10 best VR games to dive into this year

Valve is one of the gaming industry’s most hallowed and celebrated developers, so, the hype surrounding its first full-length VR game was unsurprisingly massive. Half-Life: Alyx more than delivered on its promise, transporting players to the immersive and incredibly detailed dystopia of City 17. Whether you’re deftly slotting a fresh clip into your handgun, blasting at enemy soldiers from behind cover, or holding a tin of beans really close to your face to read the ingredients, it’s a consistently impressive VR experience.

Best experienced on Valve’s own VR headset – the Valve Index – Half-Life: Alyx requires a separate gaming PC to work. Unlike games that run natively on, for example, the Meta Quest 3, with PC-based virtual reality, the computer does all of the complex rendering, meaning you get more convincing visuals and a more immersive experience. The downside is you need to own a reasonably powerful PC to connect your headset to.

Frontier’s open-ended space epic added a VR mode years after launching, and, while the game wasn’t made with VR in mind, Elite Dangerous remains one of the most immersive experiences you’ll find. The game is known for its masterful and detailed audio design, a soundscape of creaking hulls, sloshing fuel lines and space-rending warp drives. In virtual reality, these sounds work to cement you firmly in the scene – a sort of spaceship ASMR tingle.

Dogfights gain an extra tactical dimension in VR, as you can physically crane your neck around to spot pirates before slamming on the thrusters to catch them. Meanwhile, less frenetic moments are just as impressive. Space stations look and feel breathtaking in their scale, in ways a TV or monitor simply cannot convey.

In Beat Saber, you stand at the end of a virtual tunnel, armed with a laser sword in each hand, slashing at beat-matched blocks as they stream towards you. This is a classic rhythm action game with a VR twist – you’re part gymnastic cyber-samurai, part pop music choreographer, slashing and swishing to the beat of your chosen track.

An immersive and addictive dance experience, Beat Saber is as much a physical workout as it is a game. The difficulty can be ramped up for a greater challenge (seeing you dodge walls and slash at boxes from the correct angles) or dialled back for a more relaxing time. Do you look silly when playing it? Yes. Will you care? Definitely not.

This is an intense bomb defusal simulator for two players. One player enters virtual reality and is faced with a ticking time bomb only they can see. A second player outside VR has the information needed to defuse it, buried somewhere within a huge instruction manual.

The defuser must correctly (and quickly) identify the type of bomb they’re working with before the instructor can relay the correct advice from the manual – such as which wire to cut and which buttons to press. By working together and communicating effectively, players work as a team to avoid getting virtually blown to bits. It’s a deeply clever concept, endlessly fun to play with friends, and now playable without a VR headset on iOS and Android phones.

Exclusive to the PSVR2, this game was designed to showcase what Sony’s new virtual reality headset is capable of. In our Horizon Call of the Mountain review, we called the game “immersive, spectacular, and intelligently designed”.

Our reviewer said: “The inescapably captivating world is a joy just to look at,” adding: “The frenetic pace of combat and clambering is better than any Jane Fonda workout VHS going. Horizon Call of the Mountain is a fine introduction to the PSVR2’s potential, and leaves us wanting more.”

Read our full Horizon Call of the Mountain review

There’s really no better way to appreciate Microsoft Flight Simulator than in virtual reality, so long as your PC can handle the strain. The meticulously detailed flight sim looks incredible in VR, from the individually rendered knobs and switches of an Airbus A380 dashboard to the vast and sprawling landscapes over which you’re flying. Even the cockpit glass looks impressive – the tiny imperfections and scratches subtly catch the light as you move your head around.

About as close to real-life flying as you’ll get while sitting on your sofa in your pyjamas, Microsoft Flight Simulator recreates the entirety of the planet’s surface, using Bing map data and some procedural generation magic. That means you could, if so inclined, hover a virtual helicopter outside your own house while you play, which is pretty mind-bending.

Tetris Effect is already a spectacular experience on a regular screen – it’s an explosively psychedelic and visually overwhelming twist on the classic block-dropping game. In virtual reality, the fast-paced, classic puzzle game becomes borderline transcendental, as your entire vision is consumed by a wall of falling bricks that thump and pulsate in response to the vibey, electronic soundtrack.

Play for more than a few minutes and you’ll feel totally transported. Tetris Effect in VR is a sensory overload and an essential purchase for anyone with a headset.

What better way to escape the mundanity of everyday life than to immerse yourself in the virtual reality Job Simulator? Set in a distant future in which robots have replaced humans in the workplace, Job Simulator pitches itself as an educational tool for curious robots to experience what it was like “to job” in the early 21st century.

It’s essentially a series of hilarious escape rooms, which see you slapping away at a keyboard in an office cubicle, serving hot dogs to hungry customers at a petrol station, and fixing up their cars as a mechanic. The cutesy robot characters do their very best impressions of humankind, but never quite get it right, and everything around you can be picked up and played with to discover a huge amount of hidden, quirky gags.

In Superhot, time only moves when you do. Teleported into the middle of a classic, slow-motion John Woo gunfight, you must grab whatever available weapons are within reach – a gun, a frying pan, a vase – to defend yourself from and kill a group of attacking assassins. When you’re not moving, time grinds to a halt and incoming projectiles hang in the air like confetti, giving you a chance to duck and weave, like The Matrix’s Neo, to avoid them.

Each level is a short, seconds-long vignette – an ambush in an office, a bank heist gone wrong, a fistfight on top of a train – and they consistently make you feel like every great action hero rolled into one. One of the best experiences available in VR, Superhot is a must-play for movie fans.

An epic space adventure taking place in a near-infinite galaxy of stars, planets and moons to explore, No Man’s Sky rolls games such as Elite and Minecraft into one giant playground, and sets you loose in a colourful and constantly surprising universe.

Developer Hello Games has added more and more free content over the years, such as a VR mode that lets you properly appreciate the game’s expansive and beautiful worlds. Virtual reality is well-suited to games that seat you in a cockpit – full-body movement is tiring at best and nausea-inducing at worst – which makes the spaceflight sections of No Man’s Sky an excellent fit for the technology.