The 3 Best WW2 Games on the Oculus Quest 2
Who doesn’t like a good WW2 game? From the FPS to RTS genres World War 2 has been a backdrop for some of gaming’s biggest hits. Though strangely enough the most global conflict in human history has not been very prevalent in Virtual Reality… yet, here’s the 3 best WW2 games for the Quest 2.
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Sniper Elite VR
As covered in our review of the game, Sniper Elite VR heavily skews its gameplay in a way not conducive to how everyone plays shooters. As the name implies the game is heavily focused on sniping, though there are some opportunities to get up close and personal with shotguns and SMGs.
That being said, the premise is very cool. You are an Italian partisan, desperately holding out and doing your best to thwart the Nazi regime to prepare for the Allied Invasion to come. There are a couple of cool character moments in the game, though the story is not what you should play this for.
The gameplay, which is part combat with a variety of WW2 weaponry and part sneaking and assassinating Nazi patrols, is overall very solid. Missions are varied in location and theme. You get a lot of choice on how you want to approach situations and what weapons you bring with you. While sniping is often mandatory, there are also plenty of areas where going in guns blazing while throwing grenades and firing your SMG is just as viable.
Sniper Elite VR combines the more novel gameplay concepts of the Sniper Elite franchise (such as firing your rifle when a plane flies over to cover the sound of the shot) with an interesting setting during World War 2. These create a Virtual Reality game that, while not the most well rounded of VR shooters, is still interesting for VR aficionados, snipers, and World War 2 fans.
Warplanes: Battles over Pacific
Rather than a Virtual Reality shooter, Warplanes: Battles over Pacific is a VR flight simulator that is heavily geared towards flying combat in the Pacific Theater of World War 2. You can use both American and Japanese planes of the era to fly through combat missions and win by destroying enemy air and ground targets. These targets consist of a variety of things from fighter aircraft, to barrage balloons, to convoy trucks, to AA flak guns, to storage buildings.
The controls are a huge draw for this game. While you can do what you need with just your controller buttons, you can also do a lot of actions, like throttling and changing the direction of the plane, by using your virtual hands to grip the controls through physical representations in your cockpit. Want to throttle up? Then grab the throttle and push it forward.
This is much more immersive that just hitting some buttons, you can actually use the real plane controls like you are in the cockpit yourself. Warplanes: Battles over Pacific makes full use of being a Virtual Reality game in this way.
Though once you get the hang of it the gameplay can be a little repetitive. The missions follow the same formula. Destroy some primary target, usually they are one type of enemy on the map, like all enemy fighters, all ships, or all barrage balloons, while destroying or avoiding other enemies on the map. You get bonus points for destroying all enemies before eliminating your primary target.
This is cool but the missions ultimately all end up having the same rhythm to them, though the maps are varied and so are the combinations of enemies. Still, you would be hard pressed to find a better combat flight simulator on the Quest 2. The developers clearly took a lot of lessons from their first, World War 1 themed game Warplanes: WW1 Fighters to make a very polished WW2 flying game.
The Multiplayer is also fantastic. You can do Co-op missions with others as well as dogfight against them in Deathmatch. This gives you a chance to use your WW2 flying skills competitively, and is really where the replayability of this game is. Like the Singleplayer there is little variety in the game modes here, but the variety comes from the other players in the game. That being said it can be a little difficult to find a full lobby, depending on the time of day.
Overall if you want to fly combat missions in VR on your Quest 2, Warplanes: Battles over Pacific cannot be beaten.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond was widely speculated to be the premier WW2 game for Virtual Reality. The unfortunate truth is that while Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond has some solid moments in its Single Player, and seems to hit all of the bases of a World War 2 Shooter. It’s lackluster Multiplayer and overly frenetic pacing means it fell so short of everyone’s expectations that it remains relevant only because of the absence of better choices for VR WW2 shooting.
Unlike Sniper Elite: VR this game does not depend on Sniping so heavily, though there are some sniper sections in it. Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond does the exact opposite of depending on any particular mode of play, instead it throws an absolute ton of them at you. You’ll be shooting from a farmhouse in one mission and then dropping bombs in a plane in the next. Meanwhile a bevy of cutscenes interrupt each experience.
In the earlier missions there is far more time spent in cutscenes than in combat. If you manage to make it through the by-the-numbers World War 2 story that is neither believable nor interesting with characters that are one dimensional and that get very annoying over time, then you will be blessed with a few minutes of actual gameplay. This does even out in the later chapters of the game, and there are, later on, some cool moments shooting bazookas at tanks and assaulting a railway gun solo.
Though as you finally get more shooter gameplay than gimmicks, the appeal of the game starts to shine through. You finally get a chance to immerse yourself into the combat and have fun going from classic World War 2 setpiece to classic World War 2 setpiece as you do your part in breaking down the Nazi regime. Overall the campaign varies between boring you with too many cutscenes and being genuinely entertaining when it gives you time to really get into the World War 2 combat.
The shooting is decent for VR, though it brings no real innovations. When you get more combat to chew on, then the occasional gimmick, like a metal detector you use to tip toe through a field of land mines, is more welcome as it serves as a break from the combat, rather than an infuriating obstacle.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond also has multiplayer. The modes consist of “Spawn, wander around, and shoot the first opponent you see.” The shooting itself is not well implemented either, a few weapons are clearly far better than all others, making the diversity of weapons non existent. After you get the hang of it you will just use two or three weapons, or get slaughtered by those who know better. There is nothing special that will hold your attention.
Overall Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is not worth its high price for the small amount of decent gameplay there is to be found inside. I only recommend it if you are completely out of better VR shooters to play, or have such a love for the WW2 setting that you absolutely must get more of it in Virtual Reality. This game would have been a huge hit in the 2000s, but now feels outdated and boring.
Well there you have it, the 3 Best WW2 games on the Oculus Quest 2.
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