Onward VS Contractors - Multiplayer Shooters on the Oculus Quest 2

There are a few multiplayer shooters on the Oculus Quest 2, but none as popular as Onward and Contractors, the two giants of Multiplayer Shooting in standalone Virtual Reality. So anyone with a new Quest 2, or that wants to get into VR Shooters might be asking, which one is better? Well that might depend on your own taste. Here you’ll see, category by category, how the two games compare. So here’s a breakdown of Onward Versus Contractors on the Oculus Quest 2.

Gameplay

Gameplay can mean a lot of things, so let’s get a little more specific. How does the game feel to play? What is the moment to moment action like? Fun can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so what kind of fun are you looking for?

Well if you want fast paced action, then Contractors is probably going to be your go to game. Often called the “Call of Duty of Virtual Reality”, Contractors emphasizes movement, quick reflexes, and constant gunplay. While there are a variety of game modes (more on that later) most of them play out similarly. Spawn, run for a few seconds, see an enemy, fight, see another enemy, fight, die, rinse and repeat.

There is constant action and very little waiting. You will die and be in another gunfight in less than thirty seconds. The action never stops. As for the gunplay, it plays out quickly, but gives you a chance to react. It takes quite a few bullets to take someone down, depending on the weapon, though generally at least five or six, and headshots are instant kills. All weapons are very accurate and most have low recoil. It is easy to fire fully automatic and hit your target almost every time. Health regenerates automatically, which means that tactics like jumping out of cover or sliding past your enemies are completely viable without risking instant death.

So if you want a fast paced rush where you can jump and power slide across the ground while spraying with an AK, Contractors delivers on that. Otherwise if you just don’t like waiting around and don’t have a whole lot of time to get into a game before you have to take your Quest off, Contractors offers some quick action.

So what about Onward? Well if Contractors sounds too arcadey and fast paced for you, then chances are you will love this alternative. Most Onward games play out like Search and Destroy matches, a team of five against a team of five, one life only per round, no respawns. There is a respawn option, but you will see that less often in public lobbies, and respawns take about ten to fifteen seconds just to get back into the game with them enabled.

All of this means is that your life is more precious in Onward, because once you die you’ll be waiting for a new round to play again, which usually means another couple of minutes before more action at the very least. Couple this with the VERY low Time to Kill (a single bullet can kill easily, no way you can live through three) makes for a very slow paced and cautious game. You might call it “realistic”.

Whatever you call it, Onward offers less action but more tension. Running into the open where an enemy can see you means almost certain death, and while reflexes will definitely matter in some situations, especially in close quarters combat, careful thinking and outsmarting your opponents will give you victory. The fun in Onward isn’t in run jumping into a room spraying bullets, but crouch walking behind a wall, peeking into windows and waiting for an enemy head to appear.

Onward is for those that like mil-sims or just more slowly paced shooters, where quick reflexes and movement aren’t everything. Still, for both games that isn’t all there is, there’s more features to consider.

Game Modes

There’s no use beating around the bush here. Contractors blows Onward out of the water when it comes to Game Modes, and more are being added all of the time. Contractors has been a consistently improved and expanded game through constant updates, while Onward has remained largely the same for the past year or so.

That being said, not all of Contractor’s game modes are very good, but you will probably find something that you enjoy. Base Game Modes include your typical capture the flag style gameplay with sixteen players in a single match (Ground War), Team Deathmatch, escort the VIP, the usual hits and more. With a good variety of maps included in the game, there are also World War 2 and Ninja game modes, where the weapons are all replaced with WW2 variants, or everyone gets a bow, Katana, and smoke bombs. They’re all great fun, though preferences and opinions may vary.

There are quite a few single player missions. While the AI is pretty incompetent, fighting a lot of them can be very fun. There’s some escorting missions, enemy leader assassination missions (the leaders are just super buffed AI enemies), and more. While the Singleplayer is not enough alone to justify buying the game, it’s not a bad way to warm up from time to time, and can be experienced in Co-Op Multiplayer.

What’s more interesting is the Co-Op survival mode, where a team of four players faces off against waves of enemies. The later waves get very intense, and there is decent variety in the enemies that you face, from guys with SMGs to explosive laden attack dogs. It’s a challenge and it’s good fun. There is also a lackluster zombie survival mode, that feels like it needs more effort put into it, though hopefully that will be fixed one day with updates.

The thing that really makes Contractors stand out is its support of custom game modes and maps. Want to experience classics from the old Call of Duty games in VR? Maps from every classic installment of the series, such as the Modern Warfares and Black Opses, can be found in Contractors to fight over again in Virtual Reality. These maps are the most popular and the most fun. Arenas from other games are present as well, like Halo 3.

Custom game modes like Gun Game are also present in Contractors, so when you get tired of Capturing flags there’s a lot more to do. Really there’s far too many choices to list here, and more are added all of the time.

Custom Loadouts are a more recent addition to the Contractors modding scene, and they really round out custom experiences. Want Halo guns for your Halo map? Now that is possible, and you’ll even be wearing Master Chief’s armor while you use them. Want Star Wars droids fighting clone troopers on Call of Duty’s terminal map? That’s possible now too. These mods are now even capable of affecting the pace of gameplay, with guns that are less accurate, and more shots required for a kill.

Unfortunately Onward does not have modding support outside of some custom maps. Still, the game modes are pretty good. There are two main game modes in Multiplayer, Send the Uplink (type some numbers in front of a dish the other team is defending), and Escort the VIP (make sure one player with only a pistol makes it to one of two points on the map, if that player dies you lose). There’s also Gun Game, which is pretty fun, though it fits better in a faster paced game like Contractors, and a bizarre game mode called Spec Ops.

Spec Ops is kind of a misgnomer, something like “zombie” or “infection” would be a better name. In this mode one team moves really quickly and is armed with knives, while the other team moves normally and has pistols with a single magazine of ammunition. Whichever team is wiped out first loses. Oh, and the map looks foggy so it’s hard to see far. Spec Ops is… well it’s a bit weird and doesn’t really fit into the rest of Onward’s lineup, but is a decent distraction for a few rounds.

While these are good game modes that take familiar archetypes and do interesting things with them, there isn’t nearly as much variety here. On the other hand the built in maps that Onward comes with are fantastic, and come with a variety of spawn points and objective locations to keep them fresh. While the custom maps might show some promise over time, so far what the community has created so far has not surpassed Onward’s original maps.

Onward does have a better Singleplayer experience than Contractors does, with two game modes. Hunt, where you must defeat all AI enemies on the map, or Evac, where you must fight off or evade waves of enemies and escape in a Helicopter. All in all Onward has a better single player, mostly through the virtue of slightly better AI opponents, who aren’t terribly lifelike, but at least take cover sometimes and shoot straight. Still, the Singleplayer is not enough on its own, except as a nice warm up and a decent couple of hours of AI stomping.

Weapons and Loadouts

What is a shooter without a ton of weapons to shoot and customize? Well in this category Onward outshines Contractors.

There are more possibilities for customization in Onward, where in Contractors you get some choices like what weapon to take and whether or not to use a foregrip or silencer. Contractors also has a few optics to choose from depending on the weapon, though the options to choose from are very limited.

Contractors does also offer a choice between light, medium and heavy armors. The thinking being that more armor means slower movement, and less armor means faster movement. Not to mention the grenades and melee weapons there are to choose from. Meanwhile Onward offers more viable variations of loadouts depending on the situation, or player preference.

In Onward there is a greater variety of options to play around with. You can choose between AP and FMJ ammunition, whether to take extra body armor, or extra healing items. Night vision is an option for night maps, and so are lasers and flashlights on your weapon. Bipods are an option in addition to foregrips. There are riot shields and RPGs available, or even an underbarrel grenade launcher on a couple of weapons. You can take a flying drone for scouting, and put C4 on it for the classic exploding drone technique.

The options you have to customize your loadouts in Onward are far beyond what Contractors offers, and the slower pace of gameplay makes optimizing your loadout and playing with all of the options very rewarding. There are four roles to be taken in Onward, Rifleman, Specialist, Support, and Sniper. Some weapons and gear are shared between them, and some are role exclusive. Each role gets two loadout slots for a total of eight loadouts.

Contractors only gives you five loadouts (though there are another 5 for the World War 2 Game Mode) and each can use any weapon. As for those weapons, while there seems to be a wide variety, you will quickly find that some are just not as good as others.

What the current meta is becomes apparent quickly when you see what weapons you get killed by in public lobbies. Some weapons are just much better at killing opponents faster than others, so the worse weapons just never get used once you realize they are terrible. In Contractors you will find that only one or two weapons in each category are actually useful, which means there is less variety than there seems to be.

Not only that, but the sound and feeling of firearms is different between the two games, and once more Onward outshines Contractors. The weapons in Contractors really need better sounds, suppressed or unsuppressed they sound like Airsoft guns.

In Onward each weapon has a respectable report that sounds much closer to an actual gunshot, and bullets will snap as they pass near your head, while in Contractors you only notice you’re being shot when your screen goes red.

While the weapons in Contractors have a variety of spray patterns and recoil, you will generally be firing them at close range and fully automatic to try and spray down your opponent as quickly as possible. Onward has many maps with wide open spaces (such as Downfall) that require careful aiming and encourage sniping. Sniper rifles are rarely very good in Contractors. The recoil of weapons in Onward makes firing full auto at anything other than close ranges more difficult, and overall feels more like firing an actual gun than an airsoft gun.

Conclusion

So there you have it, the breakdown of Onward VS Contractors on the Oculus Quest 2. Each outshines the other in some areas, so whichever sounds better is totally up to you, though you definitely might enjoy both of them.

One final thing to note is that Contractors more consistently receives large updates that adds more modification options, gameplay improvements, and gameplay modes than Onward does. While these updates are not all super stellar and vary in quality and scope, they have been consistently making Contractors a better game and a greater contender.

Onward has not been receiving the same frequency of updates, and for the past year or so has been pretty stagnant in terms of new features and content. Maybe Downpour Interactive is just working on something big using Onward assets, but if they don’t start updating their game soon they threaten being left in the dust by Contractors. Only time will tell.

Whichever you pick, have fun in VR, and enjoy yourself.

You can get Onward on the Oculus Quest store for 24.99$. Contractors can be found there for 19.99$.