The real magic happens when you start trying to increase your score by timing your shots and reloads in time to the music, turning combat into a dance. It's easy enough, with generous aim assist, that you can breeze through most of its levels on your first couple of tries. Some enemies wear armour and require multiple hits to go down, but otherwise there's not much more to it than that. You have to duck and dodge their bullets, and shoot or punch them first. That's Pistol Whip, and it's glorious.Įach level has you sliding down a straight tunnel as silhouetted figures appear and take aim. Imagine Guitar Hero - or Beat Saber, elsewhere on this list - but you're shooting at men in time to the music instead of tapping or slicing blocks. Pistol Whip Supports: Valve Index, HTC Vive and Oculus headsets. Hopefully it won't be another 13 years before they try again. Valve can operate at a scale and level of polish that other studios simply can't afford to match. If you're looking for a large scale FPS game in VR, Half-Life: Alyx is the game for you. Particularly during the frequent horror sections, which are among the scariest experiences you can have in VR and pitch perfect in avoiding frustration. You have to manually load bullets into your weapons, all of which can now be upgraded, and combat is newly tense as a result. Alyx also has gravity gloves rather than a gravity gun, to help you in pawing your way through the newly dense environments. She speaks - the series' first talking protagonist - and the dialogue is funny throughout. Set five years before the events of Half-Life 2, you take control of former sidekick Alyx.
HL:A takes everything that made previous games in the series great and makes them work in VR, from headcrabs pouncing at your face to Antlions bursting when you shoot their glowing sacs. Half-Life: Alyx is Valve's first Half-Life game in 13 years, and their first FPS in eight, but they've lost none of the craft that first made them famous. Half-Life: Alyx Supports: Valve Index, HTC Vive and Oculus headsets.
You can also find out more about what we think of the best VR headsets for PC, or if you've got lost and don't want a VR game at all, check out our non-VR picks of the best PC games you can play right now. Our picks of the very best are below, but if you think there's a great VR game we've missed then tell us why you love what you love in the comments below. Virtual reality is an increasingly mature medium, which means the best VR games cover enough genres to appeal to most different kinds of players.
Just follow our How to play Half-Life: Alyx on Oculus Quest guide to get started. Don't forget, you can also play all the VR games below on an Oculus Quest as well, thanks to Oculus Link. That means no games that are mostly about staring or watching than actually playing.
We've also concentrating on looking at official releases rather than user-made hacks, as well as experiences that have been designed at least in part with VR in mind. We've concentrated on VR games that run on multiple platforms when compiling this list, though you will find a handful of Oculus exclusives among our top picks. It's by no means a complete list, as there are now more great VR games than you'll ever have time to play, but if you've just bought yourself a virtual reality headset such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Cosmos or Valve Index, then these are the VR games you should play first. Note that reviving Lone Echo, the in-game resolution scale does not work, you need to set super sampling using the SteamVR resolution slider.Ever since Half-Life: Alyx came out earlier this year, virtual reality has been going from strength to strength, so we've put together a list of the best VR games you can play on PC right now. And I've got more than 2 years of experience optimizing Lone Echo -)ĭon't get me wrong - Lone Echo looks totally awesome using the Index with 4xMSAA and res 200%, unfortunately I get like 10-20 fps doing that. For now I have not been able to achieve similar image quality and performance using the Index - but using at least 2080 Ti or 3080 Ti may help. Lone Echo was made for CV1, and Lone Echo with CV1 truly shines using super sampling 2.0 and temporal antialiasing. If you deactivate MSAA (and of course TAA) and using 100% res the game performs great, but jaggies are everywhere. An ideal solution would be 4xMSAA and SteamVR res 150+ %, but for that you'll need a 3080 Ti or maybe 4080 Ti -) Problem is that you now need MSAA, and MSAA requires tons of gpu performance compared to TAA. You need to turn off temporal antialiasing (TAA), because that'll look super-blurry using the Index.