If you invested $300 in an Oculus Quest 2 headset, some great VR experiences await. Like Apple’s app store for the iPhone, the Oculus store is highly curated, with Oculus carefully vetting every title that hits its store. The result is that it’s hard to find a genuinely bad game for the Quest—even the worst games don’t suffer from any serious bugs and have a moderate amount of gaming value and playability. If that’s the best thing you can say about a game, you certainly don’t want to spend your hard-earned money on it—especially when the best Oculus Quest 2 games tend to cost an average of $30.
The good news is that there are some unquestionably awesome VR games out there, with more high-quality titles arriving all the time. We’ve taken a look at pretty much every single item in the Oculus store and rounded up the best ones you can currently get. We’ve played each and every one of these games, so if you’re looking for great games to experience the best that VR has to offer today, read on for our roundup of the best VR games for the Oculus Quest 2.
- Best VR Take on Fortnite: Population: One
- Best VR Horror Game: The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
- Best VR Fitness Game: Supernatural
- Best VR Adventure Game: Moss
- Best VR Rhythm Game: Beat Saber
- Best VR Sports Game: Topgolf with Pro Putt
- Most Clever VR Game: Superhot VR
- Trippiest VR Experience: A Fisherman's Tale
- Best PC VR Game: Final Assault
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Best VR Take on Fortnite
Population: One
Population: One
One easy criticism you can level at the world of VR games is that for the most part, they’re not especially sophisticated titles. Most VR games lean into one simple idea or game mechanic and don’t offer a lot of complexity, hoping the novelty of taking place in a VR environment will make up for a lack of depth of gameplay.
That’s changing, though, with a handful of truly complex games hitting the Oculus store in recent months. Population: One could be the most ambitious VR title created specifically for the Quest yet. A Fortnite-style battle royale masterpiece, it drops you into a fully realized 3D worlds with a wealth of weapons, abilities, construction and mobility mechanics to work with as you play against a massive number of other gamers in real time.
Like any other battle royale, your goal is to outlast the other competitors and be the last team standing. You can paraglide, climb walls, snipe, run and gun. Battle royale is a hot gaming genre these days, and Population: One puts VR on the map as a great environment in which to expereince it.
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Best VR Horror Game
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: Do. Not. Like. This game wasn’t made for me, because I find VR zombies terrifying, and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners isn’t a good choice for casual gamers who, like me, don’t want to come face-to-face with horror in VR—it’s a zombie combat game, after all. In other words, loving the TV show doesn’t qualify you to love this game. The game also relies on movement mechanics that put you at heightened risk of motion sickness, so VR newbies might need to acclimate to VR before trying this title.
That might not sound like a heartfelt endorsement for the game, but for the right kind of gamer, it’s an awesome example of what a big budget, A-list game from a major studio can be like in VR. The game is deep and tells a lengthy story, with a lot of crafting at your disposal to build weapons and level up. There are meaningful decisions to make with multiple paths to victory, and if you always choose to walk into every situation with an itchy trigger finger, you’ll often end up dead. If that sounds like fun, give it a go—but priced at $40, think carefully before you complete your purchase.
Best VR Fitness Game
Supernatural
Supernatural
It didn’t take long for gamers and developers alike to realize that VR was a great place to work out, especially after Beat Saber (also on this list) proved to be the Quest’s first true breakout game, leaving players sweaty and exhausted. Supernatural picks up where Beat Saber leaves off, designed for workouts from the ground up. There are easy, moderate and hard workouts that work both your upper- and lower-body with constant arm swinging, lunges and squats.
Supernatural has a few elements that make it incredibly addictive. Every single day there’s at least one new workout, conducted by real human coaches who keep you motivated throughout each session. The workouts take place in some of the most beautiful places on earth, so you can rest assured that your morning routine will take you to mountain peaks, arctic landscapes and ocean vistas. And unlike a lot of fitness apps, Supernatural licenses popular and classic music. Working out to curated playlists of music you know and love makes all the difference in the world, and whether your tastes lean toward rock, R&B or hip-hop, there’s usually enough here to keep you coming back for more.
The game itself is free, but you’ll need to pay for a subscription (about $15 per month) to keep using the app. The good news: One subscription allows up to four family members to create their own custom profiles.
Best VR Adventure Game
Moss
Moss
Moss has been around since the early days of the original Quest, but that makes it no less impressive. It’s virtually required playing for someone new to VR. In Moss, you play as an observer who has a limited ability to interact with a fantasy world in which you’re helping a tiny mouse on an adventurer’s quest. Quill—the mouse in question—is adorable beyond words, and it’s this aesthetic that's built around such a lovable protagonist that makes the game utterly charming.
Most of the game involves moving from one setting to the next, solving a specific puzzle (or series of puzzles) to allow you to move on to the next scene. Each setting is like an elaborate diorama, and within it you direct Quill where to run, how to climb, and when to fight. At the same time, you get to move things around, like sliding large stone blocks to clear and unblock the path. Come for the cute mouse and stay for the occasionally challenging puzzles.
Best VR Rhythm Game
Beat Saber
Beat Saber
It’s probably not a stretch to assert that Beat Saber put the Oculus Quest on the map. Combining the mechanics of a traditional rhythm game with, well, light sabers, it’s addictive because it’s so physically visceral, involves music, and realizes your fantasies about being a Jedi. You probably already know the deal: You swipe at color-coded blocks that fly at you down a virtual conveyor belt, and at higher difficulties, the game can become incredibly challenging as you anticipate the approaching blocks and try to strike them with the right light saber.
The game has made its way onto a number of platforms, and in all honesty, the best experience is on PC-based VR headsets, because that version of Beat Saber can use songs from your personal music collection. Quest gamers have to pay for DLC packs to get more songs.
Best VR Sports Game
Topgolf with Pro Putt
Topgolf with Pro Putt
Topgolf is one of many family recreation centers that has no doubt been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. A high-tech putting center, it’s almost a real-life reimaging of VR golf (you hit balls that are tracked with microchips so you can see your performance on large screens). So it makes some sense that the real-life golf center would offer a VR experience.
Topgolf with Pro Putt definitely scratches your golf itch. It combines realistic golfing physics with semi-realistic environments, and the resulting aesthetic is fun but low-key. You get a driving range, practice green and four complete courses, each with a very different look and feel.
Most Clever VR Game
Superhot VR
Superhot VR
The concept behind Superhot sounds like a science fiction movie starring Nick Cage: Time only moves when you do, so to hold off enemies and formulate your strategy, just freeze. This is another one of those games that’s been around a while, but it remains a satisfying classic that makes perfect use of virtual reality.
You punch, stab and shoot your way through a series of very, very short but intense bursts of action as you fight glass adversaries who shatter at the slightest touch. The game’s physics is the star of the show that allows cool moves like catching weapons that enemies drop as you kill them and other fancy time-stop moves. There’s no real narrative here, though the game’s varied locales suggest there’s a story unfolding that never hasn’t fully materialized.
Trippiest VR Experience
A Fisherman's Tale
A Fisherman's Tale
Some VR games try to mimic realistic environments. Others put you in fantasy realms or fiddle with time and space. A Fisherman’s Tale explores scale: small, large, and everything in between. As the titular fisherman, you built an exact replica of the lighthouse you live in and discover that the replica fisherman mimics everything you do. But that’s not all—you’re a smaller version of a much larger lighthouse, and there’s a giant fisherman doing everything you do as well. Like a trippy Russian nesting doll, the layers go infinitely in both directions.
The game builds on that premise by putting you in situations in which you need to solve puzzles with items around you. But sometimes you need larger or smaller versions of those things, and you need to manipulate your world to get access to items from the giant world above you or the scale model on the table.
Best PC VR Game
Final Assault
Final Assault
One reason that the Oculus Quest 2 is such a compelling VR headset is that in addition to being a completely wireless, standalone VR device, you can also connect it to a PC using a long USB cable to play the enormous library of PC-based VR titles for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. To showcase this secret weapon in the Quests’s arsenal, I’m including one PC VR game intended for the HTC Vive that plays superbly on the Quest 2. One might be inclined to pick a game like Half Life: Alyx, a deeply sophisticated AAA title that takes place in the Half Life universe, but an even better example is Final Assault thanks to its simplicity, replayability and how it appeals your inner child.
Final Assault is a simple real time strategy game that imagines what it would be like if the World War II-style toy soldiers you played with as a kid came to life. The game mechanics are simple, you have a good assortment of weapons and vehicles, and you can play single-player campaigns or multiplayer battles. Every moment of this game is utterly endearing, but nothing compares to controlling a WWII bomber that’s flying around your head like a radio-controlled plane. Final Assault is such an incredibly addictive game that you’ll find you can’t stop playing it, months and months after you first install it.