Best VR Spaceship Games
As virtual reality headsets (especially the standalone Oculus Quest) become more commonplace, there are more space-themed experiences than ever. Some of these are better than others.
The ISS Experience takes two years of footage aboard the International Space Station and presents it to you in VR. It’s fascinating and surprisingly intimate, from interviews to the crew eating lunch together.
Experience a Spaceship
Space exploration isn’t just for astronauts or celebrities, it can be a reality for anyone with a VR headset. The best VR games can take you on a cosmic journey to see planets and stars, fight hard in starfighters or drive a spaceship through space.
This immersive experience puts you inside a simulated spaceship and gives you the chance to explore every nook, cranny, and passageway. You don’t have much to do beyond moving around and looking at the ship’s control panels, navigation screens, grated floors, and industrial structures, but it’s an incredible way to get the sense of being in a spaceship without any of the claustrophobia. The game encourages you to thoroughly explore VR Spaceship by giving you pink neon directives to look at, and though spaces might start to look the same after a while, that’s probably a good thing in order to get the full experience.
Millions of people have dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but only about 500 people have ever actually been to the International Space Station. In this Emmy-nominated VR simulation for Oculus Rift and Rift S, you become one of them as real astronauts guide you through archival footage of the station’s daily operations. You can even use the station’s docking arm and go on a spacewalk to learn how astronauts move in zero-g.
Explore a Spaceship
Unlike a lot of VR games, this one lets you wander around the inside of a spaceship in virtual reality. It’s not the same experience as flying a rocket or walking on Mars, but it’s still a fascinating look at what it feels like to explore space from inside an actual vessel.
The Smithsonian’s Discovering Space 2 is an excellent free VR experience that allows you to explore every planet in the solar system from the comfort of your own home. You can walk around Jezero crater on Mars, admire ice mountains on Pluto, and more. This experience is also compatible with the Google Cardboard headset.
This is one of the more comprehensive experiences available on the Oculus Rift and other VR headsets. Felix & Paul Studios sent a basketball-sized camera up to the ISS in 2018, and astronauts used it to film you-are-there scenes of their daily lives onboard.
While Mission: ISS isn’t technically a virtual reality game, it has become one of the most popular ways to experience life on the ISS in VR. Point your controllers at objects and you’ll hear an explanation of their purpose onboard the station.
Released in 2021, this science fiction adventure is a must-try for any space-minded VR user. You play Jack, an artificial intelligence that keeps a space station running in the rings of Saturn alongside human Captain Olivia Rhodes. The game’s developers use the visual strengths of virtual reality to create a sense of vastness and scale that would be difficult to convey on a flat monitor.
Float Through Space
If you want to get a feel for life on the ISS without boarding it, check out Felix & Paul Studios’ Emmy-nominated Space Explorers: The ISS Experience. Two years in the making, this is a you-are-there documentary that lets you roam around the station as astronauts go about their day-to-day chores. Some of the footage is scripted (astronauts explaining how they maneuver in microgravity or sharing what it’s like to eat a can of tuna while floating in space) but there are plenty of candid shots that make this an amazing piece of VR.
While the user floats around the spaceship, the game’s graphics start to look a bit VR Motorcycle stale after about 15 minutes because spaces begin to all resemble each other. Still, it’s a great way to learn about the layout of an actual spacecraft, and its simple controls will let you navigate its control panels, navigation screens, and grated floors.
If you’d prefer more interactive VR space exploration, try Universe Sandbox for the Meta Quest and – if equipped with one – the Oculus Quest headset. This open-ended, procedural VR planetarium lets you zoom into stars and planetary bodies that would be spectacular on a monitor but really take your breath away in virtual reality.
Shoot Spaceships
When not floating through space and exploring the ship, you can use your weapons to shoot down enemy ships that are coming for you. This is one of the few parts of the game where you need to actively control your ship and shoot – and it can be quite fun if you’re good at it.
Aiming simply by looking at a ship remains an entertaining entertainment gimmick in VR, and it works well here too (although some of the bits where you’re supposed to actually steer your ship around do make things a little tricky). But overall, the game does a good job of keeping the experience interesting without getting too overtly difficult or complex.
The visuals are also pretty cool. The asteroids, other sights and even your own ship are nicely rendered, with a nice sense of depth to the view too. The levels also work in a few different ways, switching between straight up rail shooting targeting sequences and flying and shooting bits with more control.
It would have been great if the game had made more use of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping technology, which allows games to understand your physical location through feature points in the real world. This would have helped it to feel more responsive and interactive, although it wouldn’t have solved the issue of motion sickness across different VR headsets.