This year has been a relatively quiet one for VR, but headset owners have still been treated to their fair share of great games. The likes of Beat Saber, In Death and Moss have become must-plays for anyone with an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, while we've also seen plenty of excellent VR ports of existing games, such as Skyrim VR.

If you missed out on any of them, or if you haven't been keeping track of all the new releases, then don't worry—we've brought them all together in this article. Here are the best 2018 VR games. For more great games, check out our longer list of the overall best VR games, which stretches back to 2016.

Note that some of the games here are in Early Access. We've only included them if we think they're polished enough to be considered one of the best things that you could've played this year.

Beat Saber

Developer: Beat Games | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site

Guitar Hero with lightsabers, basically—and the best thing you can play in VR right now. With a laser sword in each motion-controlled hand, you slash at boxes that are coming at you to a beat, ducking under low walls and dodging bombs as you go. It’s relentless, and awards points for style rather than pure timing—the flashier your follow throughs, the better, so unleash that inner Jedi.

It’s constantly getting new tracks for you to dice to pieces, but you can also import custom songs: Tutorials and a list of the best tracks are over at the unofficial BeastSaber site. It’s simply a brilliant idea, executed to perfection. 

In Death

Developer: Sólfar Studios | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site

2018 has been kind to VR archery lovers: both Sacralith and QuiVr are worth checking out, but In Death is the best of the bunch. It’s a roguelite about battling through a procedural fantasy castle, and it has the most imaginative use of a bow-and-arrow we’ve seen in VR. It’s primarily a weapon, and you come across cool arrow types by exploring, but it’s also your means of getting around: you fire a teleporting arrow to move. 

Nocking an arrow and letting it fly feels smooth, and after every run you’ll make progress on at least a handful of different achievements, which means you’ll always have a reason to dive back in for one more go. It’s tough for newcomers, but well worth sticking with.

Echo Combat

Developer: Ready at Dawn | Platforms: Oculus Rift | Link: Oculus

Echo Combat, a $10 add-on to futuresport Echo Arena, has the best movement of any FPS we’ve ever played: with pistol, laser rifle or shotgun in hand, you rocket boost your way around zero-gravity levels, grabbing onto the walls and pushing yourself off for extra speed. 

It’s slick and polished, and traversing each map feels as big an achievement as popping a long-range headshot. It only has a few arenas but they’re cleverly designed, with lots of objects to take cover behind and plenty of routes to flank your enemies. If you have a Rift, it’s a must-own.

Moss

Developer: Polyarc | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Steam 

A charming third-person platformer in which you’re both controlling Moss the mouse and poking at bits of the level with your hands, pushing and pulling objects into place to create new routes. The jumping, puzzling and sword-swinging are nothing special, but VR makes its gorgeous levels come alive. They’re full of detail and an endearing innocence, and each tells its own story. 

James loved it, saying it “recalls the sensation of being a kid and playing around in the dirt, spinning stories and characters out of sticks and grass.” You can read his full thoughts here.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice VR

Developer: Ninja Theory | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Official site

Don’t let the lack of motion control support put you off: Hellblade is a thing of terrible beauty in VR. Just like the regular version, you’ll play it in third-person with a gamepad or mouse and keyboard, but being able to swivel your head around while Senua moves makes you appreciate just how stunning a world Ninja Theory has crafted. 

It was already a moody game, but being surrounded by it makes it feel even more atmospheric—the voices that Senua hears in her head will torment you, and when they whisper in our ear, our hair stands on edge. It’s simply the best way to experience Hellblade if you’ve never played before, and even if you have, the VR version is free for owners of the original. Don’t miss out.

Blade and Sorcery

Developer: WarpFrog| Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Steam

This brutal fantasy combat game only just launched in Early Access, but it already has some of the best melee battles you’ll see in VR. It gives you endless ways to fight: you can zap lightning spells, punch enemies in slow motion, pick them up and bash their heads together, hurl concrete blocks at them with telekinesis, or simply just stab them in the belly. The enjoyment comes in stringing these moves together in imaginative, stylish ways. 

Battling human enemies sets it apart from the cartoony GORN (itself well worth a look), and the way the enemies crumple and scream when we skewer them makes us feel guilty for enjoying it so much.

Catch and Release

Developer: Metricminds GmbH & Co KG | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site

A chill fishing sim in which you row a boat to a likely spot on a lake, sling your hook, and enjoy the mountain scenery. It’s one of the most relaxing games you can play in VR and, as Chris wrote in the summer, it’s wonderfully interactive: to tune the radio to a song you want, you have to grab the tuning knob and twiddle, and to eat sandwiches you have to slam the bread into your face. You can even upload your own songs into a custom playlist to enjoy while you wait for a fish to bite. 

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim VR

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Steam

Strapping on a headset will make you see Skyrim’s world in a new light: dragons finally feel as imposing as they were meant to, and you’ll stop and stare at a sunset or waterfall that you previously wouldn’t have looked twice at. 

The motion controls are robust, and controlling your weapons with your hands makes combat more involved than ever. We especially like how both bows and spells work, and being able to cast spells in two different directions, one with each hand, is a gamechanger for mages.

The menus are a pain, and interactions usually require a button press: you can’t, say, grab the lid of a chest and pull it open. But if you can look past that, it’s the perfect excuse to play Skyrim all over again (and it even supports some of your favourite mods, too). 

GNOG

Developer: KO_OP| Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Steam

The prettiest VR game we’ve played in 2018. It’s a puzzler in which you open the box-shaped heads of colourful monsters, twisting and turning different objects inside to make something fun happen before turning the box over and twiddling some more. It’s like a VR Botanicula, and every dial you twiddle, or butterfly you poke, is accompanied by a brilliant sound effect. We have no idea what we’re doing sometimes, and the solutions to puzzles can feel obscure, but when prodding at the environment feels this delightful, we don’t care.

Brass Tactics 

Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment | Platforms: Oculus Rift | Link: Oculus

Brass Tactics is an RTS developed by the creative mind behind Age of Empires 2—and that pedigree shows. It’s our favourite VR strategy game right now, and makes us feel like a real-life general, towering over a miniature battlefield and directing intricately animated troops with our hands.

Everything is done through touch controls: to place structures you flip your hand to bring up lots of tiny models, grab one with your other hand, and throw it on the board. It’s not the most complex strategy game, but trying to keep an eye on the entire battlefield at once is enough of a challenge to keep us hooked. 

If you’re looking for something with a smaller scope, or you don’t have a Rift, we’d recommend Castle Must Be Mine, a cutesy tower defence game. 

Transpose

Developer: Secret Location| Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Steam

This mind-bending puzzler tails off towards the end, but it’s still worth playing because its central gimmick—you’re working with multiple past versions of yourself to complete challenges—feels unique. At the start of each level you don’t have any help but after you do something useful, like sliding a lever to move some platforms, you can create a new version of yourself. 

When you do that, the old version will replay their actions, and this time, when they move the platform, you can jump onto it. You might pick up a cube on the other side and chuck it to a third platform—then create a new version of yourself to pre-emptively get to that third platform and catch your own throw. It’s never too taxing, but we just love watching four versions of ourselves work together.

Budget Cuts

Developer: Neat Corporation | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Official site

This humorous VR stealth game is worth playing for its movement system alone: you fire a portal with one hand, which creates a handheld window into the new location. You can peer at it from different angles to check the coast is clear before fully committing. When on the other side, you’re murdering angry robots with scissors and knives, hiding under desks and solving simple puzzles, usually involving finding keycards. At three to four hours it feels a little light for the $30 asking price, but if you see it in a sale, grab it.

Rolling Line

Developer: Gaugepunk Games | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site

If you can’t afford to build a huge model railway in your garage, then Rolling Line is the next best thing. You can play around with its two default sets—inspired by Santa Fe and New Zealand—or create your own from scratch with its simple, powerful building tools, which even let you choose where to place individual trees, and pick how big they’ll be. Slowly crafting your set and idly flicking with the signals is a great way to blow off steam.

Guns'n'Stories: Bulletproof VR

Developer: Mirowin | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site

At its heart it’s a simple wave-based shooter—but we love its Wild West charm. Guns'n'Stories is told from the perspective of an old-timer recalling the glory days to his grandson, and he the narrates the levels as you go on, exaggerating for effect. It’s fun to act out the stories in real time, and although you can never move from one spot, we weren't ever bored: Its short stages are packed with more than enough enemies to keep us occupied. 

The cartoony shooting is satisfying, particularly when you’re dual wielding, and you can smack bullets out of the air with the butt of your gun. Nothing complex, here: Just some rootin' tootin' cowboy shooting. 

Distance 

Developer: Refract | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Official site

After more than six years in development, the best arcade VR racing game has finally left Early Access. You drive around trippy, sci-fi tracks at impossible speeds, trying to react to the way its randomly generated tracks rotate and morph shape. You’ll sometimes take flight, too, jumping between sections of track and rotating your car to drive on the ceiling and up walls. 

It has a campaign, an arcade mode, online multiplayer and a track creation tool, and it’s all set to a wonderfully thumping soundtrack that will help keep you focused on the twisting road ahead. 

Sairento

Developer: Mixed Realms Pte Ltd, Swag Soft | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Steam

If you’ve ever dreamed of becoming a cyber ninja, then you need Sairento in your life. It’s a ridiculous, cinematic combat playground in which you can, in no particular order, triple jump off of a wall, backflip, slow down time, blast dual Uzis, block bullets with your dual blades and slice up an enemy with a katana, sending blood spraying all over the level—and your screen. 

It has a campaign, an endless mode and PvP multiplayer, so there’s lots to get stuck into. It takes a while to learn how to pull of its fanciest moves, but when you finally nail the killer combo you’ve been practising for so long, you’ll never want to take your headset off. 

Accounting+

Developer: Crows Crows Crows, Squanch Games| Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Official site

The original Accounting made it onto our list of the best ever VR games—now, two years after its initial release, it’s back as an expanded version with twice as many jokes, most of which are genuinely funny. It plays a little bit like an interactive, surreal comedy TV show, with lots of quirky characters to meet and plenty of mischief to get up to. It’s all based around the “noble profession” of accounting: one minute, you’re cleaning up your desk after work, the next minute you’re playing a xylophone made of bones and summoning thousands of demons. Oops. 

Vox Machinae

Developer: Space Bullet Dynamics Corporation | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site

It’s only been in Early Access for three months, but Vox Machinae is already our favourite VR mech game. It’s remarkably polished, even at this early stage, and when you’re at the control sticks you really feel like you’re in the cockpit of a giant hunk of metal. When you turn your head, you’re faced with all manner of dials displaying your health, your location, and your heat status, many of which you can interact with, and you can hear your mech creak and groan as you leap in the air. 

Your weapons boom when you unleash them, and both bullet trails and explosions look like something out of an action film. You can choose between five mech chassis, and then deck them out with your favourite weapons before heading into its multiplayer battles. It’s only going to get better with time, too.

Red Matter

Developer: Vertical Robot | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site

This puzzler, set on a Russian base on one of Saturn’s moons, won’t leave you scratching your head too often, but it’s full of otherworldly atmosphere. Every room is packed with objects to interact with, even if they’re not part of the main puzzle: you’ll yank open lockers to discover letters from faraway families, play with moving platforms, and throw gas canisters around. 

The story is decent, and there’s plenty of incidental details that enrich it. Your handheld scanner fills in the blanks by revealing information about whatever you’re looking at—it will translate notes you find from Russian, for example. It’s worth taking the time to explore every hidey hole.

Skyrim's protagonist is famously silent, but a new mod allows you to give them a voice: yours. Dragonborn Speaks Naturally adds voice recognition into the VR version of the game, which means you can speak your dialogue lines out loud to select them during conversations. Neat.

Dragonborn Speaks Naturally works by running a background speech recognition service that hooks into Skyrim's code and identifies lines of dialogues, selecting them in-game if you say them out loud. It'll work with whatever microphone you want to use, although creator Cuebit advises against using the HTC Vive's built-in mic. You should also try to get rid of any background noise like the whirring of a fan before trying it out, and ensure your microphone volume is turned all the way up.

I imagine that if it accurately picks up your speech then it might make you feel more involved in the game, almost like you're having an actual back-and-forth conversation with an NPC. I often find myself saying dialogue lines out loud without thinking when I'm playing Skyrim, so if you're anything like me then it should feel natural. But if it fails to pick up what you're saying, or if you stumble over a word, it'll just be annoying. 

Thankfully, most people that have downloaded it seem impressed with its accuracy. Some users say it's causing their game to crash, so it might take a bit of tinkering to get it to work properly.

You have to install this dynamic-link library loader before following these instructions on installing the mod.

With a few hundred hours already sunk into Skyrim, it's rare for me to feel much wonder or excitement while playing. I still enjoy Bethesda's RPG as much as ever—though usually with a healthy helping of mods—but by now the world is so familiar there aren't many sights or scenes that manage to draw a second glance.

VR is a great way to change how you view a familiar game by quite literally changing the way you view it. In the few hours of Skyrim VR I've played, I've spent more time stopping, standing, and staring that I have since perhaps the very first time I played it back in 2011. It's wonderful, really, for a waterfall I've passed a hundred times in my travels to suddenly become something to stop and admire. The moons overhead at night are once again something to gawk at. And Skyrim's dragons have reclaimed their might and majesty since I'm not just looking at them, but looking up at them.

Playing Skyrim on the HTC Vive Pro, I was bracing myself for the long, drawn-out introductory sequence that I've been through one too many times. But it's actually pretty thrilling to experience it in VR. Instead of robotically rushing through the town of Helgen as quickly as possible to complete the tutorial and break into the open world, I really, y'know, played it. Sure, the wagon ride and the wait for your turn on the chopping block is still a bit overlong, but when the dragon shows up and starts tearing the town apart, Skyrim VR becomes a real thrill. Dragons actually feel dangerous again: they're just so damn big and scary and imposing now. In a lot of ways, it felt like playing Skyrim for the first time again. That's what VR can do for a familiar game.

You can us the standard teleportion option to get around—point a beam at the spot you want to travel to, and simply appear there—or you can use normal locomotion if it doesn't make you motion sick. I typically don't experience motion sickness in VR, so I used the normal locomotion option, and found it worked just fine. There's also a particular pleasure in opening the map and finding yourself suspended above the world, all of Skyrim laid out below you. You don't just scroll around in it, it's like you're flying.

Skyrim's VR's combat is also fun: it's a novel experience to notch an arrow, draw back the bowstring, aim, and let it fly using both controllers. Blocking incoming arrows or blows by holding up your shield (and collecting the arrows that have punctured your shield after the fight), swinging your sword or axe, and using two-handed magic to unleash terrific gouts of flames: that all feels fun and fresh in Skyrim VR, too. 

But the wonder of seeing the world through new eyes and the novelty of scorching enemies with outstretched flame-hands can only last so long. Eventually the weaknesses and limitations of a huge game retrofitted for a headset become apparent. As with Fallout 4, Skyrim is as much about using menus as it is about exploration and combat, and VR just isn't a great match for such menu-dependent games.

There's a lot of scrolling through the inventory, examining items, equipping them, comparing, sorting, selling, and so on. Not only is this a bit awkward to accomplish with the HTC Vive's controller thumbpads, but it's time-consuming in a way that's not as apparent when playing on a desktop PC. One of the ongoing issues with VR is how long players will be comfortable wearing the headset, and when a game is so reliant on multiple menu screens, that subtracts from the time spent doing the fun things like combat and exploration. Nearly every time you do anything in the game, like loot an enemy or open a chest or pick out a potion, you're going to use the menu. Playing in VR with a headset and dual controllers for an hour can leave you feeling hot, sweaty, and tired, and if half that time is spent mucking around in menus instead of battling giants, it's also bound to leave you feeling impatient and unfulfilled.

Games built for VR from the ground up often have a level of interactivity that just isn't present in existing games adapted for VR, and in addition to over-reliance on menus, Skyrim shares another of Fallout 4's problems in virtual reality: there simply isn't enough natural interaction with the world to feel truly immersed. 

You can stretch out your hand to open something like a chest or book, but then you get a prompt to click a button instead of seeing your hand actually open or grasp the item. If you see a lever that opens a gate, you have reach for it, but then you get a prompt to click a button to pull the lever, rather than actually (well, virtually) grasping it in your hand and pulling it into place. Instead of doing the natural thing—seeing an object and interacting with it—you're seeing an object and then reading a text prompt on how to interact with it, and then not really getting to interact with it at all. That will never feel real.

This doesn't make Skyrim a bad VR experience, it's just not as immersive as it could be. Seeing a familiar game in a new way, being in awe of some of the sights it contains, and swinging a sword or shield around is fun, but a truly convincing VR experience requires non-violent interactions that feel natural, too. Otherwise, it's just hard to forget you're wearing a headset and standing in your room instead of visiting another world.

Skyrim VR launched earlier this week, giving Oculus Rift and HTC Vive owners an excuse to jump back in and slay dragons for the umpteenth time. I'd love to play it, but I don't doubt that at some point the VR novelty will wear off and you'll be left playing the vanilla version of Skyrim, and all that entails. Eventually, you'll probably want to install mods—and you can already do just that through both Nexus Mod Manager and Vortex, the Skyrim Nexus's (relatively) new mod management tool. 

Reddit user tyrielwood has created this handy guide for getting mods to work with Skyrim VR using the Nexus Mod Manager, and you can find it in video form at the bottom of this post. It involves tinkering with some of the game files, but it's nothing too taxing.

Alternatively—and potentially an easier option—you could use Vortex, the new go-to mod manager for Nexus mods that was released in February in an attempt to address some of the failings of the Nexus Mod Manager. You can install Vortex here and read this handy guide that another Reddit user has written to get mods working in Skyrim VR.

I imagine that some mods won't agree with VR, and I'd be wary of texture changes and other visual enhancements. But mods that add quests, items or characters should work in exactly the same way.

Skyrim VR is £39.99/$59.99/€59.99 on Steam and the Humble Store.

You can play Skyrim at your desk, on your sofa, while you’re doing a poo and now, even if you don’t have PSVR, you can enjoy the experience of fighting dragons and climbing chilly mountains in virtual reality. Yes, Skyrim VR is now available on PC. 

Like Fallout 4 VR, this is the full game, but it's been adapted for the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, and it includes the Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn DLC. 

Skyrim was the game I most wanted to play in VR. It’s a place I’m incredibly familiar with after hundreds of hours spent playing in it across multiple platforms, so actually feeling like I’m inside it promised to be a real treat. But now the game’s almost seven years old and I’ve played it to death. The shine of VR has also worn off, and I confess that having Skyrim on Switch suits me a lot more now that I carry it everywhere. 

That said, I apparently can’t stop buying Skyrim, so I’ll inevitably end up exploring Whiterun in VR sooner rather than later. 

Skyrim VR is out now for £39.99/$59.99/€59.99 on Steam and the Humble Store.