The 3 Greatest VR Real Time Strategy (RTS) Games on the Oculus Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3

Real Time Strategy is not the most represented game genre in Virtual Reality or on the Oculus Quest 2. As we’ve covered before here that is partly due to a lack of innovation for VR strategy games, and partially due to the VR format being much better suited to innovation in other areas.

The closeness of Virtual Reality and the ability to turn your arms into controllers is much more suited to Shooting or Fighting games than the Strategy genre. Still, VR Strategy Games on the Oculus Quest 2 offer some head turning visuals, and great use of 3D space that utilizes VR controls. So here’s what we’ve got, the 3 Greatest VR Real Time Strategy Games on the Oculus Quest 2… for now.

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Eternal Starlight

As we’ve said in our video on Eternal Starlight, it isn’t the future of the RTS genre, but it is one hell of a take on a Strategy game in Virtual Reality.

In Eternal Starlight you take on the role of a Captain for future humans who have managed to carve out a new home (not Earth) among the stars. Unfortunately a particular faction of aliens has decided that humans must vacate the planet they have settled on or face annihilation.

With nowhere else to go you must stand and fight and defend humanity’s new home. Gather what allies you can and assemble a fleet, because it’s going to get rough. Don’t worry if you fail though, Eternal Starlight is a roguelike, so you can always try again from the start if your flagship goes down in flames.

The roguelike portion of this game is by far it’s weakest, and seems to have been added to make more game out of less. You will end up repeating the exact same missions, all formatted like RTS story campaign missions, over and over again. Though there is some satisfaction in getting slightly further down a mission tree than you did before.

Each mission in Eternal Starlight begins with a brief chat over the comms to give each mission in this VR RTS a little context.

The meat of the gameplay is directing your low poly ships to face towards other low poly ships and exchange volleys of gunfire ranging from canons to lasers.

All, of course, depending on where the weapons are mounted on the ships themselves. Every ship has shields, armor, and hull points. Get those hull points to zero and they explode in a great fireball.

This gameplay takes place over a variety of missions. Protect the space station, destroy the asteroids with explosives, close the stargate that is spawning enemies, and so much more.

Each mission starts with dialog between the quirky alien races that you fight with and against, which is mildly entertaining the first time, but ends up just being something you just skip past the third to tenth times.

Equipping a ship in Eternal Starlight. This Virtual Reality strategy game is all about customizing your small collection of ships.

Throughout these missions you build your fleet up from just your flagship into a force powerful enough to stop the destruction of the human race, or your fleet is too weak to complete a mission and you start over again. Each ship can be customized with different turrets, upgrades, and special abilities.

There is some tactical depth to making a fleet of ships that complement each other, but you will soon figure out which weapons and abilities are just flat out more powerful than others, and use only those.

Eternal Starlight doesn’t captivate as much as a strategy game with more depth would, but it’s easy to get into and easy to enjoy for about as long as you would enjoy most Virtual Reality titles on the Meta Quest 2 (Six to Eight hours).

The controls are occasionally clunky, but make good use of the 3D space in VR. Moving your ships with the Oculus Touch Controllers in 3D space feels natural when it works properly.

Homeworld: Vast Reaches

Luckily it seems that more innovation and effort has been put into the VR RTS space more recently by Virtual Reality Game developers. With none other than Gearbox Software credited as having had some part in the making of Homeworld: Vast Reaches.

Released shortly before the much anticipated, but much maligned, flatscreen game Homeworld 3, Homeworld: Vast Reaches is a fantastic addition to any strategy gamer’s VR collection and is basically a Homeworld game but in Virtual Reality.

Controlling your fleet in Homeworld VR is easy!

Rather than controlling your fleet of ships with a mouse and keyboard as usual, you’ll be using your hands and taking a god’s eye view of the battlefield as the newest controller of the titular Mothership as the Hiigaran people of the Homeworld universe once more defend themselves from great threats.

Homeworld: Vast Reaches is all about deftly organizing and controlling your fleet of ships as it grows bigger and better throughout the story campaign and you face greater and greater threats. Your ships are all organized in clustered formations called Strike Groups. Each of these strike groups is a group of ships that you organize and control as a single entity.

Inspecting a unit in Homeworld: Vast Reaches.

Each type of unit has different strengths and weaknesses in Homeworld VR, and mixing and matching which ships are combined in your strike group, as well as their formations, makes for some very interesting strategic decisions. Not to mention the more tactical nature of controlling your force in three dimensions.

All together Homeworld: Vast Reaches makes for a fantastic translation of the classic Homeworld experience to Virtual Reality, and is a strategy game that anybody who loves Virtual Reality and loves strategy games should definitely try. The only downside is its lack of Multiplayer or even a Skirmish mode. The entire game is limited to the Campaign, but that Campaign is well designed and thrilling from start to finish.

Battlegroup VR

Here we are saving what is, arguably, the best for last. If you want a Virtual Reality Real Time Strategy Game to really sink your teeth into, Battlegroup VR is what you’re looking for. It has a similar control scheme to Eternal Starlight, but with deeper customization and combat options that make it harder to grasp at first, but much more satisfying to master.

Battlegroup VR is a very intense VR RTS.

Once again you’ll be moving 3D ships in a 3D VR space so that their turrets point at the enemy ships and fire on them. Once again in a variety of missions, all with pre mission narration and plot. You will also acquire resources to build, customize, and upgrade a variety of ships throughout the game. There are a number of combat vessels to choose from, as well as support ships for those combat vessels.

There are a ton of fleet compositions to try, and a ton of different ways to equip your ships. If you like the sound of a game like Eternal Starlight, but want deeper mechanics and customization to sink your teeth into, then Battlegroup VR has you covered.

Customizing your commanders and ships is a must do for victory in this Strategy Game.

The missions are just as varied, from base defense, to convoy raiding, to convoy protection, to just going toe to toe with enemy vessels, there are a lot of tactical scenarios to try out. Though a lot tend to just devolve into straight ship on ship battles. Additionally the maps that these battles take place on tend to be a little bland and not offer a ton of terrain to break up the fighting.

Still, the visuals of Battlegroup VR are beautiful, by far the best out of any Oculus Quest 2 Strategy Game. Instead of the smooth low poly visuals of the other games listed here, Battlegroup VR goes for a high sci fi, high realistic and very dark aesthetic. It really pushes the Meta Quest 2’s graphical capabilities far, and still runs smoothly.

You can even see your ships out of the window of your flagship! Very cool.

The game uses these gorgeous visuals well. The bridge of your flagship stares directly into the dark of space, lined with stars. You can even see other ships right through the viewport. It’s very cool and makes you feel like you really are right there in the thick of battle directing things. You can even take direct control of your ship, if the game wasn’t hands on and in depth enough already.

That all being said the main downside of Battlegroup VR is the length of its combat. Sometimes you’ll end up a little bored, waiting for a ship to finish putting salvo after salvo into another vessel. The pacing of the combat is a little too slow at times, but that can be a blessing when the battles become truly massive.

Well there you have it, the 3 Greatest Real Time Strategy games available on the Oculus Quest 2. Hopefully this list will become bigger in time. There are also other games that, while not technically real time strategy, can still scratch that strategic itch, like Cities VR.

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Can RTS Work in VR? - Eternal Starlight Review

Eternal Starlight attempts to fill a very strange niche, in fact a couple of strange niches. It is an RTS, or Real Time Strategy Game, and at the same time is a roguelike. Both genres, while having long histories on traditional gaming platforms, are rare in Virtual Reality. What examples do exist are also mostly on PCVR. For those that desire an option on the Oculus Quest there is really only Eternal Starlight and Skyworld: Kingdom Brawl. The latter is more of a Clash Royale in VR than a strategy game. So that leaves just Eternal Starlight for the Quest 2.

A video version of this article can be found here on Youtube.

Homeworld in VR?

Eternal Starlight is sort of a Homeworld in Virtual Reality. For those who don’t know, Homeworld was an RTS game published in the late 90s that became a big hit, and remains a cult classic for aficionados of the genre. The big draw of Homeworld was its full use of three dimensions in its tactical combat, which was very fitting as it took place entirely in outer space. Coupled with a compelling space opera story, it had the potential to redefine the genre. Unfortunately, it did not.

That is what makes Eternal Starlight so interesting. It takes some of the same concepts that made Homeworld great and utilizes them in Virtual Reality. Each dimension of space is fully utilized. Ships can move upwards, downwards, and side to side in order to gain a better firing angle or positional advantage on an opponent. Just as in Homeworld there are ample asteroids and space debris to utilize in order to hide or block firing angles. The environment is, at least in theory, as much a part of the battle as the ships in the arena.

Let’s back up for a second, to truly recognize this comparison, and to determine if this use of three dimensional space in a VR RTS makes for viable and interesting gameplay, we need to know a little more about Eternal Starlight.

Eternal Starlight - An Overview

As mentioned before Eternal Starlight is a VR RTS Roguelike. That is a rare thing in VR, a platform that lends itself to first person experiences. VR is the ultimate form of first person. The player’s arms are virtual arms, their virtual body is their actual body. No other medium allows for interaction that is so close to real life. However, an RTS is so impersonal, so divorced from the sort of physical interaction that makes Virtual Reality immersive. Still, Virtual Reality certainly brings some upsides.

In Eternal Starlight you get a beter view of the battlefield than in any other RTS game. RTS camera controls are pretty standard, the camera can be panned, it can be zoomed, but it always a 2D display of 3D objects. In VR you can look around as though you are a giant head on the battlefield, craning your neck easily to capture any angle you desire. Rather than move a mouse you grab space and move yourself around with your hand. It feels kind of like climbing a ladder. Two hands are moved towards or away from each other to zoom in or out. Sort of like would be done on a Phone or Tablet.

These are map controls that are the same as they are on a computer screen, but the movement of the map is so much more intense. It feels as though you are there, floating through space. It is a simple translation of old RTS camera movement to a new medium.

It works and it adds that new dimension of up-close intensity and immersive spectacle that VR always does, but it doesn’t add much. It’s cool, and it is a novelty. Craning your neck around to see a laser beam slice into an enemy ship is great, but it doesn’t add anything to the actual gameplay experience other than a nicer view. Nothing here utilizes VR specifically to affect the gameplay, just how that gameplay is observed. It is merely a fun way to reuse an old system with a new view and new control inputs.

The rest of the game is inconsequential to VR. New ships can be rewarded through missions or bought for a high price. There is a great modular equipment and upgrade system that allows the player to increase the strength of each individual ship and specialize its role with weapons systems, special ability items, and upgrade modules.

Roguelike For No Reason

That brings up the roguelike aspect of the game. This game seems as though it was designed to be a linear experience with permadeath added afterward to encourage replayability. If the player’s flagship is destroyed then game over, start again from scratch. There is some light progression, completing missions gives a slightly more upgraded flagship on following runs, or options for different types of starting flagships. They do make subsequent runs easier, but what makes this game a bad roguelike is how punishing it can be of small mistakes.

Barely winning a battle with the final enemy ship can still lead to a game over when that ship explodes and destroys the player’s flagship. A really good run can have a single mission which goes badly and cannot be replayed. Maybe a couple of units were in the wrong place, and then were destroyed. Maybe that unit was fully upgraded and cost many thousands of resources, locking the player out of harder missions for possibly the rest of the game as they struggle to catch back up.

Resources can be hard to acquire, because if a ship is damaged resources must be spent to repair it, a sizeable amount of them. A balance can be achieved where the player accumulates more resources than they consume, but it is a hard balance to strike. As a new player it can be easy to feel as though there is no progression and every mission is a net loss. Even with the ability to pause the game at will and issue commands it can be overwhelming. New players should start on “Easy” mode if they want to make any meaningful progress.

Eternal Starlight is not helped by how difficult it is to control units. The VR interactions again are not new, but novel in their Virtual form. Trigger selects units, or can be used to drag them to a specific location. The problem is that they don’t seem to listen. Even telling a unit to attack an enemy can be unhelpful. For instance a ship designed to use long range artillery might very well decide to close with the enemy ship to use its short range weapons rather than bombard it from afar as intended. Turning off the AI can help this, but it does not help how unresponsive they are. Just trying to tell a unit to turn, for the love of god TURN, so that the enemy is in the firing arc of its weapons is extremely frustrating. Only using special weapons such as a Fusion Beam makes the ships move into firing position with any kind of alacrity. For a game so reliant on use of terrain and precise maneuvering to outfox the enemy this is a serious handicap. Starting from the beginning once more because units did not respond to orders as they should is not a good feeling.

Even without the VR aspect, combining a roguelike and an RTS is an uncommon combination, and should have been handled with more care. Possibly the ability to redo missions, at least for a limited number of times, might have made this game feel less unfair. As it stands the roguelike aspect of the game does not mesh well with the Strategy aspect of the game. It feels punishing to try new and interesting ship combinations, because if they don’t work then the player has to start all over again. While there is a skirmish mode for experimentation, the overall effect of the roguelike aspect of the game is frustrating. This is especially true for those who don’t want to sink many hours in a single game completion. It does get easier over time as the player learns how to make powerful ships that can simply tank and dish out a lot of damage, but this takes so long that it might drive many players away early on.

Most missions are always the same, though different ones appear each playthrough. Not every mission can be completed in one successful run, but most can. This, unfortunately, leaves out some important story elements when the final battle comes around. Speaking of the story, it’s alright. The aliens are all silly with one dimensional personalities like those in Star Control, which makes them suitably entertaining for a little while. There are some plotlines that feel important to resolve the first time, but not the third or fourth. The big enemy that is the focus of the game has some enigmatic master controlling their aggression. Enough story to tie the battles together in an interesting way, but not enough to be a draw on its own.

But What About RTSes In VR?

So Eternal Starlight has some problems, but what does this mean for the efficacy of VR as a medium for RTS or Strategy gaming in general? Eternal Starlight does show that utilizing 3D space ala Homeworld is one of the best and most impressive ways to utilize VR. For all the sameness of the control schemes it is much easier to direct ships to move up and down rather than simply side to side. That ability is directly due to this experience being in Virtual Reality. Zooming out far to see the battlefield is also much easier in Virtual Reality than in any other medium, though occasionally finding smaller ships like fighters against the backdrop of space can be difficult.

Those are mostly intrinsic qualities of the medium, and Eternal Starlight does little else with the fact that it is in VR. It would be about as good of a game if it was on a traditional flat screen. So if anyone out there is looking for proof that VR is a better medium for strategy, then you may have to wait for longer. Though all of this begs the question, what would make for a better RTS in VR?

Assuming that Eternal Starlight’s more mundane flaws could be fixed. The finicky movement, AI controlled ships being very unreliable, and the many problems with its roguelike format, what else could be done? Maybe if special abilities had to be flung towards their target like a hand grenade, or some other form of control that was more conducive to hand movements. Adding a “skillshot” element to the game might not be very strategy-esque, but games like League of Legends have already done wonders with the need to time and aim powerful abilities in order to land them.

Since the game already has an emphasis on using very few ships, what if one ship could be directly “helped” by blocking incoming fire with the players hand, or wound up like a clockwork toy in order to increase movement or reloading speed? Maybe it is the lack of direct interaction with the game world that is so a part of the RTS genre, which does not mesh with VR. A marrying of the two might be required. The trappings of an RTS game and controllable units, but with an added layer of direct player interaction and control which can utilize VR more fully. Units which are directly controllable have been implemented in RTS games before, and such a hybrid approach might be engaging in Virtual Reality as well.

Eternal Starlight is a spectacle for sure, and is very frustrating to begin with due to its roguelike format. It is just a shame that it does not show off anything new, and is rather a rehashing of the old in a new format. Though for an effort by an incredibly small team it is a decent experience. At the time of writing is is available on the Oculus Store for 19.99$ and Steam VR for 19.99$. It is a bit pricey for what it is. More than likely only those who are infatuated with the idea of what a VR RTS could be, or Strategy aficionados, should check this out. Unfortunately Eternal Starlight is not the future of RTS on VR, but it does offer a small glimpse of what that future could be.