These are our favorite games for the Oculus Quest

The best Oculus Quest games range from first-person shooters to musical saber swinging, but all of them benefit from the headset’s lack of wires. Most of our standout favorites will have you slicing, diving and grooving across your living room, with no need to worry about staying tethered to your PC. Our top pick, Beat Saber, was available on other systems long before the Quest came out, but this port is the definitive experience. Here are all the top games that any Oculus Quest owner should consider.

Best Overall: Beat Saber

Beat Saber is an incredibly addictive game. In it, you swing sabers through blocks to the beat of popular music. Much like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, Beat Saber is easy to enter but difficult to master. As a result, it’s fun for newcomers to VR and gaming experts trying to skyrocket up the leaderboards.

The untethered nature of the Oculus Quest improves Beat Saber because you won’t have wires in the way when you’re swinging your arms around. Also, because the Oculus Quest is so easy to take with you on the go, you can take Beat Saber with you anywhere. You can challenge your friends’ scores, or join up with them in the Beat Saber multiplayer mode to collaboratively slice up blocks. If you only have one headset for multiple people, we recommend casting it to a TV so you can take turns and watch each other play.

The only real downside to Beat Saber is that it doesn’t officially support custom songs. You can still add custom songs, but it requires another device and a few extra steps.

Pros:

• Easy to jump right into
• Difficult to master, increasing replayability
• Fun for solo gaming, multiplayer or for casting at parties

Cons:

• Custom songs require sideloading

Best Overall

Beat Saber

• $30 at Oculus Store

Fun for everyone

Because Beat Saber is easy to jump into but difficult to master, it’s a great game for beginners and hardcore gamers.

Best Strategy Game: SUPERHOT VR

This game received a massive boost when jumping from console to VR headsets. The Oculus Quest’s lack of wires made it even better. You can completely lose yourself inside this game as you dodge, dip, duck, dive, and dodge again. In this game, the world moves at the same speed you do. That means you can pause to make a plan to take down enemies or to dodge a bullet. It requires precise planning and exact movements to clear many of its levels. Alternatively, you can speedrun as you master all of its levels.

The game supports full locomotion, meaning you can freely move throughout levels. In fact, you can move to areas of levels that you can’t on some other platforms because the Oculus Quest is wireless. That’s mostly a positive, but it means you can’t get as good of an experience within limited space. It’s still an incredible game, though, and a must-have for Oculus Quest owners.

Now, all we can do is hope that the developers release a Quest VR port of its sequel, MIND CONTROL DELETE.

Pros:

• Incredibly immersive
• Unique and challenging
• Huge range of motion
• Good for slow and steady gamers or speedrunners

Cons:

• Requires more space

Best Strategy Game

SUPERHOT VR

$25 at Oculus Store

Living in the matrix

Because the Oculus Quest is wireless, you can freely dodge bullets and move to defeat your opponents in this game.

Best Unique Shooter: Pistol Whip

What do you get when you combine John Wick-style action and dubstep? Pistol Whip. This game lets you shoot your enemies to music while flowing between shots. You can dodge bullets, mow down foes with a machine gun, and feel like you’re in an action movie. It’s earned an almost perfect rating in the Oculus Store for a reason.

Pistol Whip calls levels “scenes” because each level combines combat with a cinematic experience. Starting with ten scenes, the developers added five in the Full Throttle expansion, three in the Heartbreaker pack, and five story-based scenes in the 2089 campaign. Our Pistol Whip 2089 review laid out how this latest free expansion, while too short, added new enemies, songs, weapons, environments and gameplay mechanics, plus upped the difficulty and added a story to what was previously just an experience.

If you haven’t been doing the math, that’s 23 scenes and a ton of fun, all available when you buy the base game. For replay value, and the chance to get physical exercise while feeling like a badass, Pistol Whip is one of our undeniable favorites.

Pros:

• Brings a unique style to the shooter genre
• Makes you feel like an action movie star
• Incorporates fun music
• Tons of free updates with new scenes

Cons:

• Short and predictable story

Best Unique Shooter

Pistol Whip

$25 at Oculus Store

Shoot to the rhythm

In this rhythmic shooter, you shoot, dodge, and dance your way through levels while feeling like you’re in an action movie.

Best Horror Game: Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners

In our Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners review, we called this game one of the best VR experiences you’ll find anywhere. Far more than just a zombie shooter, Saints and Sinners has excellent survival mechanics, a compelling plot with great characters and meaningful choices, and realistic physics that make you feel actually present in its awful world.

You’ll get over 20 hours of single-player content from this game, along with the hope that the developers will add new content soon. The PC and PSVR ports have The Trial, a free horde multiplayer mode with arcade scoring to challenge your friends. Unfortunately, you won’t find any multiplayer content here. Still, it’s one of the best Oculus Quest games we’ve ever played.

Pros:

• Satisfying combat
• Long campaign with great story
• Excellent graphics and physics

Cons:

• No multiplayer content
• Quest 1 port missing some visual effects

Best Horror Game

Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners

$40 at Oculus Store

A replayable single-player experience

No other Quest games match this zombie gem for its perfect combination of story, gameplay and visuals.

Best Free Game: Rec Room

Don’t let the simple graphics fool you; Rec Room is one of the best Oculus Quest games, and it’s free! It has several different play areas, so you can jump into different games. There’s also a lounge to hang out in with other people. One of my favorite games is paintball, which lets you play capture the flag with sniper rifles, pistols, and shotguns.

The biggest downside of Rec Room is the other people in the game, at least some of the time. While playing online can be fun and provide an easy way to play multiplayer games, many people in Rec Room are rude or offensive. Unfortunately, I’ve seen people make vulgar comments and motions in the game on several occasions.

That being said, a million gamers play Rec Room in VR per month, so we’re hopeful you can find some friendly people to hang out with, and enough fun content to make you want to come back again and again.

Pros:

• Free
• Has a variety of games
• Has a low learning curve

Cons:

• Community can be toxic

Best Free Game

Rec Room

Free at Oculus Store

Multiple games in one

Rec Room packs several games into one, including paintball, a pirate ship adventure, laser tag, and many more ways to play.

Best Arcade Shooter: Robo Recall: Unplugged

In this game, you have to stop an outbreak of out of control robots. You can use pistols, shotguns, mecha suits, and more weapons to dismantle — I mean, cough, “recall”— robots. You can also pick up a robot, bash it into the ground and throw it at another robot. It’s all-around robot mayhem that’ll get you laughing as you smash them to bits.

The game plays best when you plant your feet and fire away like an arcade game. It struggles a bit when it comes to moving around, especially against quicker enemies. It would benefit greatly from a locomotion option.

Pros:

• Laughably fun, ?smash ? smash?
• Has a varied set of weapons
• Let’s you jump into a mecha suit and fire lasers

Cons:

• Movement can be awkward

Best Arcade Shooter

Robo Recall: Unplugged

$30 at Oculus Store

Blastin’ bots

This bullet storm game has you to spin 360 degrees to destroy killer robots en masse.

Best Melee Fighter: Ironlights

This game tosses you in an arena to combat fighters from a range of classes. You can play as a ninja, knight, crusader, monk, or duelist, each of which has a unique set of weapons and fighting styles. Ranged combat is full speed while closeup melee combat is slowed down. This slower combat mode makes you strategize how to hit your opponent rather than just hacking and slashing at a manic pace.

Ironlights has a campaign mode, which can help you learn the basics of the game, but multiplayer provides the game’s best experience. You can battle opponents in real-time over the web and compete on online leaderboards.

Pros:

• Unique fighting mechanics
• Online multiplayer
• Multiple fighting classes for varied combat

Cons:

• AI isn’t that challenging
• Can be difficult to sync movements to weapons

Best Melee Fighter

Ironlights

$20 for Oculus Quest

Strategic slashing

Ironlights combines unique melee combat with different classes of warriors in campaigns and online battles.

Best Story: Moss

While you can have a lot of fun hacking and slashing in some excellent titles on the Oculus Quest, Moss brings a different feel to the headset. It’s a charming story that you get to work through alongside Quill, an adorable little mouse. In the game, you help Quill solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and journey through the woods filled with relics and magic.

Moss is built for VR, but instead of just focusing on movement mechanics, it immerses you into a heartfelt story set inside a virtual environment. Some might dislike the fact that it’s a VR game that has you control the main character through a third-person view. That doesn’t seem to have bothered many considering the game’s nearly perfect rating.

Pros:

• Incredibly charming
• Has a unique story
• Features clever puzzles
• Has beautiful designs

Cons:

• Uses a joystick to move the main character

Best Story

Moss

$30 at Oculus Store

Just plain charming

In this game, you lead a charming mouse around a beautiful world full of puzzles and a gorgeous story.

Best for Artists: Tilt Brush

It’s hard to say if this is a “game” in the strictest definition, but it’s a lot of fun either way. Tilt Brush allows you to create beautiful artwork inside a 3-D virtual space. Whether you’re an experienced artist or a beginner, you can have fun playing inside Tilt Brush. You can flow through your artwork with your Touch Controllers to create anything you want.

While Tilt Brush can be immersive and fun to use, it’s a little limited by its lack of some tools. Many have asked for additions like copy and pasting, a better toolbar, and other artists to make creating easier.

Pros:

• Has easy to learn basics
• Allows you to create vast pieces of art
• Works well with immersive nature of the Oculus Quest

Cons:

• Lacks some tools that would make art easier to create

Best for Artists

Tilt Brush by Google

$20 at Oculus Store

Building beauty

Tilt Brush takes advantage of the wireless nature of the Quest and lets you create on an almost infinite canvas.

Best Action Horror Game: Arizona Sunshine

Arizona Sunshine is a tremendously popular title from other VR platforms, so Oculus Quest users met it with anticipation. It’s a zombie thriller with a complete campaign mode that you don’t normally see on the Oculus Quest. It has a large arsenal of 25 weapons that allow you to blast away zombies in several ways.

Arizona Sunshine has a campaign mode, horde mode, and allows you to play in co-op multiplayer. In some ways, it’s one of the most comprehensive games on the Oculus Quest. It’s also one of the most expensive Quest games despite being four years old at this point. Rest assured, the developers are still adding content, with “The Damned” DLC launching last year and a new Arizona Sunshine horde map coming to the Quest in early 2021.

You’ll absolutely get your money’s worth; and even though we like Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners more, at least this game will let you enjoy it with your friends.

Pros:

• Large arsenal of weapons
• Supports co-op and solo modes
• Has campaign and horde modes
• Continued support from developers

Cons:

• Quite pricey when compared to the competition

Best Action Horror Game

Arizona Sunshine

$40 at Oculus Store

Sunny zombies

This game is a high action, high scare zombie shooter based in the beautiful Arizona landscape.

Best Rhythmic Shooter: Audica

There are plenty of good shooters on the Oculus Quest, so picking the best one for you can be a bit difficult. Audica has you blast targets and bat them down with your Touch Controllers. It’s set to the beat of club-style music, so you can get your groove on while shooting things up. As opposed to a game like Pistol Whip that encourages dancing around, Audica is more focused on destroying targets perfect to a song’s rhythm.

While Audica has some great music for shooting around, the songs that it comes with generally fit into a limited set of genres. If that music isn’t your scene, you can grab its DLC packs that have more “normal” music.

Pros:

• Focuses on shooting
• Just a blast to play
• Visually striking

Cons:

• Music can be repetitive (though DLC is available)

Best Rhythmic Shooter

AUDICA

$30 at Oculus Store

Bang bang

From the makers of Rock Band and Dance Central, this game has you shoot blasters to the rhythm of songs.

Best Sci-fi Game: Vader Immortal Trilogy

Generations of sci-fi fans have pretended to swing a lightsaber. Now, you can wield a lightsaber, use the force, and battle the most iconic character from Star Wars, Darth Vader. In this trilogy of games, you can take your skills to the dojo and block laser blasts and destroy robots, or play through story modes. The conclusion of the series has you raid Vader’s castle with an army of forces.

Each title in this trilogy adds abilities that make fighting more fun, such as the Force push. That’s the biggest downside of this set of games, that it’s a set. If you want to play all three, you’ll have to purchase each one and jump between them through your Oculus Quest’s menu. Luckily, the trilogy is complete so you can buy them all instead of having to wait.

Pros:

• Let’s you fight with a lightsaber
• Features incredibly fun training dojo
• Adds abilities throughout the trilogy
• Decent Star Wars story

Cons:

• Split between three games

Best Sci-fi Game

Vader Immortal: Episode III

$10 at Oculus Store

Facing Vader

In the third installment of the Vader Immortal series, you raid Vader’s fortress alongside an army and learn how to use the Force.

Force Fun

Vader Immortal: Episode II

$10 at Oculus Store

Learning from Vader

This second entry in the series has you learn the Force from the Sith Lord himself, learning how to throw people and objects.

Lightsaber Antics

Vader Immortal: Episode I

$10 at Oculus Store

Become a padawan

This game allows you to slash your lightsaber through foes and swing it to block lasers. Just don’t sleep on the training dojo!

Bottom line

The Oculus Quest has a vast and growing library of games. Whether you’re old, young, an experienced gamer, or completely new to VR, there’s a title that you can enjoy — the system has almost 200 apps and games for you to try. The untethered nature of the Oculus Quest brings new life to older titles and makes it easy to move around inside games.

Most Oculus Quest ports can be pretty pricey, so you’ll want to start with the best Oculus Quest games and not waste money on any duds. You can also try out some of the best free Oculus Quest games, but for the truly game-changing ports, you’ll need to spend a little cash.

If you’re just getting started, Beat Saber is an incredible game that’s easy to play but difficult to master. It’s an excellent title for beginners or hardcore gamers and is made even better by the wireless nature of the Oculus Quest. If you get bored with its library of songs, you can sideload your own into the game.

Credits — The team that worked on this guide

Sean Endicott has been on the Oculus VR beat since the Gear VR. As the platform evolved and more games came out, he ended up spending more and more time inside a headset. When he’s not within VR, he’s hunting for tech news and trying to control his whole house with his smartphone.

Nick Sutrich Nick is a news writer and contributor to Android Central. He’s been writing about tech since 2011 and virtual reality and any kind of gadget that’s connected to the Internet. Find him on Twitter at @Gwanatu.

Michael Hicks got his tech start in 2016, covering emerging tech like VR and self-driving cars before expanding to all things tech. When he’s not gaming or reading SFF novels, he’s writing and editing for Android Central.