For a long time, the hopes and dreams of many virtual reality fans could be summed up with two words: Oculus Rift. Helped by the rise of cheap smartphone displays, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey took a technology that most people considered a retro curiosity and convinced them that it could change the world. The Rift let you skydive without a parachute. It helped artists show the world through another person’s eyes. It simulated beheading. It put you in fictional settings that ranged from kaiju-fighting robots to Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment.

 

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And then, slowly, the Rift got company — from competition like the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, as well as totally new VR categories like Google Cardboard and Oculus’ own mobile Gear VR headset. Consumer virtual reality went from a gaming peripheral to an all-purpose entertainment device, and then to the next great evolution in computing. While "Oculus Rift" was no longer a synonym for "virtual reality," Oculus remained a central player, especially after Facebook purchased it for an estimated $2 billion.
There was just one problem: nobody knew what the Rift would look like, or when it would come out. Luckey and the rest of Oculus’ leadership were adamant about not making promises they couldn’t keep, or delivering an undercooked product — two things that doomed consumer virtual reality decades ago. But after nearly four years, the finished Oculus Rift has shipped to its very first group of customers, and it’s time to see whether the headset that started it all is still pushing the cutting edge of virtual reality.

The result is a lot of games where VR feels like an addition, not a transformation. Most of the first-person experiences could translate to flat screens without much trouble, and some — like space exploration game Adrift — are already coming to both VR and flatscreen platforms like PC and PlayStation 4. The plethora of third-person action games like Lucky’s Tale might need to be redesigned slightly for players who can’t lean over the environments, but they’re still close adaptations of established formats. The titles that feel most clearly designed for virtual reality were early experiments that came to Gear VR before the consumer Rift. That includes Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which takes advantage of a headset’s isolating effects, and Darknet, whose sprawling puzzle maps would look painfully cramped on a smaller screen.

The result is a lot of games where VR feels like an addition, not a transformation

In some cases, VR still fills genuine gaps in a familiar experience. CCP’s EVE: Valkyrie could certainly have been developed as a standard space-fighting game, a genre whose controls usually confound me. But somehow, being able to see the cockpit all around me makes it easier to understand how my ship should move, and using the Rift’s head tracking to fire missiles feels much better than pointing a joystick. Racing or flying simulations aren’t things that could only be done in VR, but it’s arguably the best place for them.

Conversely, VR-friendly design occasionally hampers a game. Chronos, a beautiful fantasy game that’s become one of my favorite Rift launch titles, uses the same combat mechanics as Dark Souls. Unlike Dark Souls, the camera moves between fixed angles for each area instead of directly following the player. This gives you a perfect view of its beautiful environments, and it cuts the risk of motion sickness to almost zero. But it also means that large enemies can block your view of the protagonist, and the camera will disorientingly pop to a completely different location if you move too far during a battle.