Beat Saber is stylish, fun and hits all the right notes for a VR-native rhythm game. In its Early Access state, it’s missing out on some variability when it comes to songs and visuals, but lays the foundation for a game that has the potential to charm a pretty wide audience. Gameplay is intuitive, but also difficult to master, making it a title worth revisiting, and passing around to anyone regardless of age or gaming background.

A superb game; the promising result of tasking a group of clearly talented game designers and developers with building a game around a brand new medium like VR. The game expertly executes every idea it brings to the table. There's charm throughout, derived from excellent animation, art direction, FX and SFX, right down to the interactive credits sequence.

Offering a suspenseful story, characters that feel human, and sci-fi backdrop that hits all the right beats, 'Lone Echo' is an impressive entry into the VR adventure genre that begging for multiple series. If the concept of "VR legs" ever existed, you won't need them in this zero-g space adventure that lets you fly with ease for hours at a time.

Asgard's Wrath may not offer the richest melee combat experience out there, but this epic Norse saga serves up a truly competent RPG that's not only strong in the visual department but is also packed with a full set of VR-native controls, something that's been so far missing in ported RPGs. There may be some wonkiness when it comes to object interaction, but the charming set pieces and excellent character design lend a level of immersion to this truly feature-length game that's hard to beat.

Until You Fall successfully brings together satisfying hack & slash gameplay with deeper combat systems that make for meaningful strategic choices about the weapons you bring to the battlefield and the way that you use them. The game's underlying systems could be communicated a bit more clearly to get players up to speed. As a rogue-lite, there's no compelling world, characters, or story to unravel, but challenging combat and the allure of enhancing your weapons or experimenting with new ones will make you want to play 'just one more run' over and over.

The Gallery -Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone is a longer, stonger and more immersive experience than the first in the series, and shows that Cloudhead has put in the hours producing a visually and emotionally adept story that feels like it hasn't outworn its welcome. Puzzles are innovative, and while they aren't particularly difficult, they always reward you with something worth pursuing.

Beat Saber's signature VR rhythm gameplay feels solid on PSVR, even at the highest levels of difficulty. This is a highly active game that not only creates a great sense of embodiment, but can also be a decent workout. The new Campaign mode adds surprising life to the game, and modifiers combined with objectives can bring new meaning and challenge to songs you thought you knew forwards and backwards. A roster of 16 quality songs is a good start, and the company plans to add more over time, but how much additional songs will cost and whether or not they come quickly enough to keep players satiated in the long term is still up in the air.

Batman: Arkham Shadow delivers an engaging VR experience that captures the essence of the Arkham series by understanding the core formula and deeply adapting it for VR. The game offers well-executed movement, light puzzles, and innovative VR melee combat. The narrative, though not without impressive voice acting and world-building, suffers from painfully slow pacing and direction, ultimately diminishing immersion. The game turns out to be surprisingly comfortable considering the significant amount of artificial locomotion.

Robo Recall is one of the most frantic, kinetic, satisfying, and challenging games of bullet ballet available in VR today. It harkens back to headier days of blue skies, tight gameplay loops, and arcade purity. You could argue that it’s a little content light, but you can’t argue with the price, so we turn to the modding community to see where they can take us next. [Tested with Oculus Rift]

Moss is the beautiful opening to a promising tale of an adorable mouse and her silent helper. It's an artfully crafted game that you will want more of—more content, more story, and more depth. Moss feels like an opening chapter that's trying too hard to be a self contained story. It got the ball rolling but fumbled when it came to bring all the pieces together. If Polyarc can follow through with their (apparent) plans for timely episodic installments to the world of Moss, and continue building on this foundation, this could be the start of a world you'll look forward to losing yourself in any time there's a new story to be told.

Sprint Vector may have borrowed some well-established kart racing tropes from the Mario Kart franchise, but that's where the comparison with other games stops. Using a unique locomotion system, Survios shows a masterful understanding of what it takes to make a fast-paced, but comfortable racing experience, one that will have you flying higher and running faster than you've ever gone before.

Red Matter 2 brings best-in-class graphics and interactions to Quest 2, a welcomed entry amidst a largely arcade-focused library—and stands as a solid PC VR title in its own right. Mostly good puzzling gameplay is mixed with a light helping of not-so-good combat, set against a backdrop of a 'radio play' plot that's not particularly engaging. With a stellar attention to graphical detail and direction, both large & small, and a richly interactive world, Red Matter 2 excels in the immersion department in a way that few VR games do. While effectively channeling titles like Lone Echo and Half-Life: Alyx, it doesn't quite reach that mark, but for a small team and a reasonable $30 price tag it's an impressive feat—especially considering the computational limitations of Quest 2.

Thumper is a fun and visually aggressive, face paced rhythm survival game. As a space scarab you’ll enjoy banking and weaving your way through hours of increasingly intense levels. It doesn't make use of any mechanics that are unique to VR and plays identically on the screen as it does on the headset, however the novelty of being in VR enables a more focused experience and heightens the game's purposeful intensity. [Tested with PlayStation VR]

LEGO Bricktales isn't the complete VR digitalization of the LEGO-building experience we might have hoped for, but it does present well-designed puzzles and plenty of light adventuring opportunities in the game's undeniably charming lego-filled world. Although the kid-friendly story is a bit of a snooze, the star of the show is definitely the lego puzzles where Bricktales makes up for the lack of 1:1 lego tactility with smart brick-building design. Despite being ported from flatscreen, puzzle solving feels suitably native to VR.

With its mixture of incredible highs and frustrating lows, I tentatively recommend Project CARS 2. Its physics engine has taken a massive step forward, and should win back many enthusiasts. But as a result, the game sits more firmly in the ‘sim’ category, and might feel less approachable for fans of the original (or those coming from series like Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo). If you can look past the unproven multiplayer and troublesome AI—which should improve over time—Project CARS 2 is a seriously capable title with a promising future.

Superhot VR is built upon a one-of-a-kind bullet-time mechanic that translates phenomenally well to VR. After a slow start, you'll find that the game is part action and part puzzle, as you dodge incoming firing in slow motion while finding the most effective way to shatter your enemies. The core gameplay is challenging and enjoyable, though it comes up just short of hitting a masterful climax of game mechanics. The story elements are mostly distractions, and, like many of the best VR experiences, we're left wishing there was more than the 2 or so hours of gameplay available. [Tested with Oculus Touch]

I Expect You to Die 2 may be more of the same, but it's a good slice of fun, espionage-flavored action that again tasks you with disarming cleverly-designed and deadly puzzles provided by the evil Bond-style Zoraxis corporation. While object interaction isn't the game's strong suit, the sequel offers up a good number of varied levels packed with truly intriguing puzzles, oftentimes containing multiple ways to die that always feel like the joke's on you.

Moss: Book II is a direct continuation of the first game in both story and core mechanics. Generally speaking, it's a longer and better experience than the original Moss thanks to the introduction of new weapons, mechanics, and more intriguing puzzles. The game is polished to the brim with stellar art direction, with each segment of the game being its own detailed diorama with top notch composition. Sound is strong and animations are superb throughout, with one of the game's enjoyable boss fights showcasing Polyarc's animation prowess in particular. Though the 'narrated book' story structure may have hindered the impact of the story and characters, Moss: Book II is a well rounded adventure you won't want to miss.

By combining shooting, dodging, and rhythm, Pistol Whip gets you moving in a unique and compelling way. The game is at its best when it leads you into a strong sense of flow where dodging and shooting fuse into a cohesive dance. It isn't without occasional frustration—having your flow broken by seemingly unfair deaths can be annoying. A generous set of modifiers and options allow you to tweak the game in significant ways, especially the Dual Wield mode which changes (for the better, in my opinion) the way the game feels. Pistol Whip has undoubtedly strong fundamentals, though it seems like there's untapped potential waiting to be unlocked with better level mapping.

Demeo is a very solid tabletop game that hits the mark on balance, difficulty, and polish, but in its quest to offer up a more true-to-life tabletop game experience, it doesn't focus enough on leveraging VR mechanics to bring players more into the action.

YUKI is a nostalgia-soaked bullet hell shooter that puts you in control of an action figure-sized protagonist. As a roguelike game, YUKI is patently difficult and essentially requires a fair bit of grinding to get to the end boss. Fun and useful upgrades are dolled out often enough to keep you coming back for more though. We were left wanting more of the cool and stylish Japanese mythology-inspired bosses and inventive levels, but that may speak to just how fun and cohesive the entire experience is. It's best played standing, however seated mode may ask for simply too much movement to really be practical.

A lot of small changes to the VR shooter formula add up to more than the sum of their parts, delivering an enjoyable experience somewhat let down by overly fussy controls and a lack of variety. You'll forget all the sleepy towns along the way but you’ll remember the protagonist, you’ll remember Fred and you’ll remember the ending. [Tested with Oculus Rift with Oculus Touch]

Skyrim VR has successfully made its way to PC after squeezing onto PSVR, now boosting the pixels where it counts and leaving it an extremely stable experience. While flatscreen-to-VR ports tend to have the deck stacked against them, Skyrim VR for PC shows that you can bring an older, more mature game to VR and have great results. Besides some obvious holdbacks and design tropes from an early era in gaming, its vast and rich world, great voice acting and depth of play mostly make up for its shortcomings.

Stormland has delivered on its ambitious vision of making VR open-world adventuring a reality, thanks to smart design on both macro and micro scales. While there's some rough edges, the game brings enjoyable combat, innovative world traversal, and satisfying interactions to the table in a way rarely executed as well on their own, let alone together in a single experience. With fully-featured two-player co-op and the potential for long term replayability in the Cycling World, Stormland sets a new bar while at the same time laying out a well-formulated framework that will benefit VR games of the future.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a slightly tuned-down RPG that's just begging to be bigger in size, although it didn't bite off too much in its quest to deliver an engrossing story, excellent physics-based zombie killing action, and an immersive atmosphere that feels as gritty and deadly serious as The Walking Dead comic books.

FORM offers a visually stunning mix of epic, dream-like architecture and ever-morphing geometric shapes. Puzzles are intuitive, and while difficulty is on the low to medium side, they always make you feel like you've accomplished something great. In the end, it demonstrates a clear understanding of what makes VR different, and delivers a truly VR-native experience that you'll have a hard time forgetting. [Tested with HTC Vive]

Wanderer mostly delivers on its promise to immerse players in a sci-fi adventure that has you trekking across time, replete with fun and interesting set pieces that offer up plenty of objects to collect and use as you move forward (and backwards). Voice acting and its script are all on point, however clunky object interaction hampers the entire experience since you're constantly searching and manipulating items. That's more of a casual warning on what to expect than a solid reason not to play though.

With strong gunplay that doesn't overstay its welcome, Blood & Truth plays out like a guided adventure through an action movie. Sony's London Studio has thoughtfully crafted the game with shooting, locomotion, and interaction mechanics that feel good without being overly complex or clunky. The game's action is underpinned with some truly impressive virtual characters which can be enthralling at times. Unfortunately the story they're in service of can't match the excellent renderings and performances. Though it only took me a little more than four hours to complete the main campaign, it still felt like an adventure worth taking.