The Best VR Pickleball Game On The Oculus Quest 2 and 3
Imagine playing a game of Pickleball in your living room. It’s too cold or too hot outside, you don’t want to go anywhere, but you really want to get some practice in and have some fun with the fastest growing sport.
Well the magic of Virtual Reality can make that desire a reality with a wonderful Pickleball VR game. With an Oculus Quest 2 or an Oculus Quest 3 there’s nothing stopping you from enjoying a game of Pickleball in VR whenever you want to.
Whether you’re already an avid Pickleball player or want to see how much you’d like the sport yourself, VR Pickleball is a great way to not only learn the rules and how the game plays, but also discover the joy of playing Pickleball.
There are currently three Pickleball games available on the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 2 platform, and to spoil the rest of this article I’ll let you know right now that there is one clear winner out of the three, and that is Pickleball One.
If you’d like to know why, and what features are available in this fantastic Pickleball VR game, then keep reading.
Oh, and a quick disclaimer before we get into these games. You’re going to want a bit of space to play them.
So if you want to enjoy VR Pickleball as much as possible with these games make sure you’ve got the biggest playspace you can get. Having enough space to swing the paddle around is important.
Anyhow without further ado here is the Best of all VR Pickleball games on the Oculus Quest 2 and 3.
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VR Pickleball Games - The Ones You Want To Avoid
Before I start singing the praises of Pickleball One, let’s talk about why the other two Pickleball games available on the Quest store aren’t worth your time and money in comparison.
I had really hoped that, despite both being available through the App Lab, one of these games would be a strong contender to Pickleball One and would have offered unique alternatives to that game. Unfortunately both were disappointments.
First let’s talk about one that, while not being much right now, does have quite a bit of potential for the future assuming development keeps up. That would be Pickleball Pro.
The Pickleball Pro Logo
Pickleball Pro has all of the makings of a decent Pickleball VR game. A nice loading screen, a quick tutorial, and a good looking main menu.
Unfortunately the main problem with this game is apparent when you look at that main menu.
The main menu of Pickleball Pro. There aren’t a whole lot of options here
At the time of writing only Training and Practice modes are available for this game, and as far as a VR Pickleball game goes those aren’t much.
Going up against a ball throwing machine is nice and all, but at the end of the day it’s hard to call a Pickleball VR game an actual Pickleball game without being able to play a match of Pickleball at least against an AI opponent.
It looks like that just isn’t available at the moment, and even the practice modes weren’t great. The ball machine doesn’t even have the capability to throw the ball at you in random directions.
Nope, instead you need to manually tell it where and how to spit the ball out at you.
I guess a random automatic ball machine is too much to ask for
That being said there’s the makings of a decent game here. It looks good enough, and the ball physics aren’t bad either. Though the ball does tend to react a little too violently to your swing, but not often.
It’s getting the opportunity to hit the Pickleball that’s sort of a drag, and even if AI matches were available I doubt they’d be much fun since the only way you can move around is by thumbstick movement, which slides you across the court incredibly slowly.
So maybe one day I can update this article and tell you that Pickleball Pro is worth taking a look at if you want an alternative to Pickleball One, for now it feels like your money is being stolen to get so little game for a price of 20 dollars.
Speaking of games that feel like scams, let’s talk about the simply named Pickleball, our other bad example of a VR Pickleball game.
The Pickleball Logo
Playing Pickleball feels like playing the sort of game that is secretly mining bitcoin while you play it.
It looks clunky, the UI is terrible, and it was hard to figure out how to even start a match. Though it does have a leg up on Pickleball Pro by at least having the option to play a Singleplayer match.
Still, just look at this mess of a main menu.
The Pickleball main menu. It looks even worse in Virtual Reality
It hardly looks like something that warrants a 15 dollar price tag. It looks like an alpha of a game that is yet to be released to the public.
Unfortunately, it plays like one too. First, you need to go to the “AI” section and set up your AI opponent, and then you need to go over to the “Mode” menu to actually start the match. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
It didn’t help that a couple of players were trying to invite me to multiplayer matches, which I would have gladly started if I could figure out how to actually start the match after accepting. I’m not even sure it was working. I’d join and not even hear them say anything.
The Singleplayer match against a bot was every bit as odd and janky as the main menu.
A bot swinging at a ball that is nowhere near them, and that they don’t hit anyway
The most heinous and most obvious thing I noticed when starting the first match was how choppy and unoptimized the game itself was. Even on a Quest 3 with all the latest standalone hardware it would stutter constantly.
The ball physics are also kind of all over the place and the ball moves a little too quickly, though to be fair there were a number of options in the settings menu to change this.
That doesn’t make the game look any less terrible though, with the bot constantly doing animations that not properly timed with them actually hitting the ball, and the extremely generic music constantly looping in the background to the point that it was extremely grating.
Turning off the music didn’t end the jankiness though. Every time the ball lands in your court you are teleported to it, and while teleportation might be fine for some, I’ve been spoiled by VR Tennis games and find being teleported across the court to be extremely jarring.
The game would also teleport you too close to where the ball was. While there was also an option that would make the teleportation happen only when you take an action, like pressing a button, the weird looking bot, constant framerate drops, bad pickleball physics, horrendous visuals, and overall impression of low quality made it not very fun.
In Pickleball the game adds challenge by teleporting you so that the ball is at your feet
The game feels like a low effort cash grab, made all the more obvious by how it kept asking me to review it over and over again.
Oh, and if you want a more specific example of what I mean by “janky” then here’s one. Your pickleball paddle will disappear when you bring it close to your face. Not even that close, about a foot or so away.
The paddle (and your hand) start to disappear about a foot from your face in Pickleball. It’s uncomfortable
If Pickleball One didn’t exist I’d say that Pickleball is better than nothing, but Pickleball One does exist, so if you’re going to buy a VR Pickleball game make it the good one.
Why Pickleball One Is The Best VR Pickleball Game
The Pickleball One Logo
So I’ve hyped it enough, why is Pickleball One so good compared to these other games?
Let’s start with the tutorial. Before I played this game I knew nothing about the rules of Pickleball.
Twenty or so minutes later, with very little effort on my part, and I now know them all, and all of the controls in this VR Pickleball game.
Serving training in Pickleball One
The tutorial was great, better than any tutorial for any VR sports game I’ve ever played, and it kept getting better when I tried my luck against some AI opponents after that.
They had a few different difficulty modes, looked as good as a Facebook Metaverse avatar can look, and all of their animations matched up to what they were doing in the game.
A bot hitting the ball back in Pickleball One
There’s no constant annoying music, and there are a lot of useful in game audio cues.
Each time the ball is hit there is a noise that sounds a little bit like how an actual Pickleball hitting a paddle sounds, and the same goes for the ball hitting the floor of the court.
Every time the server loses a point and the server changes there is a call of “side out” to indicate that is the case. The sound design is minimalistic but pleasant.
So are the AI opponents. Easy truly is easy, even when I was a novice I had a shot at winning, and Hard is extremely difficult. After some solid hours of play I got to the point where I had a chance of winning against a Medium difficulty bot. I felt like I was making progress.
Returning the ball in Pickleball One
The paddle physics are also great, if that wasn’t obvious by now. You do really have to whack the ball hard to get a serve in, but in general you don’t have to exert yourself to hit a Pickleball to the other side of the court. If you accidentally send it flying into the stands it’s because your hit is too hard and not because the physics decided to break.
Even outside of the matches there was a lot of great stuff to try, and some of it even things you might not expect. The Training and Fitness menu has all of the usual greatest hits, like a ball machine and a wall to smack the ball against so it bounces back at you.
What was really surprising were the Fitness options. Pickleball One does give a good Pickleball experience, but it’s also secretly kind of a fitness game.
In fitness mode a song plays, usually a fairly catchy if generic tune, and robots launch Pickleballs at you that you need to hit to get points.
The workout mode of Pickleball One. It’s really fun
It’s a very novel way to not only practice hitting Pickleballs, but get a bit of a leg workout, test your reflexes, and sweat it out in Virtual Reality. Or even Mixed Reality, because Pickleball One also includes a mixed reality mode.
While this is by no means the most intense VR fitness game, it is a lot of fun and great practice. I never expected a feature like this in a VR Pickleball game, but I’m really glad it’s there and have had a lot of fun with it.
Pickleball One also has Multiplayer, and while you might have trouble finding an opponent at certain times of day or in certain regions of the world, it functions extremely well.
The Multiplayer works extremely well
There was little lag, and the game worked just as well as it did in Singleplayer. Overall an almost seamless Pickleball experience against another person in VR. There was just occasionally a split second of lag when someone would hit the Pickleball with their paddle, and that was still only occasionally.
I really have no complaints about Pickleball One. It’s everything you might want in a Pickleball VR experience and then some.
So if you want to play VR Pickleball ignore all the other games and spend your time and money on Pickleball One, it’s really the best of them all.
