The Ultimate VR Cat Game That Lets You Become A Cat - I Am Cat VR Review

I Am Cat does exactly what it says in the title. It takes you, a human wearing a Virtual Reality headset, and turns you into a cat.

Well, it doesn’t make you a cat exactly, you’ll still be you, but I Am Cat does an absolutely incredible job of putting you into the furry paws of a feline and making you feel like a cat n Virtual Reality.

You can be a good kitty or literally the worst cat imaginable in I Am Cat, and that’s what makes it such a fun VR Cat Game.

This is the very definition of a VR Cat Game. The game doesn’t involve cats, or happen to show cats, or let you look at cats. I Am Cat makes you the cat, and it does so in very novel and fun ways that make full use of Virtual Reality hand controls and immersion.

Take your view of the world for an example. In most VR games your head is usually situated a few feet above the floor of the virtual world, at about your height or an average human height.

Instead in I Am Cat your head is very close to the ground. Your eyes are just above the floor, a lot like a cat’s. When you move your view of the world feels a lot like watching one of those cat collar camera videos, except with much smoother and less shaky vision.

You can use a lot of things around the house. Like the faucet.

Speaking of movement, the movement in this game is amazingly innovative and designed to make you imitate a cat to move.

You’ve got these long, straight arms, and the paw at the end of them follows your touch controller for each hand. There are no almost no physical buttons to press, no slide movement, all of the movement and interactions in this VR Cat Game are done with your paws. I mean your hands.

There are a tun of little games and cat toys to play with as a VR Cat.

The first thing that the game teaches you to do is walk. It can be tricky to get the hang of, especially if you’re used to other VR games that have you use the motion of your hands to move around the world, like Gorilla Tag.

While Gorilla Tag is a Gorilla VR Game that has you slapping the ground and other surfaces to move yourself around, I Am Cat feels much different. You have to move your arms kind of like you are imitating a cat. You have to quickly swipe at the ground with one paw and then the other in quick succession, just like a cat would.

It does take a little getting used to. I found myself trying to glide my paws across the ground like you would in Gorilla Tag, purely out of habit, and found that the game would frustratingly move me forward and then slingshot me back to where I started. This feedback wasn’t very pleasant, I’d rather just not have moved at all, but I did eventually learn to imitate a cat’s front paws with my hands to move quickly and comfortably.

The movement is so immersive because of this, and you can even pounce by smashing both paws against the ground, or climb by pawing at a vertical surface. You can even pick up objects with the grab button, which releases your claws, and hold items in your mouth. The movement is a lot of what makes this game so fun, and combined with how small you are in the world makes you really feel like a tiny cat scurrying and jumping around a house.

The tutorial in I Am Cat is great at showing you how to walk and move around. It does still take some getting used to though.

That’s where I Am Cat takes place, at least at the time of writing, entirely within a house with a ton of household items, toys, and your owner, an old woman.

She looks absolutely MASSIVE to you in the game. You are a cat after all, she’s so tall compared to you.

Your owner. She looks absolutely massive ingame and towers over you.

The scale of the house around you continues to reinforce that while you are playing this VR Cat Game you are a small cat instead of a human standing in a room with a VR headset on their face.

You can easily run and jump around furniture, mess with the many household items like the very intelligent feline that you are, eat your food, drink water. If you’ve ever seen a cat do something hilarious and silly then you can do it in I Am Cat.

There are a lot of things to explore and do, and interactions to discover, in the house the game takes place in. Despite being a two story and fairly average sized place, the house is a massive playground for you since well, you’re a tiny cat.

Climbing and jumping around is so much fun in this Cat VR Game.

You can turn on the TV, change the channel on the radio. Break into your owner’s computer, or even cook. There are an absolutely insane amount of things you can do.

Oh, and if you’re a bad cat and break some glasses, vases, or fine china, then your owner won’t be too happy with you either.

Make your owner mad in I Am Cat and she’ll whack you with a frying pan. No cats were hurt in the creation of this VR Cat Game.

There’s even a progression system with experience and levels. On your handy cat smartwatch on your left paw you can look at various tasks that you can do around the house.

These are all fun little cat activities like playing the piano, breaking stuff, exploring the top of the refrigerator. You know, Virtual Reality Cat Game things.

Each task gives you experience, and you gain levels over time. They’re an interesting way to introduce you to new wacky things that you can try around the house.

You’re given some direction in your Cat VR Game adventure through these missions, which are a ton of fun to complete.

I Am Cat is exactly what you’d want from a VR Cat Game. It turns you into a cat in VR, and wow does it do a good job at that.

Even if you aren’t a cat lover the unique movement system and perspective are fun an unique on their own, and completely worth checking out. You can play I Am Cat on the Meta Quest, and on Steam using PCVR. Enjoy!

Infinite Inside Review - A Surreal VR Puzzle Game With Passthrough

Infinite Inside is a game that the puzzling part of your brain will enjoy greatly, and it makes great use of Virtual Reality, and the passthrough capabilities of the Quest headset to deliver a unique puzzling experience.

That is, combining Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality to create an impression of a tower in whatever room you are playing in, and you teleporting inside and exploring that tower. Deeper and deeper you go, and the game becomes more surreal and draws you into its atmosphere.

All the while there are enjoyable 3D jigsaw puzzles to complete, and always the question of how to get to the next area to get more puzzle pieces to solve. Infinite Inside is unique for its combination of Passthrough Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality, but even more so for how well it uses Virtual Reality to convey the sense of traveling deeper into a different and mysterious world.

There are some fantastic 3D jigsaw puzzles in Infinite Inside.

Before we get any deeper into the Infinite Inside review though, let me tell you how the game actually plays.

What Do You Do In Infinite Inside?

The first order of business is to set up your playspace, which is quick, easy, and done with the Meta Quest’s superb passthrough. That is, assuming you are using a Meta Quest 3 or Pro.

Using the more inferior passthrough on the Meta Quest 2 might make Infinite Inside a far less enjoyable, and visible, experience. Though fortunately you can turn off the use of passthrough and have the game take place entirely in Virtual Reality, though the passthrough Mixed Reality exterior of the tower you explore does make the whole experience more wonderful and interesting.

You tell the game where the center of your playspace should be, and this is another game where having a larger playspace to work with is definitely beneficial, though you’ll be alright as long as you have an area large enough to just walk around the square you place in the center.

Placing the area where the tower appears in Passthrough.

You don’t need a massive room, and the game does feature a stationary mode if you don’t have one. Playing in roomscale mode, and with enough space to walk around the center of your playspace, is much more enjoyable though.

Then you get to the game, which is puzzling and exploring really. Explore to find 3D puzzle pieces, and then do your best to stick them together. That’s the core of Infinite Inside.

The game starts with the Mixed Reality portion, a massive plinth arises in the center of your playspace. Three empty compartments open up in front of it, and you can quickly intuit that something needs to go into these slots.

The first VR puzzle. Assemble the pieces and place them in the slot.

So you search around the monolith and discover some handles on it that you can slide open, revealing puzzle pieces. You put these pieces together so they fit in 3D space, and then place the finished object inside of the plinth.

Soon after some of this we get to the VR section, which caught me completely by surprise.

Exploring inside the tower in VR involves a lot of teleporting around. That’s the biggest negative takeaway from this Infinite Inside review.

Placing a statue of a little man inside the Plinth causes you to go inside as well, and in there you can collect more puzzle pieces to put together and solve outside of it.

Then later on you can move through larger environments by grabbing these geometric objects to teleport around inside. If you’re wondering, yes unfortunately the only way to move and explore is through teleport movement. More on that later on in this review.

You explore these stone rooms, sometimes dotted with vintage objects from our world, and get more puzzle pieces so you can leave and assemble them back in Mixed Reality.

Explore inside the plinth to get all of the 3D puzzle pieces you will need.

Is Infinite Inside Fun?

If you like 3D jigsaw puzzles and are intrigued by the idea of breaking them up with some VR exploration, then Infinite Inside holds up pretty well.

What’s odd about the game is that it doesn’t lean far enough into either the Mixed Reality Passthrough or Virtual Reality elements for them to complement each other greatly. Rather the Mixed Reality beginning to the game is merely just a way to anchor the monolith at the center of the experience in the real world. This is cool, but not necessary. It could just as easily be a VR scene as well, and you can make it that way in the options menu.

Using this small figure of a man to move inside and outside this monolith, or tower, or plinth, or whatever you want to call it, is a great way to make the world feel immersive. The transition between the two modes of play makes traveling inside of the game a significant change in gameplay. The exterior space is for putting puzzle pieces together, and going inside to the interior is for exploring to find puzzle pieces.

That’s mostly what Infinite Inside amounts to, changing gameplay between these two modes of play. Exploring in VR feels much different from poking around the outside of the plinth and putting puzzle pieces together in MR.

Infinite Inside shines when the puzzles combine the inside and outside of the tower.

Where the game really shines is actually more in the VR sections inside of the monolith, and where the exterior of the structure briefly interacts with the interior. As the game progresses there are portions where you can actually move puzzle pieces around the tower that will change the environment as you explore.

This way you can create new pathways and explore new areas in order to find all of the puzzle pieces. Occasionally you need to dip back out of the tower to change a piece of the environment around, and give yourself a new area to access. In this way the exploration becomes a whole new set of puzzles alongside the 3D jigsaw puzzles that you complete once you get all of the puzzle pieces.

It gets even more intense and surreal when you find even smaller areas to teleport into while you’re already inside of the monolith, creating layers upon layers of different exploration and environment puzzles in a single level. It’s fantastic, and provides many moments where you can wonder at the surrealness of it all.

Infinite Inside’s surreal look and mysterious tone are well executed and fitting.

Moreover the reliance on teleportation movement in the VR exploration portions of the game was the biggest disappointment of the whole experience. A Virtual Reality game on the Meta Quest relying completely on teleportation movement feels very pre 2020 and hopelessly outdated today.

Teleporting from place to place feels tedious and unimmersive, and is bad for all of the reasons that developers no longer base their games around it except as an option for the hopelessly motion sick.

In this entire Infinite Inside review I’d have to say the reliance on teleport movement is the one element that was truly disappointing and entirely negative.

Eventually you will uncover layers of worlds to explore. Puzzles within puzzles. Infinite Inside slowly escalates its mechanics.

I’ve had fun with Infinite Inside though, and found it to be a very calming and mysterious experience. The austere visuals of the game look fantastic on the Quest 3. They really shine when the simple geometry at the beginning of the game starts to dip into the more surreal.

The look of this game combined with the simple yet elegant and mysterious music give a feeling of mysterious calm that put you in the mood for solving some puzzles and poking around a digital tower in the middle of your living room. The aesthetic and mood of the game are perfectly executed by the developer.

So Infinite Inside is a surreal puzzler that feels like a journey into a dream, and it’s much more fun for how well it commits and pulls of that theme and feeling. Though beware that the puzzles are pretty difficult, and only get harder as the game goes on. If you’re not prepared to scratch your head for a while while trying to figure things out then don’t test your patience here.

That’s all for this Infinite Inside review. If you like 3D jigsaw puzzles in Mixed Reality or Virtual Reality, and are intrigued by the idea of combining that with a little VR exploration then this is a game that is easy to recommend for its pacing, ambiance, and creativity.

Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck VR Review - A Wacky Breathedge VR Sci Fi Experience

Today we’re reviewing another VR game, and today it's time to get in depth with a Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck review.

The flatscreen game Breathedge, which this game is loosely based on, was fully released in 2021, and according to steam reviews has been very well received.

Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck is a Virtual Reality take on the original game for the Meta Quest, and unfortunately it doesn't quite make the cut to really be called Breathedge VR. If that’s what you’re looking for here, then you’ll be disappointed.

Not Quite Breathedge VR

The sci fi space future of Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck looks pretty great

Why? Well, mostly because it's clear that a lot of the features and progression systems that made the flatscreen game interesting and challenging are just straight up gone in Cosmic Cluck.

There's technically crafting, but instead of the Subnautica style progression present in the flatscreen game where you improve your tools and spacesuit so that you can go further into the expanses of a space junkyard, in the VR version you're really just crafting items that are needed to progress the main story.

Outside of building your original multiool gun in the first twenty minutes or so, that's about it as far as creating things that give you more capabilities. From there on out you're just gathering what you need to craft the next item that progresses the story, and so there's really no need to explore or think about what you would like to gather or build next for yourself. The game tells you exactly where to go and what to do the entire way through.

You start the game, check for what mission you are doing, and then do it. Usually this means gathering crafting materials, maybe solving a light puzzle, or just traveling to the next mission marker. Then every now and then you craft an item with one of these crafting machines and put the crafted item somewhere to continue the game.

Crafting in this Breathedge VR game is almost purely to create items that just advance you to the next objective.

Therefore, you never get that feeling of incrementally improving yourself so that you can go further and further into space. You just keep doing what the game tells you to do, follow the next objective marker, until you’ve followed and done them all and the game ends.

Stuck Between A Family And A Corporation in VR Breathedge

Fighting a robot in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck.

Still, that doesn't mean there's no merit in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck. This isn’t a bad game just because it doesn’t give you much freedom.

I actually found a few things to be quite enjoyable and unique in this experience, and its tongue and cheek humor is just as prevalent as in the original flatscreen game. For instance, you take the role of a man named... Man. You're on your way to meet up with your Grandfather, who you haven't seen in a very long time.

You've got a delivery for him, and things aren't going well at your job. Unfortunately, things quickly go wrong when you end up crash landed inside of a junkyard. Fortunately, you've got a helpful and talkative chicken to guide your way.

Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck - The Good

From there you quickly assemble all of the tools that you will need to do accomplish all of the space work and space fighting you will need to do to make your way to your grandfather.

That's most of what you do in VR Breathedge, space gathering, space traveling, and occasionally space puzzling. Here's where I can finally talk about my absolute favorite part of this entire game, and that is how you travel.

You start with a sort of EVA pack setup, you can slowly scoot in any direction you like, up down, sideways, forwards, backwards, but you quickly find that when you're outside you'll run out of oxygen before you can really get anywhere.

That's what makes this game more interesting and challenging than it would be otherwise, the simple fact that wherever you go you have a very limited amount of time before you will run out of oxygen, and you'll need to enter an oxygenated area or find an oxy candle to refill your suit before that happens.

This adds a constant low level of tension to any of the tasks that you do in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck. Making tasks that otherwise would be entirely without risk or tension always inherently dangerous.

An Oxy Candle in this VR Breathedge game. Used to refill your oxygen.

That's why you'll need a way to get around quickly, because areas where oxy candles can be found can be very far apart, and that's where the grabber comes in.

With it you can pull items towards you from far away, and more impressively pull yourself towards far away objects. I have to say, this is now one of my absolute favorite ways to travel inside of a Virtual Reality game.

If there's one huge positive that you should take away from this Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck Review it's that pulling yourself around these huge ridiculous sci fi environments is an absolute blast, which is only occasionally cut short when you try to pull yourself towards an object that is too far away and have to scramble to find something that is close enough for your beam to latch on to.

There are many sights to see on the way to your next objective marker.

Unlike most methods of movement in Virtual Reality titles, this one isn't immersion breaking and makes sense in the game’s universe. The world of Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck is definitely one in which a handheld beam can pull you towards distant large objects, or pull small objects towards you.

It's wacky sci fi technology in a wacky VR sci fi world. You're using an ingame item that requires some skill to use efficiently and correctly to slingshot yourself around the environment. It's not only a very engaging way to travel quickly, but also one that is in harmony with the world around you.

This isn't using a joystick to slide around the world, it's using a piece of the world to fling yourself around it. The grabber is fitting for this game and also very entertaining to use. Not to mention a fantastic way to incorporate movement with the use of VR hand controls.

You can also use the tool for combat, which is less impressive but also unique. Instead of just shooting laser bolts or something, you actually have to grab items with your tractor beam and shoot them at enemies to deal damage.

Fighting a group of robots in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck.

This is also a pretty creative approach that leans into the inherit wackiness of the world of Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck. The only downside to combat in this Virtual Reality game is that the designers didn't take it much farther than this.

While shooting junk items with your handheld multitool gun thing is a fun concept, the enemies you face just orbit around you and shoot at you from close range. There's not much tactical consideration to take during each combat encounter, and really it ends up just being a somewhat repetitive game of grabbing and flinging items accurately as quickly as you can.

The combat, like a lot of this game, is creative, fun, and innovative on the surface, but quickly reveals itself to lack sufficient depth or variance to stay interesting for long.

There are some missile turrets later on in the game that switch things up a little bit, but they don't stay intersting for long either, because they just devolve into standing still and grabbing and flinging missiles back to it. The turrets are even less engaging than the bots.

Launching a rocket back at a turret in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck.

Now there is one combat encounter in this game that was actually extremely superb, and while I don't want to spoil the game by telling you what it is, I will say that it exists and was very fun.

The downside of playing a single interesting, varied, and complicated combat encounter is that ultimately it revealed that Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck is a game where combat could have been more interesting, but the end product was cut short of being all that it could be.

Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck - The Bad

You need to keep an eye on your oxygen all of the time.

Though, shooting the junk items that you find is also a good way to tie in many of the bits and bobs floating around that you will be gathering to craft story items. That's their only use, just pick them up when the game tells you to, otherwise they're good for shooting at hostile robots and nothing else.

That's one of my main gripes with Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck, it feels like the developers started off with the idea of making a full survival crafting experience like the flatscreen game, but ended up making a linear story driven game instead with just the veneer of survival crafting on top.

You don't really make interesting decisions on where to go and what to do in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck, and that's another important takeaway from this review. While you gather resources, and occasionally craft things, and there is a big world to fly around and explore, this isn't a game you can build interesting things in, or improve your character to take on greater challenges in, it just seems on the surface like it would be.

This VR game is about following the objective markers on your HUD and doing what your mission tracker tells you to do while you receive phone calls and listen to them. Actually, you mostly listen to your chicken companion, who I personally found to be extremely annoying and sometimes very reptitive, it would just say the same voicelines over and over sometimes.

That's kind of part of the tongue in cheek humor of this game though, and also leans into the rugged individualist vs greedy corporation story that is also a big part of the game.

Humor is really subjective and that part of this game also may or may not be for you. If you don't like the sort of tongue in cheek humor of Breathedge then you will probably not enjoy this game, but if you like that sort of humor you'll find a lot of laughs.

The chicken can be obnoxious, and funny.

I laughed out loud a few times while playing this game, and only found the chicken to be overly annoying occasionally. There's some puns, and overall the world and its characters are ridiculous, but in a fun way.

It's a shame there's not more of them. Really, it's a shame that there isn't more of this game in general. I'll end this VR Breathedge review and leave you with the number one biggest issue with this game, and that's that it is just way too short. I completed the entire experience in about two hours.

Even for a VR title that is extremely, unacceptably short for the price of 24.99$. During the entirety of these two hours you also only make a single choice that actually affects the game, and so if you want to play it twice you could get maybe four to five hours out of this experience to get both endings. Though both endings are almost exactly the same.

The story of this Breathedge VR game is mostly given to you through phone calls.

That being said the gameplay itself was getting repetitive, because it lacks depth, and so I was already about ready to finish my time with this Breathedge VR game regardless. Still, I can't help but feel that there was so much lost potential here, and there are a few parts of this game that absolutely shine with creativity, and will stick with me for a very long time.

I don't regret my time with Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck, but I do regret the incredibly high asking price of 25 dollars for admission. As it stands there just isn't enough game to justify that cost.

If I had to guess it seems the developers cut a lot of planned content for this game, and that's just such a real shame, because with some more features and freedom I could see this being a classic.

As it stands it's just overpriced. If this game sounds interesting to you, then wait for a sale.

The Most Realistic VR Motorcycle Game On The Meta Quest - VRider SBK Review

Looking for an exciting, challenging, and realistic VR motorcycle game on your Meta Quest 3 or Meta Quest 2? Well then look no further, because an extremely realistic VR bike racing experience is here in the form of VRider SBK.

This is more than just a VR Motorcycle Game on the Meta Quest, it’s really more of a VR Motorcycle Simulator.

I have only ridden a real motorcycle once or twice, but even with this limited experience I can definitely appreciate and feel the efforts that the developers of VRider SBK put in to make this a very real feeling Virtual Reality Motorcycle Racing experience.

Let’s find out how in this quick VRider SBK Review.

A Realistic VR Motorcycle Racing Game

In VRider SBK you’re a motorcycle racer on top of a fancy superbike that most normal people could have no hope of actually owning or driving in real life. It goes really fast, really quickly.

This is the most realistic Motorcycle experience you can have in Virtual Reality.

What’s even better is that VRider SBK isn’t like some flatscreen game where you control your motorcycle with a thumbstick and a trigger on a controller, which is entirely unlike the actual controls of a motorcyle.

Nope, in this Virtual Reality game you control the throttle by physically twisting your hands while holding the controllers sideways. You know, kind of like how a throttle on a motorcycle actually works.

It gets even better. As you might guess you will need to do a lot of turning during a superbike race. Well, in VRider SBK you turn by actually moving your controllers in the direction you want to lean in the game, and your motorcycle will lean with you.

Racing on a VR Motorcycle is so much fun in VRider SBK. Though it is really hard.

It is absolutely amazing and intuitive, because this is a pretty close simulation of how you would actually control a real life motorcycle!

That, combined with the very first person VR view of your motorcycle and the track in front of you equates to an extremely immersive and realistic VR motorcycle game that puts any flatscreen attempt at simulating the experience of racing a superbike to shame.

You even have to duck your head down behind your windshield when you go really quickly, otherwise you will shake and slow down because of the wind. You know, like if you really were sitting up on a bike going a couple hundred miles per hour.

Following the arrow on easier difficulties is a good way to learn how to hug the track in a VR Bike Game.

VRider SBK Is Hard

Though there is one downside to this level of realism, and that’s that riding an actual motorcycle in racetrack conditions is hard to learn and hard to master. Due to the amount of realism in the racing simulation and the controls, VRider SBK is also a really difficult game.

Maybe it would be a little easier to someone who has actual experience riding real motorcycles, but to a casual VR gamer VRider SBK is incredibly difficult to be good at. I have finished many races and still have trouble not going off of the track during simple turns.

Though this isn’t due to ignorance, just a lack of experience and skill. The tutorial was in depth and fantastic, giving you a little bit of knowledge at a time and then reinforcing it with a small racing challenge. As far as VR racing game tutorials go, VRider SBK’s might have a lot to learn in it, but it is fantastic.

VRider SBK has a fantastic tutorial, better than any other VR Racing Game I’ve seen.

You can mitigate some of this difficulty with this motorcycle VR game’s many difficulty options. There are a lot, and a few presets going from Rookie to Pro.

I mostly played on Pro for maximum realism, and honestly even with the assistance given to you in the Rookie difficulty this is still a VR racing game that is difficult due to its emphasis on realism. There are also some other options though, like changing the throttle control from twisting the controller to pulling the trigger.

There are a lot of difficulty settings and presets to try in this VR Motorcycle Game.

My back and arms would even start to ache by leaning forward into my chair and holding myself in the motorcycle racing posture with my arms up and tilted to the side and my head tucked safely behind the windshield. With no motorcycle to rest on my body became tired from holding itself up.

I still can outpace bots on the Very Easy difficulty, and found that trying to beat my previous best time on tracks was a very fun way to slowly improve my skills.

So if you want to get into VRider SBK keep in mind that realistic VR bike racing is hard, but still very rewarding when you pull it off right. There are also 12 total tracks, which is a healthy number, and a few different racers you could be as well.

VR Bike Racing Multiplayer

The number one biggest downside to VRider SBK, however, is that despite checking several times I couldn’t find a single live Multiplayer match.

Racing against the bots is fun and all, but they’re bots, and they’re not super intelligent. It seems that they mostly just follow a mostly set path at a set speed without deviating at all based on what you, the player, do to try and pass them. Racing against them feels more like racing against a moving obstacles than against other people.

So I was really hoping for some Multiplayer matches to add a factor of competitive spirit to motorcycle racing in Virtual Reality.

I couldn’t find a single Multiplayer match in VRider SBK.

If you want to race against others it seems that, at the time of writing at least, you’ll have to organize races outside of the game itself. There is an official VRider SBK facebook group and an official VRider SBK Discord where you can find opponents.

There is also a mode where you can try to beat other players’ track times, but that doesn’t really feel like much of a competition either, at least to me.

Regardless, VRider SBK is a fantastic example of using VR hand controls and a VR first person immersive view of the world to bring an expensive and dangerous real world experience, in this case superbike racing, and make it cheap, safe, and fun to enjoy in the comfort of your home on a Meta Quest device.

For that this is a fantastic VR racing simulation, and one that I would recommend if you want to feel what it’s like to race on a motorcycle in Virtual Reality.

Half-Life 2 VR Mod Review And Setup Guide

Half-Life 2 is one of the most well known and respected video games of all time. Just like the original Half Life it is widely considered to be a classic that not only showcased some impressive technology for the time in the Source Engine, but also was another tightly designed and extremely well thought out experience that is full of memorable moments and superb gameplay.

Most players that have tried it can come to the conclusion that Half-Life 2 is a fun and good game. We already know that, so that’s not what I'm here to talk to you about. The question here is: As much as we've all loved Half-Life 2 on the flat screen, does that mean it is also fun in Virtual Reality?

The Gravity Gun is even better in Half-Life 2 VR

Half-Life 2 Is Amazing In Virtual Reality

Yes... yes it is. Seriously this game is somehow even better in Virtual Reality, and you can play it for free in SteamVR as long as you own a copy of the original Half-Life 2. This is crazy. I'd like to thank everyone who put time in to work on this. It is absolutely amazing and I've never loved a flatscreen to VR mod more in my entire life.

Though you, the reader, might want a little more detail than just my word that Half Life 2 VR is absolutely awesome and amazing and you should try it right now. So let's talk specifics. How does the addition of VR make Half-Life 2 better?

In any discussion of a flatscreen game being ported into Virtual Reality there are very obvious aspects that differ immediately between Virtual Reality and flatscreen gaming.

The most immediately apparent of these is the switch from a desktop monitor to two very little monitors shoved right in front of both of your eyes and cast slightly askew so that you have the illusion of being inside of a completely 3D space with the illusion of depth. Basically the magic that makes VR gaming so much more immersive than flatscreen gaming.

Aiming in Half-Life 2 VR feels so much less constrained when using your physical hands in Virtual Reality

Now you might think that this is where the Half Life 2 VR mod wouldn't be very impressive. Sure the mod makes it so that your head is exactly where Gordon Freeman's head is, basically putting you immediately into his shoes and making you feel like you really are present inside the whirlwind of combine gunfighting, headcrab zombie chopping, and antlion wrangling chaos around you.

Still, Half-Life 2 is about two decades old now, and concerning how far computer graphics have come, two decades is quite a long time. The source engine was impressive for its time, but does it really hold up twenty years later?

While you'd think that taking such a up close look at textures and technology that is so old would make it feel like you're living inside an eyesore, the look of the game still holds up very well. If you look really closely at the textures that make up your environment or other NPCs, then yea you can see that they are lower resolution than you're used to.

Oh, and being able to look so closely at those NPCs talk is sometimes a little uncanny, but Half Life 2 still looks better in Virtual Reality than a lot of modern games made for VR platforms.

The Half Life 2 VR Mod looks excellent as well. Even better than the original Half-Life 2 because of the more personal point of view

At the end of the day this comes down to good environmental design. While the technology is older, good design is timeless.

The various aesthetics of the maps that you explore and fight through in the Half-Life 2 VR mod still hold up as well as they did all those years ago, and taking a closer and more personal look at things just makes them even better to look at and experience. Though while I mentioned the NPCs can be uncanny to look at when they're talking, boy are they great when you're fighting.

Strapping a device to your head that displays the action directly into your eyes and tracks your head like you really are there standing exactly where your Gordan Freeman in the game is makes the combat feel so much more immersive. You really do feel like you're standing in a hallway in Nova Prospekt gunning down incoming combine prison guards almost as quickly as they can spawn in.

The Half-Life 2 VR Mod Feels As Good As It Looks

Even the scope on the crossbow functions excellently in the Half Life 2 VR Mod

Combined with the excellent hand controls that the Half Life 2 VR mod brings to the table, the full force of the VR effect comes crashing in on you in Half-Life 2 VR. You feel like you're really there, like you really can reach out and touch that soldier standing just feet away from you. Well, actually you can reach out and touch them.

That's the second half of the puzzle that makes Half Life 2 such an enjoyable Virtual Reality experience, the hand controls. They are absolutely superb. I've played plenty of recently released titles that were made for VR which had worse hand controls than those in this free Half-Life 2 VR mod.

Though while the hands generally track really well and are responsive, they're not perfect. There are instances where your hands might get caught on the walls or floor around you, mostly I noticed this when physically crouching. The system that detects what object your hand is close enough to to grab was also a little finicky sometimes, but the fact that it works at all is still amazing. You can just reach an empty hand out to an object and hold down the grip to grab it, and the physics fun only gets better when the Gravity Gun comes into play.

With the VR mod you're also much freer when playing with the physics and just in general since you can use your physical hands in any way you'd like. You're not constrained to grabbing or aiming directly in front of you like you were in the original game.

There’s a fully functional hand grabbing system as well. It works amazingly well in Half-Life 2 VR

So now you can shoot from different angles, shoot from cover, or even blind fire around corners or above obstacles if you want to. While you don't have to play the mod like a more cover based shooter than Half Life 2 was intended to be, you certainly can if you like. Your weapons point where your hands point, and that not only feels amazing, but even expands the game and gives you as a player more options in how you want to play it.

Speaking of those weapons, they all feel fantastic. The entire arsenal of Half-Life 2 looks and feels amazing in this game. From the humble pistol to the combine assault rifle, each weapon has unique reloading actions that you can do with your actual, real hands. This isn't one of those flatscreen to VR ports where you just hit a button to reload your primary weapon. Nope, in the Half Life 2 VR mod you have to eject the old mag, grab another one from behind your back, and slam it home.

Weapons like the SMG or Pistol even have to chamber another round if you fire it completely dry before reloading. All of the weapons really come to life in the Half-Life 2 VR mod.

Even throwable weapons like the grenade feel great, and throwing that feels natural has been hard for many VR games to pull off. Basically you start your throw, and just pull the trigger when you would release, and a grenade is spawned from your hand going on the trajectory of the throwing motion you were just making. It feels so natural once you get the hang of it.

Tossing a grenade is easy in Half Life 2 VR

You even reload the RPG by putting another rocket in the tube. The shotgun is actually even a little overpowered because now you can pump it as quickly as your hand can move, meaning you can fire it a lot faster than you ever could as flatscreen Gordon. Now your reloading speed is dependent on how fast you, the player, can reload.

Oh, and since there aren't a bunch of number keys to use anymore, you now select weapons by just pushing in the stick on your dominant hand and then moving your hand over the weapon you want on the selection menu. It did take a little getting used to, but with some practice I could pull out a new weapon extremely quickly.

Eventually knowing where the weapon I wanted was on the selection wheel was just muscle memory. There are a ton of weapons, and so accidentally equipping one that you didn't want to occasionally does happen (mostly when panicking and getting shot a lot), but this beats hitting a button to cycle through every weapon in your arsenal any day.

Selecting weapons is fast and straightforward with this weapon selection wheel. Just move your hand over the weapon you want and let go

As for negative things, there are a few bugs, mostly I noticed some objects popping in and out of existence when you look at them from certain angles. The only bugs that were really annoying were the few times my hands were caught behind walls or objects, and for the record that was very rare and only happened once or twice.

The only part of the gameplay itself that is annoying is that when you dump a magazine you don't get the leftover ammunition in it back automatically, you have to pick it up manually instead. Now this isn't the worst thing ever, and is realistic if nothing else. I just would have liked an option to make it so that dumped magazine ammunition is automatically collected from the ground.

That's really about it. There are a ton of comfort and other settings that you can change in the game as you like, like adding a laser pointer to your guns if you aren't the best at aiming, or making it so that you actually have to physically grab and climb up ladders to use them. There are really a ton of comfort and utility options you can set in the game.

The Half Life 2 VR Mod Is Free And Runs Directly Through SteamVR

This mod is fantastic, and if all of this hasn't convinced you to try it, maybe the fact that it is free will.

The Half-Life 2 VR Mod is totally free! You just have to own Half-Life 2

If you own a copy of Half Life 2 just download the mod for free on Steam and run it, you don't even need to have the original Half Life 2 installed. There's no setup process, just play it like any other Steam VR game. If you are on a standalone device like a Meta Quest 3 or 2 then you can still play the Half Life 2 VR mod if you stream it from your PC to your headset.

So thanks to Valve for making a fantastic game two decades ago, and most of all thanks to the dedicated modders who created this absolutely fantastic VR mod. I have absolutely no idea how they pulled it off but if I didn't know better I would have thought that Half-Life 2 was actually made as a Virtual Reality game first and not the other way around.

So yea, give this mod a try and thank me later.