Summary
The virtual reality medium has often been criticized for the scope of its games. Especially in the earlier days of VR, games tended towards shorter campaigns and experiences, often finishing in a couple of hours. That trend has changed over time, and VR gamers who want some depth in their games now have more options.
Meta’s Quest platform has an extensive library of games these days. With the advent ofQuest 3 and its additional processing power, developers now have more room to squeeze more content into their games. These are all great examples of VR games with lengthy single-player campaigns.
10Stride: Fates
Parkour in the City
Stride: Fatestakes the parkour gameplay ofStrideand attempts to weave a single-player narrative that takes players through the skylines and rooftops of a futuristic city. The story doesn’t quite hit the “Mirror’s Edgein VR” vibe that it’s going for, but there’s enough run-and-gun action and nimble parkour segments to keep things interesting.
The single player campaign is a decent length, taking place over several missions and taking around6–7 hoursto complete. Updates post-launch have added side missions that unlock as the campaign progresses, too, adding a couple of hours to the single player content.
Assassin’s Creed: Nexusis a faithful attempt at translating the flat screen series' most iconic aspects into VR. Players inhabit classic protagonists Ezio, Connor, and Kassandra, stepping into their shoes to carry out the varied assassinations and tracking missions that fans know and love.
The campaigns of the three protagonists are linked, and it will take players around15 hoursto get through the full story. There’s also plenty of side content, like time trials, collectibles and side missions to be found within the game’s areas.
8Grimlord
Grimdark RPG
While there are a number of physics-basedmelee combat games in VR,Grimlordtries something a little different. The combat is slower and more deliberate than something likeBlade & Sorcery, with more focus on defensive moves like parrying and learnable enemy attack patterns.
Grimlordis one of the many games claiming a soulslike influence, and its scant narrative reflects that. Yet, following the NPC threads and uncovering secrets can extend the single player campaign significantly. The main narrative is only around4 hours, but exploring the campaign fully can take around30 hours.
Surprisingly, there aren’t that many examples of WWII-erashooters in VR.Sniper Elite VRis probably the best example of a VR game in that setting, putting players in the shoes of an Italian resistance sniper fighting to free his country. The campaign has the unique and interesting framing of being told by the protagonist in his old age. In between missions, players find themselves sitting in the garden, reading war stories from an old scrap book. It’s an interesting way of splitting up missions, and infinitely more immersive than selecting missions from a menu.
The campaign itself is a decent length, and it will take players around8–9 hoursto finish the main content. It’ll be even longer if players want the completionist feeling of hunting down all the Stone Eagles in a mission, or getting perfect stealth runs.
6Moss: Book 1 & 2
Quill’s Big Adventure
Moss: Book 2expanded on the originalMosswith a longer campaign, deeper combat, and more interactions from the player’s first-person perspective. It also tells an enchanting narrative that allows players to develop an emotional relationship with the little mouse protagonist, Quill.
The second game has a decent-length campaign on its own, but these days new players can pick up both games ina bundle on the Quest store. That makes over10 hoursof single-player campaign split across both games.
With its narrative told through audio snippets, notes, and environmental storytelling,Into The Radiusdoesn’t have the most straightforward single player story campaign. Still, the cryptic main missions and their goals will take players on a memorable journey nonetheless.
Piecing together the full story of the Pechorsk Radius will take players anywhere from20 to 30 hours,as they’ll have to deal with the rigors of surviving and maintaining their gear at the same time. It helps that the game is immersive enough to keep players engaged for all of those hours.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinnersblew VR gamers away when it was released in 2020. Few games had managed to capture sucha weighty feel to VR combat, and fewer still had built fully fleshed out games around these kinds of systems. The sequel,Chapter 2 Retribution, was less revolutionary. However, it still offered a meaningful update to the original’s core systems, adding dynamic dismemberment with the new chainsaw weapon, among other things.
Both games will takeover 10 hoursto beat the main narrative, and most players will likely add hours to that with optional missions and hunting for new crafting recipes. Both the games can be picked up in a bundle from the Quest store, which gives new players a huge amount of single player content to dig into.
Resident Evil 4 VRtakes the full single player campaign from theclassicResident Evilentryand translates it faithfully into first person VR. Facing off against the Ganados feels intense in first person VR, and the addition of the wave-based mercenaries mode is a nice bonus.
There’s nothing brand-new in the single-player campaign other than the perspective, which many fans will find refreshing compared to the more recentResident Evil 4 Remake.What’s here is the full12-hour campaignthat fans know and love, and that’s more than enough.
As players might expect from Meta’s flagshipQuest 3launch title,Asgard’s Wrath 2probably has the biggest single player campaign of anyQuestgame. It can take around28–30 hoursto beat the main story alone, and side quests and additional content can take that total to50–80 hours.
On top of that, the game is a deep fantasy RPG with leveling systems, weapons, skill progression, and all the bells and whistles players would expect from the genre. It’s not only long, but also a deep and worthwhile experience, giving players one of thebest single player VR campaigns.
Batman: Arkham Shadowmight have just been released, but it’s come straight out of the gate and into the hearts of Quest 3 players. Pre-launch apprehensions have been put to bed as players have come to realize that this isa full-fledged Batman: Arkham game. Inhabiting Batman has never been so fully realized as in this VR adaptation.
Across the 15-hour single player campaign, players will string up enemies, swoop down from vantage points, and use the Bat’s gadgets to solve wide-linear scenarios, in a near-perfect VR analogue of Rocksteady’s iconic flat screen games. It’s an astounding example of what can be achieved on standalone headsets and a deep, lengthy single-player experience.
