Dan Stapleton's Reviews
Orcs Must Die! 3 is very familiar to players of the second game but still a fun and goofy action/tower-defense challenge.
Phantom: Covert Ops takes itself way too seriously and it stealth is basic and reliant on virtually blind enemies, but infiltrating an enemy base with a murder canoe in VR does have its bright spots.
Disintegration's single-player campaign has some novel ideas and its robot enemies die well, but it never achieves any tactical depth.
Maneater's monster-shark feeding frenzy is fun but simple, and that lack of depth causes it to become repetitive as time goes on.
Gears Tactics does an excellent job of grafting Gears' signature look and feel onto XCOM's turn-based battle format and looks great doing it.
Half-Life: Alyx has set a new bar for VR in interactivity, detail, and level design, showing what can happen when a world-class developer goes all-in on the new frontier of technology.
Black Mesa is the best way to play the classic original 1998 Half-Life today, but it's a remake that already feels old enough that it would benefit from a remake itself.
Phoenix Point's more complex take on the classic X-COM formula has some great ideas, but most of them feel experimental and in need of fine-tuning and balance.
Simplistic combat and a predictable story leave Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series Episode 3 very little to work with.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order makes up for a lot of lost time with a fantastic single-player action-adventure that marks the return of the playable Jedi.
With The Outer Worlds, Obsidian has found its own path in the space between Bethesda and BioWare's RPGs, and it's a great one.
John Wick Hex is a simple, smart tactics game but its distracting lack of polish often thwarts its attempt to distill the fast action of the movies into deliberate gameplay.
In Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, survival is easy once you decipher the basic mechanics of evolution and sit through the cutscenes, but the journey is full of moments of discovery.
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw does a great job of modernizing the spacefighter gameplay of classics like Wing Commander: Privateer and Freelancer.
Youngblood is aggressively okay, but doesn't come close to recapturing the joy of its predecessor.
Beat Saber should be the go-to for introducing people to the potential of VR gaming. Its simple to learn, damn near impossible to master rhythm gameplay is outstanding.
Rage 2's moment-to-moment combat is outstanding, making it shine among open-world first-person shooters.
Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Story - Episode 1 is mechanically simple, but it does a fine job of letting you bask in Star Wars surroundings and the impressive presence of Darth Vader himself.
Civilization VI: Gathering Storm is a strong expansion that turns disaster into opportunity.
Just Cause 4 is a slightly better version of Just Cause 3's destruction-fueled action, but lacks a big new idea to give it an identity of its own.