR applications that properly integrate and interact with the world around the user.

In addition to Quest 3S helping to grow the population of Quest headsets with decent MR capabilities, this change also makes building MR applications a more attractive proposition for developers.

Ostensibly Meta had originally blocked direct camera access to preserve user privacy and prevent potential abuse by bad actors. Reversing that decision is risky; another privacy scandal is the last thing Meta wants its headsets to be known for.

New Tools for Developers to Bring ‘Spatial Computing’ to Quest

The News

This year Meta also introduced new tools to make it easier for developers to port both flat-screen and spatial computing applications to Quest devices. These tools are designed to streamline the development process, enabling developers to create more immersive XR content without requiring a steep learning curve.

Why It Matters

Meta’s headsets are great for gaming, but it wants them to be great at ‘spatial computing’ too. But getting developers to bring traditional apps to its platform has been a major hurdle for the company.

One of the biggest challenges traditional app developers face is moving from a flat screen modality to something that inherently exists in 3D. This generally requires a completely different set of tools that’s much more in the realm of game development than app development.

Meta’s new tools aim to simplify this process, allowing developers who are familiar with building flat-screen applications to bring their apps to the Horizon platform with minimal friction. This opens up the Quest platform to a wider range of applications, from 2D games and productivity tools to more immersive spatial experiences.

But Meta still faces an uphill battle with getting a critical mass of everyday apps onto its headset. The company has openly said it would love to bring the Play store (and all of its apps) to the headset, but it seems Google isn’t down to play ball. That’s likely because it’s busy working on its own XR strategy and doesn’t want to give Meta an upper hand.

New Headsets on the Horizon

The News

In a surprising move this year, Meta announced that it was planning to open up the Horizon OS to select partners who will make their own headsets that run the operating system.

Why it Matters

While Meta has made solid general-purpose headsets, the company believes the time is right for more specialized options. But rather than build those options itself, the company is enlisting help from companies that are already familiar with building hardware for someone else’s software.

While this could bring a wider range of headsets to market which retain access to Meta’s leading platform of content, the move shares a striking resemblance to Microsoft’s ill-fated VR play which enlisted major computer OEMs to build a round of VR headsets and then quickly lose interest.

Because Meta owns the Horizon platform, and subsidizes the cost of its own headsets, it’s difficult to understand how announced partners like Asus and Lenovo could hope to build a headset that’s meaningfully better than what Meta is already offering and compete with Meta on price. This has clearly been a struggle for HTC Vive which doesn’t have the money to burn to subsidize its hardware like Meta.

Meta may have already run into trouble with its announced partner LG, which was set to collaborate with Meta on a Horizon OS headset, but reportedly had second thoughts just weeks later.

– – — – –

Meta’s ability to burn billions in its pursuit of owning the XR space (or the “next computing platform” as Zuckerberg often calls it) means the company is the one primarily steering the ship. The moves Meta made this year are the beginning of a new era for the company (while most of the industry remains in tow).

While Apple’s entry into the space has already had notable influence on Meta’s XR trajectory, it won’t be until both companies are competing in the same price-class (and for the same users) that Meta will have to truly fight to maintain control of XR’s near-term future.

Batman: Arkham Shadow stays true to the series formula, but did developer Camouflaj manage to make the game feel truly at home in VR? Read our full review to find out.

Batman: Arkham Shadow Details:

Publisher: Oculus Studios
Developer: Camouflaj
Available On: Meta Horizon (exclusive to Quest 3 & Quest 3S)
Reviewed On: Quest 3
Release Date: October 21st, 2024
Price: $50

Gameplay

Batman: Arkham Shadow is a lot like Half-Life: Alyx. No, not in the gameplay. Or the story. Or the graphics.

It’s a lot like Half-Life: Alyx in the way that the creators managed to completely reimagine how the game actually works, without losing the essence of the series.

For some context: I’m not the world’s biggest ‘Batman’ fan. I’d say I’m a casual enjoyer. I liked the Christopher Nolan trilogy and I enjoyed the Arkham games (though I’ve only played two of the four main line titles). I’ve never read any of the comics, nor do I own a single piece of Batman-related paraphernalia.

Even so, just like the Arkham games I played before it, Batman: Arkham Shadow is a fun game.

And it feels like an Arkham game. The gameplay primarily falls into the buckets of exploration, light puzzling, and combat, and all are done pretty successfully. Let’s start with exploration and puzzling.

Although you don’t have a whole city to roam like in Arkham City, the game does a reasonably good job of having expansive and connected spaces that feel convincingly large. It’s much closer to Arkham Asylum in that sense; for the most part you’re roaming a ‘facility’ sized space.

Aside from just walking around the ground, you’ll also use your grapnel gun which you can use to quickly ascend to balconies and other high places that are great for staying out of sight. Although I would have liked to see a more immersive approach to how the grapnel gun is actually initiated (simply looking at a target and press A doesn’t feel as immersive as it could), the unique way it pulls you through the air feels both fun and surprisingly comfortable.

Another important traversal tool is gliding with your cape, which also feels fun and surprisingly comfortable. As it’s initiated with an immersive gesture (grabbing your cape and pulling your arms up), it feels cool every time you do it. This is aided by the smart detail of seeing the shadow of your outstretched cape cast onto the ground below where you’re flying.

As you’re moving through the game world, there’s at least five different kinds of collectibles to find, most of which unlock some bits of lore. While I normally don’t care about ‘collectibles’ (or off-screen lore), I enjoyed hunting these down because each was either hidden in a clever place that was fun to find, or locked behind a little puzzle. Although the puzzles are light, they’re just the right amount of bite-sized engagement to keep you entertained on your way to primary objectives. For the ‘100%’ people out there, I think you’ll enjoy the hunt.

Part of the puzzling is just figuring out how to get from A to B. You’ll often need to search for ways around obstacles, whether they be locked doors or electrified floors. Sometimes the solution is finding another path, and sometimes it’s figuring out how to unblock the door in front of you.

There’s no major headscratchers—or highly memorable puzzles for that matter—but the game hits a perfect sweet spot of difficulty where you spend 30 seconds or less understanding the logic, and then actually solving the puzzle involves some fun itself (whether that be throwing batarangs to hit buttons, pulling levers at the right time, or using one of your other gadgets to assist the process).

Next we’ve got combat, which plays like a beat-em-up as only VR could do it. The game cleverly uses your punches as your primary means of movement during combat, turning swings into lunges that launch you toward enemies.

Arkham Shadow is about as far from a physics-driven VR melee sim as you could get. Instead the game makes significant use of instructed motion mechanics [a concept I explored in a recent episode of Inside XR Design], which asks players to make specific attacks in specific directions. While this removes a lot of freedom, it means players fight like Batman, which adds to the fantasy of the game.

It also leads to fluid and satisfying combat that allows meta-game elements to be successfully layered on top. Just like the prior Arkham games, that means different enemy types that need to be handled in different ways.

There’s the run-of-the-mill bad guy that just needs a beat down, the armored dude that needs to be dazed with your cape before eating a flurry of blows, the stun-baton wielder that you need to vault off of before the slam down, and the swat-shield holder that needs a combination of the two.

The game really nails the essence of Arkham combat, in which players fluidly tackle these different threats, weaving various gadgets and abilities into the mix to keep enemies busy while you dish out the pain.

Combat does take some getting used to, but the game does a good job of introducing mechanics and new enemies at the right pace to give the player time to improve as the things get more challenging. The game achieves a satisfying arc of combat mastery, making the player feel at first like a novice, but a beast of a brawler by the end.

As you play you’ll earn skill points which you can use to unlock skills and upgrades. The combat skill tree has quite a few new and fun moves to be unlocked, like the ability to use the grapnel hook to pull enemies toward your knuckle sandwich. Although the moves are fun, most need to be activated by not only hitting a certain combo count, but then pressing a button and doing an additional unique gesture.

It can be a lot to juggle mentally in the heat of combat, alongside the ability to use your batarang and explosive gel. I had to consult the game menu several times to remind myself which of these abilities I had and how to use them.

The game doesn’t force you to use most of these extra abilities, but they’re essential to both success in combat and a solid level of combat variety. I’m sure there will be players who forget about these abilities and pretty much just throw basic punches the whole time, which would leave the combat feeling a bit one-note.

While there’s plenty of all-out brawling, there are also enemies with guns who won’t hesitate to put you down if you’re spotted. For these situations you’ll want to stick to the shadows in what the game calls its ‘predator’ gameplay.

Anyone who has played the other Arkham games will recognize this gameplay loop (for the best reasons). You’ll use high vantage points to stay in the shadows while surveilling the landscape below you with your ‘detective mode’ vision which reveals enemies through walls and highlights useful environmental objects.

And this gameplay loop works just as well in Arkham Shadow too. If you jump in without a plan you’re almost sure to take damage, if not die outright. But if you take time to assess the situation and find the best opportunities to exploit, you’ll steadily whittle away at the group of bad guys until you’re the only one left standing.

Sticking to stealth in these situations is important. It wasn’t until later into the game that I realized I could fly down with my cape and land behind someone while remaining undetected. This allows for a stealth takedown before returning to the shadows. Up until that realization it felt like most of my actions would immediately alert all the guards in the room, causing bullets to fly my way within seconds.

Overall, the combat in Arkham Shadow feels very cohesive, and the different forms of ‘all-out brawl’ and ‘predator’ gameplay gel well together while still feeling varied.

All of the above is largely to say that the developers of Arkham Shadow really took their time to understand what an Arkham game is and what it’s supposed to feel like. It’s the latter part that’s often missed in VR. But they managed to distill the formula and then successfully reconstitute it with thoughtfully designed VR mechanics.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is a rare VR game with a campaign that feels like it has meat on the bones; it took about 10.5 hours to complete the game on medium difficulty. You could get through it faster. I took (and enjoyed) my time to find many of the collectibles along the way. Still, the game says I’ve completed only 84% of everything there is to be found, so I could still go back for some more if I was so inclined. There’s also a handful of ‘challenge’ sequences outside of the main campaign which offer some extra fun for those that want to put their combat skills to the test.

Immersion

While Batman: Arkham Shadows’ gameplay is really solid, the game also has a significant narrative element. This is the only major area where the game isn’t particularly successful, and unfortunately it cut down the immersion for me.

It’s a shame because it’s clear that a lot of time went into the narrative side of things, with solid motion capture, above average voice acting, impressive world-building, and some cleverly presented sequences that used pre-rendered immersive video playback.

The key narrative issue for me is one of pacing and direction. The narrative is largely presented in first-person moments with characters monologuing in your direction.

The way the characters are written makes them feel like caricatures, and the way the scenes are directed makes it feel like you’re watching a theater play rather than listening to a real conversation that’s right in front of you. The pace of delivery was just so painfully slow across the board that I found myself literally twiddling my thumbs (distracted by the impressive procedural finger animation tech) much of the time while characters were delivering their lines.

It doesn’t help that the story covers extremely familiar ground. Like I said, I’m not even a particularly big Batman fan, but even I have probably seen 5 different interpretations of ‘Bruce Wayne’s parents killed in a mugging outside the theater’. A 6th version isn’t really adding anything.

For what it’s worth, you can skip most of the narrative moments by holding B. But the thing is, I don’t want to skip the story. I want to know what’s going on and I want context for what’s happening—I just also want it to be engaging. I need characters that aren’t caricatures… characters I can actually care about.

While many of the narrative moments felt like they could have been played at twice the speed (and still might have been too slow), there were a few that were more successful. These were almost universally the narrative sequences that were mixed with some level of interaction—like when you’re interrogating a bad guy and punch him through a wall before lifting him up by the collar to intimidate him.

I appreciated that the game tried to make use of asking the player to hand things to characters (to create a feeling of real interactivity), but this was unfortunately undercut by both the slow pacing of these moments and the lack of any other kind of player-to-character interactivity.

Characters in the game are 100% unaware of player actions. You can clip your hand through their face while they’re talking to you, or throw a bottle at their head, but they won’t react.

Counterintuitively, when characters don’t react, it doesn’t just make the character feel less believable, it also makes the player feel less convinced that they actually exist in the world. This isn’t always an important detail, but it was notable in this game considering how often you are within arm’s reach of the game’s characters during narrative moments.

With its gesture-based combat, Arkham Shadow might not be the most embodying game [another concept I touched on in an episode of Inside XR Design], but it’s surely immersive. There’s enough to juggle mentally while laying the smackdown on a group of varied enemies that one can easily forget about the outside world. I expect to hear many real-life reports of bruised knuckles and broken TVs as a result. Make sure to wear your wrist straps folks!

The game’s visual presentation is impressive throughout. It’s clearly not modern AAA graphics, but it emulates the Arkham art style very well, and the world feels suitably detailed. There was scarcely anything in the game to overtly remind me that this is all running on a standalone VR headset (except, perhaps, the number of slow opening doors that mask much of the game’s level loading process). This is a strong example of what Quest 3 and 3S can do when backed with the right talent and funding.

While the world is detailed and there are occasionally interactive objects to play with, there’s much in the game that’s completely static. True, the gameplay doesn’t rely much on detailed object interactions, but it’s always a little jarring to find a bookshelf with one book that’s interactive, right next to a row of books that are fused together and completely static.

While the game defaults to directing users to use thumbsticks for a handful of actions (like mantling or climbing out of a grate), I appreciated that there was usually an immersive alternative as well. I found it much more natural to reach up to a ledge and pull myself up rather than hold the stick forward to automatically climb.

Comfort

For all of its movement, I was impressed with how comfortable I felt while playing Batman: Arkham Shadow for sessions stretching an hour or more. I’m not surprised—considering the magic the studio pulled with Iron Man VR’s comfort—but I am suitably impressed.

There’s a lot of thoughtful comfort design throughout. For instance, the game manages to recreate the classic Arkham ‘counter attack’ by quickly snap-turning you into the correct direction to face the off-screen enemy. And you can automatically face forward when grapelling up to a vantage point by holding the A button as you move through the air.

There seems to be some trick to how the game moves the player; a certain intentional smoothness about it. Like the way the grapnel gun pulls you up, or the way you lunge at enemies, or the way you glide through the air with your cape. It all felt more comfortable than I expected.

That’s not to say that everyone will be able to handle the game. There’s a lot of artificial locomotion, and unfortunately no teleport option to speak of. So if you’re someone who can’t tolerate much artificial movement, this one might need to be a pass.

But, as always, don’t forget Meta has a fair refund policy: you can own the game for up to 14 days and play it for up to two hours before refunding it. So don’t be scared to give it a try to find out about the comfort—you can get your money back if it isn’t for you. It’s also free for all new Quest 3 and Quest 3S purchases until April 2025.

Arkham Shadow has an above average selection of comfort and accessibility options. There’s some thoughtful inclusions like the ability to turn off ‘speed lines’ while sprinting, adjusting the color of the game’s critical combat icons, and even changing the way the game interprets your object-grabbing intent.

Batman: Arkham Shadow’ Comfort Settings – October 21st, 2024
Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode	(not explicit)
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages	English, French, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (European), Italian, German, Japanese, Korean
Dialogue audio
Languages	English
Adjustable difficulty
Two hands required
Real crouch required
Hearing required
Adjustable player height

Quest 3S is here and brings with it an undeniable value considering its price and capabilities. But many longstanding gripes—largely related to Meta’s Horizon OS—apply here just the same.

Quest 3S Review Summary

Quest 3S is the best value you can find in a VR headset today when considering its $300 starting price, content library, and overall capabilities. It’s an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to check out VR for the first time.

Even though Quest 2 also launched at $300, Quest 3S is an even better value because Meta’s headsets have only become more capable, while the range of games and apps has grown and improved since the launch of Quest 2. The Quest ecosystem overall has drawn the focus of the majority of VR developers, meaning most new VR games are available on the ecosystem. And Quest 3S has the same horsepower as Quest 3, meaning you’ll get to see improved graphics compared to what Quest 2 was capable of.

If you’re new to VR and want to find out what it’s all about, it’s hard to imagine recommending anything other than Quest 3S—especially because it doubles as a PC VR headset, meaning if you happen to have a high-end gaming PC you can also get access to some must-play VR games that are exclusive to PC, like Half-Life: Alyx.

If you’re a VR user who has spent a lot of time using a Quest 2, PC VR, or PSVR headset, and are looking to join the modern Quest ecosystem, we still recommend Quest 3 because its higher resolution and class-leading lenses offer a notably sharper image and slightly wider field-of-view. These improvements will be appreciated most by those who have already spent lots of time in VR.

Quest 2, Quest 3S, and Quest 3 have always been good at playing immersive games, but the underlying Horizon OS software that powers them continues to be rough around the edges as Meta has prioritized adding features rather than polish. Using the main Horizon interface for spatial computing tasks like web browsing, finding and installing apps, and adjusting the headset’s settings is almost never without small bugs, inconsistent interface behavior, confusing layouts, and visual stutters.

It might seem like an odd critique considering that Meta definitely has the most comprehensive and capable software stack of any standalone headset on the market. But just being ‘better than the rest’ doesn’t necessarily make the headset’s core software experience good enough. That’s because Quest headsets don’t just compete with other headsets; they also compete with other forms of in-home entertainment like gaming consoles, smart TVs, tablets, and smartphones, which are often significantly easier to use.

Quest 3S Detailed Review

Before we get started, if you’d like to know how Quest 2, Quest 3S, and Quest 3 specs compare for the sake of context, you can find a detailed comparison here.

Visuals

Peering through Quest 3S reminds one very much of Quest 2. That’s no surprise considering Quest 3S has the same lenses and same resolution as Quest 2.

Quest 3S’s clarity (the overall fidelity of the image through the lens) feels decidedly ‘last-gen’, largely owed to the Fresnel lenses that make the display less sharp with added glare. The lenses also have a small sweet-spot, which means the clarity from the center of the lens to the edge drops off quickly. The small sweet-spot doesn’t matter too much for most VR games. But when it comes to doing spatial computing tasks like web browsing or using a virtual desktop, it’s noticeable because you need to move your head more often rather than being able to simply peer toward something at the edges of the lens with your eyes alone.

There are some visual improvements over Quest 2 though. Because Quest 3S has the same processor and power as Quest 3, it generally renders the view in the headset at a higher resolution which improves sharpness a bit. That extra power also means games can run higher graphics settings, often meaning more detailed textures, models, and improved lighting.

Even though Quest 3S can run the same graphical settings as Quest 3, the image through Quest 3—which has both better lenses and a higher resolution—is clearly the winner.

Quest 3S has one other big visual improvement over Quest 2: its mixed reality view. Although they share the same lenses and same display, the cameras on Quest 3S—which show the outside world through the headset—are now color and significantly higher resolution. Quest 2’s cameras were very low resolution, black & white, and didn’t offer a very pleasant view of the world. Because of this, using mixed reality on Quest 2 felt more like a hack than a proper feature.

With better cameras, mixed reality feels like a real benefit on Quest 3S. The resolution of the mixed reality view is still far from what your eyes see in real life, but it’s just good enough to want to use. By default you’ll be greeted with the view of your own room when you put on the headset (rather than being whisked away to a fully virtual environment). This makes for a much more pleasant transition into and out of VR, a nicer way to do basic spatial computing activities (like web browsing and movie watching), and makes mixed reality games feel much more viable.

Overall the visuals in Quest 3S look… fine. It’s perfectly capable for the games the headset can run, but still lower sharpness than you’d want if you planned to use the headset primarily for spatial computing tasks like web browsing, movie watching, and virtual desktop. Quest 3 gets closer to being ideal for those things, but even it still falls a bit short of ideal.

Audio

Quest 3S lacks a 3.5mm jack, unlike Quest 2 and Quest 3. Luckily it shares effectively the same audio quality as Quest 3, which we find is better than Quest 2 and good enough that most people won’t feel the need to add their own headphones. Though, if you want to, you can use your own headphones via USB-C.

We’d still love to see an ‘elite audio strap’ added to Meta’s official Quest accessory lineup, which would ideally combine high-quality off-ear headphones with existing ‘elite strap’ designs.

Tracking & Controllers

When it comes to headset tracking, Meta consistently has the best inside-out tracking in its class. Aside from annoying software-related stutters, Quest 3S tracking is robust and handles low light situations well enough.

Unlike every Meta headset that has come before it, Quest 3S lacks a proximity sensor inside the headset, which means the screen doesn’t automatically turn on or off when you put on or remove the headset. It feels a little weird coming from other headsets, but it’s not a major inconvenience to just press the little standby button on the side when you pick it up.

Quest 3S uses the same Touch Plus controllers as Quest 3 which are also class-leading in terms of inside-out controller tracking. They’re compact, reasonably high-quality, have decent haptics, capacitive sensing on the thumbsticks and buttons, and excellent battery life. Overall there’s little to complain about regarding the controllers—they do their job well.

However, one downside of the Touch Plus controllers continues to be that they use replaceable batteries rather than rechargeables. Ostensibly this is a cost reducing measure, as Meta solves that problem itself with an official Quest Compact Charging Dock which includes custom rechargeable batteries that enable wireless charging when placed in the dock (the headset still needs to be plugged in). Note that Meta’s previously available Quest 3 Charging Dock also charges the Touch Plus controllers, but will not charge Quest 3S because the headset lacks special contact points on the bottom which are unique to Quest 3.

The controllers offer impressive tracking which feels equivalent to how they operate on Quest 3. While it’s possible for the controllers to lose tracking when put into blind spots for extended periods (like behind your head or back), the controllers do a good job of compensating if they’re only briefly out of view of the headset. Most VR games today also account for (or outright avoid) interactions that would put the controllers in tracking blind spots for long periods.

Hand-tracking on Quest headsets has gotten better over the years. On Quest 3S it’s a ‘nice-to-have’ feature when you want to do something quick in the headset like click a button, or want to consume media—where only simple inputs like play, pause, and seek are needed—without bothering with the controllers.

But hand-tracking on Quest 3S (and Quest 3 for that matter) can still be frustratingly inaccurate at times. The design of Horizon OS doesn’t help the matter with its poor input affordances, feedback, and targets that are often insufficiently sized given the limited accuracy. This undercuts the headset’s usability when using hand-tracking for basic spatial computing tasks.

Quest 3S improves hand-tracking in at least one meaningful way however. New IR LED lights on the front can invisibly illuminate your hands in front of the headset, improving hand-tracking in low-light scenarios. This makes hand-tracking more usable in dimly lit rooms and at night. Hand-tracking even works well in a pitch black room, which is not the case for Quest 3; this is perhaps the only notable scenario where Quest 3S outperforms Quest 3.

Ergonomics

Quest 3S is essentially the same size and weight of Quest 2 and Quest 3. Ergonomically speaking, it’s nearly identical too.

Unfortunately that means Meta has paired it with a soft strap out of the box. Everyone has a different head shape, so mileage varies, but we’ve just never found the soft straps of Quest 2, Quest 3, and now Quest 3S, particularly comfortable for long-term use.

In particular, the strap tends to graze the ears instead of going around them, which can be annoying for long sessions. Without any counterweight on the back of the strap, the headset also starts to feel front-heavy pretty quickly. This can be alleviated somewhat by being cautious about how much you tighten the rear strap (instead let the top strap do as much of the lifting as possible, with the rear strap as minimally tightened as possible while still keeping the headset on your face). This is made more challenging by the odd tightening mechanism on the soft strap which makes it difficult to make small adjustments.

As with its siblings, an improved headstrap is the very first thing we recommend to anyone thinking about getting accessories to improve their experience. A rigid strap with some counterweight on the back and a dial for tightening means significantly greater comfort.

Fortunately Meta was careful to make the Quest 3S strap attachment point largely identical to the one on Quest 3, which means the vast majority of third-party Quest 3 straps are equally compatible with Quest 3S. And that means there’s already huge variety to choose from—you can find our top Quest 3 (and now 3S) headstrap picks (and other accessories) here.

If you’re coming from Quest 2, you’ll find that the headset inherently feels a little less taxing to use simply because the improved passthrough view of Quest 3S eases the transition into and out of VR. And a new button on the bottom of the headset makes for a convenient shortcut to turn passthrough on and off. On Quest 3 you can activate the same shortcut by double-tapping on the side of the headset, but many people are unaware of the feature, so having a dedicated button is an improvement.

Continue on Page 2: Games, Apps, and Horizon OS »

Games & Apps

Although it can do more, playing fully immersive games and experiences is definitely the main use-case for Quest 3S and what it’s best at.

While there remains some older PC VR gems that the headset can’t access (unless you have a high-end gaming PC to pair it to), the vast majority of VR games today are released either exclusively on the Quest platform (called the Horizon Store), or concurrently with other platforms. That means Quest 3S has access to a large and growing library of the biggest VR games and experiences being made today.

Compared to the launch of Quest 2, the Horizon Store has only grown in both breadth and depth. You can find viral indie hits like Gorilla Tag or jump into big-named platform exclusives like Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR or Asgard’s Wrath 2.  And between a wide range of games in Early Access or built inside of Meta’s Horizon Worlds social platform, there’s a lot to explore.

Because Quest 3S shares the same performance specs as Quest 3, it can play the same games at the same graphical settings. That means it not only has access to the newest games (like the upcoming Batman: Arkham Shadow) but you can also be confident that it will be supported for as long as Quest 3.

With some exceptions, the vast majority of Quest games on the Horizon Store unfortunately don’t have the scope or polish that you might expect from games on any of the big three game consoles. So if you’re looking for polished experiences, you’ll need to do some research to sort through the huge library to find the content that scratches that itch.

We’ve got our own recommendations for the first Quest games you should consider buying, and for the best free Quest games you can find.

The Horizon Store is also home to many interesting non-game apps that span the gamut from education to travel to meditation, and much more. If you’re the creative type, you can find a number of interesting tools for creative endeavors like sculpting, painting, and animating in VR.

Horizon OS

Horizon OS is the name Meta uses for the core Quest software—the interface and features you use when not inside of an immersive app.

The company has been rapidly adding to the Horizon OS feature set. You’ll find a full-blown web browser, a virtual desktop for using your headset as a display for your Mac or Windows computer, a media player for viewing side-loaded content like photos and spatial videos, and more.

Recent changes enable free-form window management, allowing you to, say, open a web browser to pull up a YouTube video and maximize it like a huge TV, then open another browser window and pull it into your lap to browse twitter like a tablet.

On paper, Horizon OS has a lot of built-in capabilities. In reality, the OS continues to feel overtly clunky. Using it often feels like using a bolted-on smart TV interface rather than the streamlined interfaces you’d expect from a smartphone or tablet.

Issues with Horizon OS are broad, generally falling into three categories: poor design, inconsistent behavior, and bugs. It would take an entire series of articles to dig into the details, so here I’ll just say that Horizon OS continues to have poor usability. It does more today than it ever has, but cramming more features into the OS doesn’t always mean a better user experience if the features aren’t actually polished and easy to use.

This is a real shame because these issues are largely software and design based—things that aren’t constrained by the headset’s hardware. And the clunk of the user-facing software layer really diminishes the incredible things the headset is actually doing under the hood (the invisible stuff like head tracking, world tracking, passthrough, rendering games and apps with incredibly low latency, etc).

If Meta can figure out how to make real usability improvements to Horizon OS, it could greatly increase the value of Quest 3S over time. But, having seen these issues persist since Quest 2, we aren’t holding our breath.

Disclosure: Meta provided Road to VR with a Quest 3S headset.

Quest 3S launches on October 15th, letting you dive into some of the best free games and experiences out there on the cheap, as well as a ton of paid Quest content built up over the years. Whether you’re into active games, puzzles, or just want to slice or shoot the ever-living crap out of something, we’re here to help you settle into your new headset with a few games that should keep you playing for hundreds of hours yet to come.

Note: This list includes only Quest-native games. Don’t forget that you can also play PC games with Quest Link, Air Link, or Valve’s Steam Link, and of course a VR-ready PC. Find out if your PC is ready for Link.

This list is a great starting point if you’re looking to burn pretty close to a single Benjamin, with each genre section featuring some tried-and-true games for cardio freaks, shooter fans, puzzle nerds, fantasy swordplay geeks, and much more. Click through each category, or pick and mix using the legend below:

• Multiplayer Shooters (below)
• Single Player Shooters 
• Active Music Games
• Purely Puzzles
• Adventure + Puzzles
• Swords & Sorcery
• Fitness Games
• Relaxing Casual Games

Multiplayer Shooting Madness

Zero Caliber 2 – $28

While Zero Caliber 2 packs in an eight-hour single player campaign, not only can you play in four-player co-op, but also classic multiplayer game modes with up to 10 players. It looks (and plays) amazing on Quest 3.

‘Zero Caliber 2’ on Quest

Pavlov Shack – $20

After a long stint in free early access, Pavlov Shack brings a torrent of awesome features, making it truly worthy of its $20 price tag. Including 65 realistic weapons, you can team up in a 5v5 match of classic Search and Destroy, uncover traitors in a casual murder mystery, monster hunt in an asymmetrical 1 vs. 9 game mode. Operate vehicles in a 4v4 WWII match to defend Stalingrad, and hundreds of community made mods.

‘Pavlov Shack’ on Quest

Breachers – $30

In Breachers, you plan your assault or orchestrate your defense as a team through intense close-quarters combat. Whether you play as an enforcer or a revolter, master your nifty gadgetry, customize your powerful weaponry and beat your opponents in stunning environments. Intuitive to grasp. Endlessly playable. Basically Counter-Strike.

‘Breachers’ on Quest

Ghosts of Tabor – $20

Ghosts of Tabor is an extraction-based game with both PVP and PVE survival where you will have to use your wits, skills and resources to survive. Inspired by games such as Escape from Tarkov and Day Z, the game features a variety of scenarios from scavenging, looting to crafting. Make your safehouse your own by building your personal collection weapons and gear to display in your armory.

‘Ghosts of Tabor’ on Quest

Into Black – $25

This is another strong single player game that just so happens to make everything more fun with the addition of four-player co-op, essentially replicating a lot of the action of Deep Rock Galatic in VR. Mine the caves. Shoot the many-legged beasties, and try to repair your ship to get the hell out (and back in again, because it’s so fun).

‘Into Black’ on Quest

Continue on Page 2: Single Player Shooters»

Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom is a new sort of VR film hybrid for Quest, mashing up a movie’s worth of real-time rendered narrative with sprinkles of first-person gameplay, billing itself an ‘interactive anime’.

On paper, it sounds really cool, offering you essentially two ways to step into your favorite anime universe and experience it in all of its Shonen glory. In practice though, it’s a total guessing game of when you can get to have fun, and when you’re expected to just sit back and live out your new life as a camera–person-chimera.

Silver Phantom, which enlists you as the protagonist in the beloved mecha-filled world, will no doubt tickle the fancy of hardcore Gundam fans by virtue of the fact that, well, it’s Gundam, however most others will probably be left scratching their heads. Me included.

But not for the characteristically heavy doses of exposition or patently Japanese social mores on full display—I’m a dusty, old anime fan myself—but because it packs in all of the lesser ills of VR filmmaking while being way too precious with moments of fun.

In Silver Phantom’s quest to offer up both embodiment and immersion though—slightly different concepts—its managed to fumble both at the same time. The film’s narrative richness and visual flash envelopes you entirely (immersion), but is substantively hindered by relying too heavily on replicating traditional shot composition in VR, which is a shame, because everything looks awesome, from characters expressions to the full-blown mecha action happening in space.

While its smattering of first-person game mechanics are meant to make you feel like you’re really there and have an effect on the environment (embodiment), those moments are doled out at seemingly random intervals, leaving you to constantly question why you’re being unceremoniously dropped back into a first-person POV to engage in one-off jobbies—essentially feeling like the little brother who’s only allowed to play with an unplugged controller all while the real action goes on around you, never knowing when your older brother will concede and let you press a few token buttons.

I admire the trio of developers (Bandai Namco Filmworks, Atlas V, Albyon) for taking the risk on developing the two-hour narrative, although it just doesn’t feel like the future of cinematic VR to me, but rather one that has replicated the same mistakes early 360 filmmakers have made ever since enterprise-level VR cameras saw their boom in the mid-2010s.

Switching cameras too often is jarring, and treating your head like it’s on a boom is something you either don’t really mind, or vehemently hate. Either way, it comes at the cost of embodiment, as you never know when your POV will switch, and whether you’re back in your body for brief moments of action.

And (rant continues) instead of letting scenes breathe, and calling the user’s attention to specific action, you’re basically encouraged to keep your head still—worsened by the fact that frame rate is fairly jumpy, making subtitles difficult to read. Granted, you can experience it with English audio and no subtitles, but that does little for those looking to experience it in Japanese with English subs (signature look of superiority). If neither are your first language, it will be a little tough to get used to.

When the final credits roll, Silver Phantom’s replay value comes in the form of an optional mixed reality wave shooter, which feels stylistically similar to the ‘Xortex 26XX’ mini-game in Valve’s The Lab (2016). Going pew-pew-pew with toy-sized Gundams in your own living room will never not make me feel like a kid again—but one who was left more than a little scorned by not getting to have more fun during the main event.

There’s also a cool MR gallery that lets you get up close and personal with a handful of mechas—something fans should definitely appreciate.

In the end, you can pay $16 for a substantially worse movie-going experiences, so take it for what you will. It’s a flashy, sometimes fun experience that Gundam fans will probably gel with, which is great. But just not for me.

If you’re into it, you can get Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom on the Horizon Store for Quest 2, 3 and 3S.

Our series Inside XR Design highlights examples of great XR design. Today we’re looking at shotguns in several different VR games to learn what makes them feel great in the player’s hand. In doing so, we’ll uncover the secret to making anything feel great in VR.

You can find the complete video below, or continue reading for an adapted text version.

Ok, we’re jumping right into this… if I asked you ‘what’s your favorite shotgun in VR?’ you can probably picture it in your head pretty quickly. But could you tell me exactly what makes that shotgun feel so great?

Well, that’s kind of a trick question, because the answer is like 50 different little details that all add up to how a shotgun ultimately feels in the player’s hands.

So today we’re going to look at some of my favorite shotguns in VR and dissect all those little details to talk about how they contribute to that feeling. And by the end of this… I’m going to make the case that if we can understand what makes a shotgun feel great in VR, we can figure out how to make anything feel great in VR.

Arizona Sunshine 2 – Sunshine Shorty

Let’s kick things off with one of my favorite shotguns in all of VR. That would be the sawed-off pump-action shotgun in Arizona Sunshine 2—lets call it the Sunshine Shorty.

Just look at this thing go. It’s incredibly satisfying to use. But why?

Well first of all, it’s pump action. You just can’t beat a pump-action shotgun in VR. Two-handed interactions in VR are always interesting, and making the player perform such a visceral and well-recognized gesture is always gonna make them feel like a bad-ass. Pumping a shotgun to load the next round is a clear extension of the ‘Instructed Motion’ concept I introduced in the previous episode, and an example of how such movements can infuse players with emotion.

The way the Sunshine Shorty reloads has a great little detail too. In many VR games you can reload a weapon just by touching the magazine or shell to the right place on a gun, but in Arizona Sunshine, you need to actually slide the shell into the weapon. The developers made this feel great by adding a custom hand-pose to show the player pushing the shell into the gun.

This little detail adds a lot to the feel of the weapon, because it changes reloading from just touching one thing to another into performing a gesture that captures more of the fantasy of sliding rounds into a shotgun. And importantly, it’s still feels good without being tedious. You might say the interaction is generous to the player… you don’t need to get the motion or position perfectly right in order for it to work.

But the motions themselves are only part of what makes using the shotgun satisfying. Providing feedback to the player intention is critical as well, and the easiest way to do this is with great sound and haptics.

And getting the sounds right is everything.

Let’s listen to how much less satisfying it is to use the Sunshine Shorty with weak sounds vs. strong ones:

View post on imgur.com

Unmute for sound

Sounds make such a difference.

For a shotgun, getting the pump-action sound just right is crucial. As someone who’s fired real shotguns, I wouldn’t say the Sunshine Shorty’s pumping sound is particularly realistic, but remember, the goal is to convey the feeling of pumping a shotgun, not simply playing back a perfect replication of a sound. In the case of this shotgun, its got just the right amount of crunch, clack, and metallic sounds to give a very satisfying feeling every time you pump it.

View post on imgur.com

Unmute for sound

And though I can’t show you haptics on video, haptics can be almost as beneficial as audio itself, because it ties specific weapon sound effects to different locations on the weapon. For instance, when you pump the gun you should feel a haptic rumble in the pump hand, but not the trigger hand.

And again, both sounds and haptics are about giving the player feedback when they do something. When a player pumps the gun you’re conveying that they did something right by giving them the feedback of a sound effect and a haptic rumble.

Another piece of feedback is seeing the shotgun shell ejected from the gun after pumping it. This further reiterates the player has interacted with the shotgun in a valid way.

And there’s a great little detail the developers added here. On most real-life shotguns, the shell ejection port is on the side of the weapon so the shell is ejected away from the wielder. But the Sunshine Shorty has an ejection port on the top of the shotgun, just to make the feedback of ejecting the shell even more visible for players. I love it.

There’s one huge thing we haven’t talked about yet about what makes this shotgun feel great in VR. That would be the things the player actually shoots the gun at. You could do literally everything perfectly about the gun itself—the sounds, effects, tuning etc—but if the player pulls the trigger and the enemy just slowly lays down, that’s absolutely not gonna feel good.

Arizona Sunshine 2 might even go a bit over the top with the visual impact and sound effects when shooting zombies, but damn it feels great. The key is that the effect on the target correctly matches the sound and recoil of the weapon. Since the shotgun sounds powerful when it shoots, to deliver the feedback of that expectation, the target you’re shooting at needs to be satisfyingly impacted.

So the Sunshine Shorty feels great for all the reasons we talked about. But we can also learn a lot by noticing where things could be better. If I could just snap my fingers and make it so, these are the improvements I’d wanna to see with this gun:

First: Having an animated transition in hand poses between holding the shell and sliding it into the gun would make reloading look smoother visually.

Second: While the gun operates realistically in terms of pumping and loading, visually if we look into the chamber we can see the next shell from the gun isn’t actually loaded into the barrel. It just sits there until the chamber closes and then essentially appears in the barrel to be ejected after the shot.

And Third: Unless you’re counting while reloading, there’s no clear way to know when the shotgun is completely full of shells. That often means you’ll go to put another shell in the gun but end up throwing it on the ground instead because it can’t fit. This happened to me all the time when playing the game. Giving players an audio cue to indicate when the gun is almost full and then completely full is a subtle way to avoid this—and you’ll see exactly that with the next shotgun we talk about.

Continue on Page 2 »

Next year VR will get its first big Batman VR game, exclusively on Quest 3. We went hands-on with the game and found out what it’s like to be the brawler behind the mask.

My first impression of Batman: Arkham Shadow is that it was hard on my back.

The Arkham series is well known for its “freeflow combat,” where you’re able to freely attack in any direction at any time. You manage violence in these games like an orchestra conductor, where you’re always in control.

The first big hurdle for adapting Arkham into VR, as an exclusive for the Meta Quest 3, was how to handle freeflow combat. The developer Camouflaj’s answer was to turn the game into a boxing simulator.

I’m only about half kidding. When you enter combat in Arkham Shadow, you open by throwing a punch, which makes Batman lunge at your targeted opponent. From there, you can punish them with a flurry of lefts and rights.

If one of your opponent’s buddies goes for a sucker punch, you’re warned by a blue icon that shows up directly in your field of vision. When you swing your arm in the indicated direction, Batman instantly abandons his current target in favor of countering the incoming punch. You’re never off-guard and, just like the rest of the Arkham series, you’re always in control.

However, you’re also always shadowboxing. And I felt the results in my back muscles for the rest of the week. I might grab a couple of light wrist weights before I pick up the full version, so I can pretend to be Batman and get a work out at the same time.

I played a short demo of Arkham Shadow at Meta’s offices in Bellevue, Washington, a week in advance of the game’s first gameplay reveal.

Arkham Shadow is a canon entry in the Arkham series timeline, set a few months after the events of 2013’s Arkham Origins. At this point in the series, Batman (Roger Craig Smith) is still relatively new to fighting crime, without the network of allies, equipment, and hidden lairs that he’ll eventually develop.

As the game opens, Batman’s only ally is his butler Alfred, who serves as his mission control for an investigation that’s taken Batman into Gotham’s sewer system. The Rat King has organized dozens of Gotham’s dispossessed citizens into an anarchist movement, which has recently kidnapped several policemen.

The demo I played is primarily about rescuing those policemen, then returning to the surface, in a short sequence that also serves as Arkham Shadow’s tutorial level.

Batman’s basic equipment in Arkham Shadow includes Batarangs, which you can retrieve by grabbing them off of your chest. These automatically return to Batman’s hand once thrown and are primarily used to target distant switches or destructible objects. If you toss one at an enemy, it’s good for a short stun, which can be useful in a pinch.

Batman is also equipped with his grapple gun so you can zip to distant ledges. And there’s the “detective vision” that’s built into his mask. This is activated in Arkham Shadow by bringing your right hand to your head and pushing the trigger button on the controller. In detective vision, interactive objects in your environment are highlighted, you can see opponents’ alarm levels and equipment, and you can track electronics by their power conduits.

The detective vision also lets you see hostile opponents through walls, which gives you a necessary edge. Batman’s armor can’t handle incoming gunfire, so you’re at a distinct disadvantage whenever street punks show up with rifles.

At this point, you’re advised to use stealth, confusion, and the environment to your advantage. Batman can travel unseen through vents, land stealthy silent takedowns if he gets the drop of an enemy, or leave opponents dangling from Gotham’s trademark Gothic statuary. If you’re caught off-guard, you can hit B to drop a smoke bomb from Batman’s left gauntlet, which obscures enemies’ vision and stuns them for long enough that you can retreat to the shadows.

As Arkham Shadow plays out, you’ll gradually accumulate more gadgets and tools. The demo ends before what the studio told me was the game’s first big plot twist. Shortly after that point, players are introduced to Arkham Shadow’s hub level.

From here, you’ll be able to take on the game’s antagonists in whatever order you prefer, and will unlock more of Batman’s arsenal along the way, such as a pistol that shoots the trademark Arkham explosive gel. That in turn lets you revisit old locations in search of more bonuses and collectibles, which are hidden throughout the environment. I was able to find a couple of rat statues and propaganda radios made by the Rat King’s followers, which I got to smash against the ground or wall for achievement progress.

The game’s developer, Camouflaj, deliberately dodged the issue of what other antagonists would appear in Arkham Shadow, and are focusing for now on Batman’s fight against the Rat King. The game will also feature appearances by Ratcatcher (Khary Payton), Commissioner James Gordon (Mark Ralston), Harvey Dent (Troy Baker), and Harleen Quinzel (Tara Strong), the latter two of whom have yet to become supervillains at this point in the Arkham timeline.

You’ll also receive backup in Arkham Shadow from a pre-Batgirl Barbara Gordon, who serves as computer support for Batman. Part of the game’s plot reportedly involves Batman having to keep secrets from both Barbara and her father, neither of whom want the other to know that they’re working with Batman.

That all matches with something that’s conveyed very well by the demo: in Arkham Shadow, Gotham is just on the edge. Everything in the city, and about Batman, is about plate-spinning. Everything could fall apart at any time.

That mirrors the combat system; it’s got a certain ragged desperation to it. In the later Arkham games, you’re able to play Batman as a sort of violent chessmaster, where you dance between opponents and beat up six baddies at once. In Arkham Shadow, however, you have to deliver each individual punch and takedown yourself. Not only does that encourage you to do whatever you can to stack the deck in your favor ahead of an open confrontation (like silent takedowns or opening with a Batarang) but it really sells the illusion that you’re in a back-alley fistfight. When I got tired halfway through an encounter, and realized there were still two guys left to fight, there was a distinct moment there that I remembered I wasn’t Batman.

I’d go so far as to say that it’s a more interesting version of Batman to me than the older version from the later Arkham games on the timeline. Developer Camouflaj has taken advantage of Arkham Shadow’s status as an interquel to write Batman as experienced but still quite raw, in a city that barely makes any sense: the sewers are nicer than the city streets, the cops are more dangerous than the crooks, and the most moral person in Gotham is a 20-something vigilante.

I’m genuinely interested in seeing where the Batman superfans at Camouflaj plan to go with this. The overall atmosphere feels very different than the high-concept dystopia of, say, Arkham City. Arkham Shadow is about rolling around in the dirt.

Beyond that, Camouflaj kept much of Batman: Arkham Shadow under wraps. Most of the team was dying to talk more about it as its 75-person team has been living and breathing Batman for the last four years. If there was one impression I had as I walked away from the demo, besides the feeling in my back muscles, it was that Arkham Shadow was a labor of love.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is scheduled for release this October as an exclusive for Quest 3.

First released eight years ago, SUPERHOT VR is not just a notable VR classic—it’s still a great game. Although it never got a sequel, it left enough of a mark for not just one but several spiritual successors. The upcoming Quest game Action Hero from Fast Travel Games revisits SUPERHOT’s innovative mechanic with a smart premise. But to meet or surpass its predecessor, Action Hero will need to take it to the next level.

If you’ve never played Superhot, it’s built around a core mechanic where time only moves forward when you are physically moving. So if you stay completely still, the game more-or-less freezes. That means if there’s a bullet heading for your face and you freeze in place, the bullet freezes too. That gives you time to observe the situation and make a calculated decision about what to do next. It’s basically ‘bullet time’ from The Matrix, but you’re in control of it.

Action Hero isn’t exactly trying to hide its inspiration… in fact I’d say the unique ‘time moves when you move’ mechanic from Superhot is the really the heart of the game and the main reason to play it. After playing Action Hero for myself I can confirm that dodging a bullet as it wizzes inches from your face—while its path through time is directly related to your movements—is still an incredibly unique and engaging VR experience.

But where SUPERHOT had an intentionally low-poly look and consisted of a setting that was little more than a vague backdrop for the game to exist, Action Hero is built around the idea that you’re an action movie stunt person doing all these crazy moves because you’re being filmed for a movie.

It’s a clever idea. Levels are packaged as ‘movies’ which consist of a series of scenes strung together under one umbrella. For instance, there’s a level that’s roughly in the vain of Indiana Jones, where you’re in an ancient temple-like environment shooting baddies. Each ‘scene’ within the ‘movie’ is a moment of gameplay where you’re tasked with dodging, shooting, etc.

When you complete a scene, you move forward to the next one, and so on, with a logical progression that follows a basic movie narrative (ie: hero enters temple, kills goons, stops bad guys from stealing the important thing, then escapes).

This structure not only increases the cohesion of the scenes, but also allows for a bunch of different settings, enemies, weapons, etc., by letting players jump from one ‘movie’ to another.

The basic ‘time moves when you move’ mechanic is executed well, and generally feels as awesome as it does in Superhot.

But to really deliver something that feels like a next-gen version of Superhot, Action Hero needs to seriously bump up the variety and polish—otherwise, why not just play Superhot instead?

The whole premise of Action Hero is that you’re a stunt person acting out spectacular action scenes in movies. But spectacle is lacking. The game doesn’t feel particularly polished visually or audibly.

Of course this is an unfinished build of the game and hopefully more polish comes later. But if the marketing tells us this game is supposed to be a “blockbuster VR FPS with explosive set pieces and cinematic design,” then those elements should really be in place before showing off the game. With Action Hero planned for launch by the end of this year… there’s only four months, at most, for that to fall into place.

It’s not just visual and audio polish either. SUPERHOT succeeded not just because it had a really cool fundamental mechanic, but also because the level design—the specific scenarios the player has to conquer—were very well crafted. They were challenging and varied throughout.

Action Hero has proven that it can nail the fundamental mechanic, but it’s going to need to tighten up its level design and bring more variety—in weapons, enemies, and scenarios—into the mix if it wants to have a genuine value proposition when put next to Superhot itself.

I, for one, would love to see Fast Travel Games pull this off. Conceptually, Action Hero is genius. It revives a truly unique mechanic and builds it atop a framework that allows for unlimited creativity in what kinds of scenarios the player could be put in—be that contemporary action, horror, sci-fi, western, and a million other possibilities. But when it comes right down to it, quantity isn’t quality. The studio needs to nail the depth of gameplay before it’s worth leveraging the breadth of gameplay.

Veteran VR studio nDreams has made several shooters with innovative mechanics over the years. That experience seems to have guided the studio’s publishing interest as well; the newly announced VENDETTA FOREVER, developed by MeatSpace Interactive and published by nDreams, uses a unique movement mechanic to create fast-paced VR gameplay. We jumped into the Quest demo that’s available to all starting today.

Update (August 15th, 2024, 3:46PM ET): Vendetta Forever is being published nDreams and developed by MeatSpace Interactive, a one-man studio run by Zander Dejah.

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that VENDETTA FOREVER was being developed by nDreams itself.

Vendetta Forever is an arcade shooter through and through. Though it has the ‘auto-aim’ vibes and bullet trails of Pistol Whip and the slow motion bullet dodging of SUPERHOT VR (and shares aesthetics of both), Vendetta Forever is far from being a clone. It brings something new and interesting to the table: a movement mechanic where you can teleport to any gun you can see, whether sitting on the ground or still falling from a dispatched enemy’s hands.

And this isn’t just an occasional thing, the game is built around your ability to rapidly move from one gun to the next, not just to get around, but to avoid all the bullets that were headed right for your face. And because there are almost always bullets headed for your face, rapidly the game sets a frenetic pace of jumping from gun to gun.

Even on the base ‘Normal’ setting, you’ll almost certainly find yourself dying a few times when you start a new level. But the fun part is knowing what to expect the next time around… after a few tries you’ll be moving with the speed of a superhero and shooting like a sharpshooter that can see the future.

Though this pace can definitely make you feel like a badass superhero, it never really lets up. If you aren’t moving, you’re dead. That means not only jumping from gun-to-gun, but also physically moving your body to dodge incoming bullets, similar to Pistol Whip.

There was at least one part in my hands-on with the game where things slowed down for a minute—I was shooting a big machine gun out of a helicopter—which was a nice change of pace, but it only lasted briefly. I hope the game will include more moments like this to break up the pace. I also wouldn’t mind an outright ‘freeze’ ability to freeze the action and give myself a few seconds to think about what my next move should be. Perhaps this would be an ability with a long cooldown to give players that breather moment when they need it, but not reduce the challenge too greatly.

Levels in the game are largely deterministic. The same enemy will round the same corner at the same moment. As mentioned, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it turns you into a future-seeing gun-god. But levels also have some alternative paths which you can take depending upon which gun you decide to teleport to.

Ultimately this didn’t change very much about the level, but it might add a little replayability for those aiming for high scores on the leaderboards. Hunting for new and potentially faster paths through a level could be an interesting aspect of the game.

The levels that I played in Vendetta Forever are, so far, quite short. If you know the path they might take you 30-60 seconds to complete. But those first few times dying while exploring the level expands that time a bit. But if you aren’t interested in optimizing your score or completion time, you’ll be blasting through levels pretty quickly, so it remains to be seen if the developer can create enough to feel like there’s really some meat to the experience for those not interested in improving their leaderboard rank.

And a final note that didn’t really fit anywhere else… I’m fine with the game’s stylized look, but was very surprised at the significant amount of aliasing. Given the low-poly aesthetic, this really feels like a game that should be running at maximum resolution and native 90Hz or 120Hz on a Quest 3. It’s possible the build I played has yet to be optimized for Quest 3, or perhaps a significant optimization pass will land before the game launches.

I’m sold on the underlying mechanics of Vendetta Forever. Moving by teleporting from one gun to the next, combined with some generous auto-aim to make you feel like you’ve got action-movie aim, definitely works.

The success of Vendetta Forever is likely to hinge on the quality of the levels if there’s enough (and enough variety) among them to keep the game interesting. I’m hopeful the developer can pull it off!

The demo for Vendetta Forever on Quest is available today, and the game will launch on Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, and PSVR 2 this October.

There are a ton of VR games coming this year, although there are a few big names we’re really holding out hope for.

Many of them are targeting all major VR headsets (thankfully), with only one actual Quest 3 exclusive listed below. More importantly, they’re all slated to arrive in 2024. Check out the this year’s most anticipated VR games below:

Aces of Thunder (PSVR 2, PC VR)

Created by War Thunder (2012) studio Gaijin Games, Aces of Thunder promises to bring a host of WWII combat airplanes across 15 maps representing three key theaters: Western, Eastern and Pacific Fronts. It’s said to include War Thunder’s physically accurate flight and damage models, so we’re hoping for some intense and realistic dogfights.

There’s no precise launch date yet, although Gaijin says it’s coming sometime in Q4 2024 on Steam and PSVR 2.

Alien: Rogue Incursion (Quest 3, PSVR 2, PC VR)

Alien: Rogue Incursion pits you against a stealthy swarm of Xenomorphs, although you won’t be creeping around and hiding in lockers the entire time. Developer Survios is tossing in a few tools to keep aliens at bay: motion-tracking radar and a few guns too, including a pulse rifle, revolver, and pump shotgun.

Alien: Rogue Incursion is releasing sometime around Holiday 2024, coming to PSVR 2, PC VR, and Meta Quest 3—not Quest Pro or Quest 2.

Batman: Arkham Shadow (Quest 3)

Batman: Arkham Shadow has big shoes to fill. Not only is this the first fully-fledged Batman game for VR, but we think developer Camouflaj’s last game Iron Man VR was “VR’s first great superhero game”.

Facing off against ‘The Rat King’, Batman: Arkham Shadow promises a heavy dose of exploration, stealth, and free-flowing combat across Gotham. That includes Batman’s Grappling Gun, Batarang, smoke bombs, and even working cape that lets you glide from the city heights.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is due out sometime in Fall 2024, coming exclusively to Quest 3.

Hitman 3 VR Reloaded (Quest 3)

Hitman 3 came along with VR support for the original PSVR at launch in 2021, later bringing PC VR support a few months later. Now IO Interactive is working with XR Games to bring Hitman 3 exclusively to Quest 3. Notably, the game is said to be “rebuilt from the ground up” for VR, which may smooth over some of retrofitt-y woes of the PSVR and PC VR supported versions.

We don’t know when it will launch specifically, although it’s slated to arrive sometime in Summer 2024. In the meantime, you can wishlist it over on the Horizon Store for Quest 3.

Metro Awakening (Quest, PSVR 2, PC VR)

Coming from VR veteran Vertigo Games in partnership with 4A Games, Metro Awakening throws you back into the Moscow metro with plenty of guns and a mission to protect your home station from mutant threats. One of the biggest concerns, we learned last month, would be scrounging for ammo, making thorough exploration essential.

There’s no release date yet beyond the “2024” window, however you can wishlist the game now on PSVR 2, PC VR, and Quest 2/3/Pro.

Skydance’s Behemoth (Quest, PSVR 2, PC VR)

Skydance Games, the studio behind The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners franchise, is getting the hype train fueled for its next big single-player VR game, Skydance’s BEHEMOTH, which promises to bring a bevy of immersive melee combat and epic adventuring to all major VR headsets later this year.

Promising a 12-hour single-player campaign, you’ll face off against blighted soldiers and, of course, the game’s namesake: hulking beasts taller than skyscrapers, aka Behemoths.

Skydance’s Behemoth is slated to launch sometime in Fall 2024 on all major VR headsets, including PC VR, PSVR 2, and Quest 2/3/Pro.

Zombie Army VR (Quest, PSVR 2, PC VR)

Rebellion, developer behind cult horror shooter series Zombie Army, is getting ready to release the franchise’s first VR game on all major headsets this year. The co-op campaign takes place during the events of the Zombie Army series, letting you take to the field as one of the Deadhunters, an elite squad that is hunting down zombie war criminals.

Developed in partnership with XR Games, Zombie Army VR is slated to launch sometime this year on PC VR, PSVR 2, and Quest 2/3/Pro.

What VR games are you looking forward to this year? Let us know in the comments below!

Not ready to plonk down your first $100 on Quest games? Thankfully there’s an impressive number of free games, experiences, apps, and social VR platforms to keep you playing before you’re paying.

Looking to make your Quest 3S gaming experience even better? Don’t miss our top picks for the most essential Quest 3 accessories. The new hotness supports all of the same Quest 3 accessories, save the facial interfaces, which are unique to each headset.

Free Quest Games

Yeeps: Hide and Seek

As a Yeep, your belly is full of stuffing used to craft anything from pillows for building to bombs for destruction. Pull items from your vast imagination and toss them into the world. The game’s intuitive block-based building makes it easy to express your creativity at any skill level.

• Developer: Trass Games
• Store link

Gorilla Tag

Like your primitive ancestors, Gorilla Tag will have you lumbering around a tree-lined arena using its unique ‘grab-the-world’ locomotion style that lets you amble around like a great ape. Chase the other apes and infect them or climb for your life as the infected chase you. Pure and simple. Make sure you’re far from TVs, furniture, babies, and pets because you will punch something in the mad dash for sweet, low-poly freedom.

• Developer: Another Axiom
• Store link

Maestro: The Masterclass

Step on the podium and become a true orchestra conductor in Maestro: The Masterclass. Play hands free or grab a chopstick and master the real hands motions that command the orchestra through an off the rail conducting masterclass that culminates with an epic symphonic concert in a packed opera house. Good luck, Maestro!

• Developer: Double Jack
• Store link

Noclip VR

Riding off the success of cult-like status of ‘The Backrooms’ Internet lore, Noclip VR lets you and online players explore the liminal spaces, solve puzzles, and escape that which lurks within. To move, you’ll need to swing your arms, and always keep in ear-shot of your friends, otherwise they won’t hear you scream. Gameplay is a bit barebones, making it feel more like something you’d find imported on a social platform like VR Chat or Rec Room, although it’s definitely invoking Gorilla Tag vibes.

• Developer: SuperFPS
• Store link

Population: One

Population: One is basically VR’s most successful battle royale, letting you climb, fly, shoot, and team-up with whoever dares. The free-to-play game does feature microtransactions, but only for cosmetics, which is nice. It’s more than just a battle royale though: you can play in the sandbox for custom maps and rules, team deathmatch with customizable loadouts, a 12v12 war mode, and more.

• Developer: BixBox VR
• Store link

Gun Raiders

Gun Raiders serves up a healthy slice of multiplayer shooter action with multiple game modes that let you jetpack through the air, climb from wall to wall, and shoot down the competition. There’s the same sort of microtransactions you see in bigger games, but it they’re all avatar skin stuff, so no pay-to-win here.

• Developer: Gun Raiders Entertainment Inc.
• Store link

Gym Class – Basketball

Gym Class – Basketball is the solution if you’re looking to shoot some hoops and dunk like you probably can’t on a physical court. Online multiplayer lets you go head-to-head for a pretty convincing game of b-ball thanks to the game’s physics-based and full-body kinematics.

• Developer: IRL Studios
• Store link

Blaston

This room-scale shooter is now free-to-play, letting you take on friends, family and foes in head-to-head 1v1 dueling. Refine your loadout and jump into the action as you scramble for weapons and send a volley of hellfire at your enemies, all the while Matrix dodging through this innovative bullet hell meets futuristic dueling game.

• Developer: Resolution Games
• Store link

Hyper Dash

Hyper Dash is a multiplayer shooter that basically fills in where Echo Combat never could (never mind that Echo Combat was never on Quest, and is now entirely defunct on Oculus PC). Letting you quick dash, sprint, and rail grind around, Hyper Dash manages to serve up an impressive number of modes, including Payload, Domination, Control Point, (Team) Deathmatch, Capture The Flag, and Elimination. You can also take on both Quest and SteamVR users thanks to the inclusion of cross-play.

• Developer: Triangle Factory
• Store link

Ultimechs

Ultimechs should look pretty familiar: it’s basically Rocket League, but instead of driving around in cars, you’re given rocket-powered fists to punch balls into the goal. Online multiplayer includes both 1v1 and 2v2 matches, offering up tons of opportunities to earn cosmetic gear that will let you outfit your battle mech into something unique. There are also now two paid battle passes too, offering up a ton of cosmetics to set you apart from the competition.

• Developer: Resolution Games
• Store link

FRENZIES (early access)

Fans of arena shooters, get ready to battle in this lucky dip of game modes, including all of your favorite modes and a few new ones too, like Red Light, Green Light and Glitter Pig. Now in early access, the stylish, neon-soaked free-to-play team shooter packs in some serious style.

• Developer: Near Light (nDreams)
• Store link

Cards & Tankards

Cards & Tankards is a pretty addictive social collectible card game, letting you collect and battle friends with over 180 cards. With cross-play against SteamVR headsets (also free on PC), you may consider hosting your regular game night playing more than a few rounds in the game’s characteristic medieval fantasy tavern.

• Developer: Divergent Realities
• Store link

Vegas Infinite

No real cash gambling here, but PokerStars’ Vegas Infinite not only let you go all-in on games of Texas Hold’em, but now a full casino’s worth of table games a machines that are sure to light up the dopamine starved pleasure centers of your brain. It’s all free play, so you won’t be risking real cash unless you buy in-game chips, which cannot be turned back into real money: it’s only to keep your bankroll flush for free play.

• Developer: LuckyVR Inc
• Store link

Bait!

Since the Fishin’ Buddies update, this classic VR title has gotten a whole new lease on life as a multiplayer VR fishing game that lets you sit back and crack a cold one with the boys as you reel in the big’uns. The additional social areas also let you sit back between your fishing adventures to take part in casual mini-games.

• Developer: Resolution Games
• Store link

Gods of Gravity

Gods of Gravity is an arcade-style RTS game where you compete in an epic showdown of between celestial gods (2-8 players). Scoop up ships and fling them to capture a nearby planet, or open wormholes to teleport them across the solar system. Hold planets and moons to boost your production. Mine asteroids for the powerful resources within. And if you dare, capture the sun for the ultimate buff. Then send a massive fleet to conquer your enemy’s home planet. Last god standing wins.

• Developer: Trass Games
• Store link

Social VR Platforms

Rec Room

Without a doubt one of the most fun, and most expansive VR titles out there… and it’s free. Sure, you can pay real cash for in-game tokens to buy spiffy clothes for your avatar, but that’s really up to you. Gads of mini-games await you in both first-party creations such as the ever so popular co-op Quests—that could be games in their own right—to user-created stuff that will keep your pocket book gathering dust. It’s social VR, so meet people and have a ball for zero dollarydoos. Fair warning: there’s a ton of kids.

• Developer: Rec Room
• Store link

VRChat

If you’ve been anywhere near the Internet in the last few years, it’s likely you’ve already heard about VRChat, the user-generated social VR space filled with… well… everything you can imagine, re-pro games included like Among Us, Mario Kart, and even a version of Beat Saber. Fashion your own avatar or download the millions of user-generated avatars out there so you can embody SpongeBob, Kirito from Sword Art Online, or any one of the million anime girl avatars that you’re bound to see there.

• Developer: VRChat
• Store link

Horizon Worlds

Horizon Worlds has changed a lot since launch. It now includes more tools, user-generated content, and some more compelling first-party games which has rounded out things to make it more competitive with Rec Room and VRChat. You may want to check in just to see the state of Meta’s first-party VR social platform. Whatever the case, the price of ‘free’ is hard to argue with.

• Developer: Meta
• Store link

Continue on Page 2: Free Experiences & Apps»

Bounce Arcade, recently announced and launching this Fall, looks like a unique fusion of pinball and VR, in a way that’s truly native to the medium. It’s an example of the body of VR-native gameplay mechanics that’s still in its infancy.

Update (October 1st, 2024): Developer Velan Studios announced that Bounce Arcade will officially launch on Quest on November 21st, priced at $20. The game will include four boards at launch, and mechanics like every pinball player’s favorite, ‘multi-ball’, are promised to make an appearance.

The original article, which explores the game’s creative mechanical exploration—and how essential this is to the growth of the medium—continues below.

Original Article (July 10, 2024): All video games trace their lineage to arcade games.

I’m not necessarily talking about games in a big cabinet, but any game which has little in the way of narrative, characters, and progression. They’re primarily built around simple gameplay mechanics that are just plain-old fun.

With Pong (1972) we figured out how one axis of input could work. With Pac Man (1980) we added two axes and enemies to chase the player. Super Mario Bros (1985) figured out how we would fit a larger and more complex world onto a small screen. And Star Fox (1993) on SNES laid the groundwork for navigating 3D worlds from a third-person perspective.

It’s the mechanics that drove these games—the ones that are so fun they don’t even need narrative, characters, or progression for them to feel complete.

It took 21 years to get from Pong to Star Fox. And since then, games have only grown in complexity, but only by building on core mechanics that were invented long before.

Platformers that are not conceptually distant from Super Mario Bros are still huge. So are games using third-person views and on-screen reticles for navigation and aiming, like Star Fox.

I could go on-and-on with these examples, but the point is, they take time to figure out. And it’s not until you figure them out that you can create compelling games with all the other stuff on top, like narrative, characters, and progression.

It took decades of work to find these core mechanics and for them to eventually evolve into the huge games we know and love today. There’s a lot that’s been established at this point.

But, all that work was done specifically for flatscreen games made for controllers or keyboard & mouse.

When a new medium like VR comes along—with a whole new kind of input like 6DOF motion controllers—we can borrow from the flatscreen realm, but ultimately the medium needs to invent the mechanics that feel truly native to it.

Many VR games borrow too much from the world of flatscreen gaming. They don’t sufficiently answer the question ‘why play this in VR instead of on a flat screen?’. And these games unfortunately tend not to find much commercial success.

Then something like Beat Saber (2018) comes along.

Rhythm games have been around for a long time; but Beat Saber took the overall concept of a rhythm game and paired it with a core mechanic that is truly native to VR. The way you use your body to slice cubes in Beat Saber can’t be replicated in any medium other than VR.

Beat Saber found a core mechanic that feels great in VR. And one day that mechanic will be the foundation for a game that’s not just the arcade-y expression of the mechanic, but a large and complex game instead.

There’s been other core VR mechanics discovered thus far. Like Gorilla Tag’s unique movement—which can’t be replicated outside of VR—that turned the simple game of tag into one of Quest’s most successful titles and spawned a whole new genre of games based on this VR-native mechanic.

But there’s still so much to invent and discover when it comes to VR-native mechanics.

All of this is to say, I love seeing new and creative gameplay ideas that feel truly at home in VR. And what I’ve seen of the recently announced Bounce Arcade immediately struck me as one of those ideas.

We’ve already seen plenty of pinball machine simulations in VR: the kind where you’re literally standing in front of a pinball machine and pressing buttons to flip the flippers.

But Bounce Arcade is taking the overarching concept of pinball and truly and creatively reimagining it for VR. Your fists are the paddles and the world around you is the playing field. It’s a fresh look at what pinball even means when you’ve got the power to alter the player’s entire reality and allow them to bring their hands into the game world.

Bounce Arcade is coming to Quest on November 21, priced at $20. So far other platforms have not been confirmed.

But this isn’t to say that all VR games are destined to be arcade games. To the contrary—what I’m saying is the medium still needs to spend time experimenting and innovating on core VR-native mechanics.

Only once a sufficient number of them are discovered and refined will we start to see a real mass of larger and more complex games that feel properly at home in VR. It’s actually pretty easy with a little imagination to see how you could extend Bounce Arcade’s underlying mechanic into a much more complex and less arcade-centric game.

And honestly, I think there are many more of these VR-native mechanics already out there that simply haven’t gotten enough attention. That’s a huge reason why I’m working on the Inside XR Design video series to highlight these kinds of learnings. If you’ve read this far, I have to imagine you’re interested enough in this topic that you’d probably enjoy checking out the episodes published so far.