VR is coming to invade living rooms this year with the Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, and HTC Vive just on the horizon, and each new headset has a full library of games coming at launch. The Oculus Rift headsets are going out to consumer’s homes soon (if you managed to jump on the pre-orders early enough), but with so many VR systems on offer, how can you possibly decide which is worthy of your hard-earned cash?

Of course, the games that are compatible with each headset are a huge determining factor of a purchasing decision. So, to make things a bit easier, we’ve put together this list of our most highly-anticipated Oculus Rift games coming to the system close to launch. Be sure to check back often as we update this list with even more game announcements.

EVE: Valkyrie

If you ever wondered what it would be like to be a starfighter pilot, like in Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, playing EVE: Valkyrie is your answer. You sit in the cockpit of your own ship battling bogies, weaving between capital ships, and dodging enemy fire like you would in most space flight games, but playing EVE: Valkyrie with a VR headset steps up the experience. With the ability to look around the cockpit as you pilot the ship, you get the feeling that you’re actually in the middle of a space battle.

Edge of Nowhere

Edge of Nowhere is an Oculus Rift exclusive developed by Insomniac Games (makers of the Ratchet and Clank series). The snowy adventure takes the main character through the Antarctic wilderness in search of a missing expedition. The gameplay seems to be inspired by the third-person platforming and climbing mechanics of the Uncharted series, forcing you to brave the hazards of the icy landscape. But there are more than just environmental dangers threatening your safety. There are monsters with tentacles roaming everywhere, and theyre probably keen on eating you for dinner.

RockBand VR

Music games have always tried to give players the the feeling of actually playing a musical instrument and being a rock star. RockBand VR takes the effort a bit further, putting you on a virtual stage surrounded by your band mates and hundreds and thousands of screaming fans. RockBand VR looks to play like any other RockBand game, except you won’t be able to see the buttons on the neck with the Oculus on your face. Time to start practicing blindfolded.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a party game, but before you start thinking you’ll need to spend thousands of dollars on headsets for all your friends, good news, you only need one Oculus Rift. The way it works is, one person wears the Oculus and enters a virtual room with a ticking time bomb and needs to defuse it. But that single player can’t do it himself, everyone without the headset must guide the bomb defuser through the process with a printed bomb defusal manual.

P.O.L.L.E.N.

POLLEN puts players in an isolated, atmospheric, space-faring adventure in which they explore Titan – Saturn’s largest moon. A research station on the moon’s surface has gone dark, leaving no sign of the crew that was manning it. As you explore the journals and records left by the previous inhabitants, you begin to piece together the circumstances of their disappearance. From the looks of things, the missing astronauts didn’t just up and leave. Something other-worldly is happening at the station.

Lucky’s Tale

Lucky’s Tale is definitely one of the most lighthearted VR games we’ve seen so far. It’s a basic platformer that plays like a 3D Mario game, challenging you to navigate the cartoony environments and enemies using Lucky’s jumping abilities and tail whip. It looks like a by-the-numbers platformer, and it comes with every Oculus Rift purchased at launch, but it will still be interesting to see how game makers are improving the classic 3D platformer using full VR immersion.

Chronos

The Zelda-like third-person adventures aren’t getting left behind with VR. In Chronos, the hero must delve into a labyrinth filled with dangerous enemies and daunting puzzles in order to rid the land of an evil dragon. The catch is: the dungeon only opens once a year, so if you fail, your character will be forced to wait until the doors open. This causes your character to age, changing the gameplay as you transition from an inexperienced teenager to a battle hardened warrior. Needless to say, we’re excited to see what surprises the former Vigil Games developers (Darksiders) have in store for the VR experience.

Esper 2

Here’s your chance to be telekinetic, but instead of becoming a superhero or laser sword-swinging space wizard, you’ll use your mental powers to solve puzzles for a psi-ops government agency. Though working for the government as a supernaturally-powered agent sounds like serious business, the taunts and quirky quips of your guides give the game a lighthearted tone. Your instructors aren’t afraid of dishing out the insults as you walk around various 3D environments like test labs, ancient ruins, and alien dimensions attempting to levitate objects and manipulate the world around you.

ALICE VR

Space exploration VR games already seem to be flooding into the VR scene, but Alice VR puts a fairytale spin on the alien-world adventure. You end up on a mysterious planet after your spacecraft malfunctions and crash lands on the surface. This is no barren wasteland. That planet seems to be inhabited, only there’s no one around. You’ll need to explore the empty villages and ruins solving trippy Alice in Wonderland-inspired puzzles to uncover what has happened to the planet’s missing population.

Bullet Train

You can pretty much get what this game is about just by reading the title. Bullet Train lets you grab a variety of firearms and gun down enemies using one-to-one motion controls provided by the Oculus Touch controllers. But blasting bad guys with shotguns and dual wielding high-caliber pistols isn’t all you can do;. you also have time manipulation powers that allow you to slow gunfights down to The Matrix speeds and teleport to new locations. The trailer also shows the player catching missiles in mid air and throwing them back at flying robots, so it looks like you’ll have plenty more tricks up your sleeve.

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Since HoloLens is augmented reality and not virtual reality, it’s not like Mani is experiencing the world of Halo as though he were actually there. Instead, what you’re seeing is the Xbox One streaming Halo 5 to a Windows 10 PC, which is subsequently streaming to the HoloLens. Since HoloLens lets you “pin” an app window in physical space, Mani has apparently pinned the Xbox app to his home’s wall, letting him play without a television.

I’m impressed – the technology is still too new to expect holograms of Spartans running around the living room, but the fact that a game like Halo 5 can be streamed to a PC and then to another device with no hiccup in framerate or drop in visual quality is impressive. There seems to be a delay of about one second (which would make games with a lot of action nigh unplayable), but HoloLens is still in active development after all. Hopefully there’s time to improve.

But enough about me, what about you? Does this make you excited for HoloLens, does it turn you off the idea, or are you pretty much the same as you ever were?

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

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The EU would become a vast, sprawling beast. Many characters found themselves with histories and the story continued beyond Return Of The Jedi, as Luke got married, Leia and Han had twins and Boba Fett famously escaped a thousand years of pain and suffering in the belly of the Sarlacc. There would eventually be contradictions between sources, and debates over what counted as canon – if it happened in the movies it was gospel; pretty much everything else could be open to reinterpretation. In other words, don’t bet on Mara Jade cropping up in The Force Awakens just because you’ve met her in the books.

Then, after Disney bought the keys to the Star Wars empire, new Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy announced a plan so audacious it made doing the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs look a doddle. The movies would no longer occupy their own rarefied “more important than everything else” status in Star Wars canon, as new films, books, comics and TV shows would fit into one, all-encompassing continuity. (The old Expanded Universe novels still exist, but as a separate “Legends” line.)

“It’s definitely exciting, because this kind of cohesive approach is something we’ve always aspired to,” says Pablo Hidalgo, a member of the Lucasfilm “Story Group” set up to be the arbiters of Star Wars canon. “In the past, you’d have multiple levels of authenticity, because we didn’t have this connective group acting as a bridge between film and television projects and what was happening in books, comics and games. We’re better set up for this different approach, where every Star Wars story could be a gateway into the same universe, the same big picture.”

Since the new continuity kicked off we’ve seen (among others) a novel focusing on Grand Moff Tarkin (Tarkin), and Marvel comics centred on Darth Vader, Princess Leia and Lando Calrissian – not to mention the pre-A New Hope Star Wars Rebels on the telly. With so many media to choose from, how do they decide what goes where? “There are attributes to a story that make it clear where it wants to live,” explains Hidalgo. “A political story like Tarkin worked best in a novel, whereas [Rebels hero] Kanan’s life after Order 66 works better as a comic. The story will tell you where it wants to be told.”

“Lucasfilm/Disney makes the ultimate decisions on where to tell what stories,” says Del Rey books editor Shelly Shapiro. “When we come up with ideas for a story we’d like to tell in a novel, we propose it to Lucasfilm and the Story Group. If it’s approved – or approved with tweaking – we move ahead to hire an author and hammer out the actual storyline with the author. So far, everyone (books, comics, games) has been playing very nicely together in the Star Wars sandbox.”

“The process is definitely organic,” adds Hidalgo. “It starts with working with filmmakers, and finding a story that they are passionate about. That forms the core storytelling and other stories naturally flow out of those projects. One thing we’re not interested in doing is filling gaps for the sake of filling gaps.” That said, there are now some intriguing uncharted time periods in the Star Wars universe, such as the lead-up to A New Hope (when next year’s “Anthology” movie Rogue One will be set) or the aftermath of Palpatine’s demise. But with such established characters, how much freedom does a writer actually have?

“It varies from project to project,” says Shapiro. “In general, we have a lot of freedom to create, but the results are looked at very carefully by Lucasfilm and the Story Group. So free and yet not so free at the same time. Which makes sense – we have to be sure that what we’re doing in the books jibes smoothly with what is being expressed in movies, comics, games, even toys. Our goal is to be part of creating the larger universe of Star Wars.”

“It’s all challenging,” continues Chuck Wendig, who picked up the story after the Emperor and Darth Vader’s demise in his new novel Star Wars: Aftermath. “This is not only somebody else’s sandbox, but it’s a sandbox created by Lucas and then one that literally millions of people have imagined themselves playing in. So to get to jump in with my own narrative action figures and create a story there, it’s completely overwhelming. But in the best way possible.”

While Aftermath is predominantly focused on new characters, however, Kieron Gillen is writing for one of the most iconic characters in popular culture. Set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader picks up the Sith Lord’s story after Han Solo sent his TIE Fighter spinning. “We pitched freely in that [time period], but I’m a writer who knows how story works,” says Gillen. “There’s a start to this story – Vader, disgraced, after the loss of the Death Star. There’s an end to this story – Vader, on the bridge of the Executor, more powerful than ever, hunting his son across the universe. I’m not going to pitch a story that doesn’t tell how Darth Vader got from one to another, y’know? Even with my reputation, I’m not going to suggest an arc where Darth Vader packs it in and becomes a superstar DJ in the Star Warsian equivalent of Ibiza.”

Once a writer’s working on their story, the Story Group remains on hand to keep tone and continuity consistent. One of the Story Group, Leland Chee, has created an in-house database called the “Holocron”. “We also have plenty of documents, spreadsheets and whiteboard maps,” says Hidalgo. “And some of us just have really good memories for this stuff.”

“There was lots of back and forth,” says Wendig. “We’re trying to thread a needle here – forging the path ahead for the galaxy and also building into the lead-up to The Force Awakens. That means a lot of finessing and conversation as to how that happens just right.”

“It’s always a developing relationship,” explains Gillen. “Especially early on, I pitched some characters to be involved I suspected we wouldn’t get, but we wanted to see what the limits were. By now, it’s very much a more fluid thing, with information passing back and forth. I’ll do things like ‘Right, I’m going to create a crime boss here, but if you think there’s someone elsewhere in the canon you want to see here, that’s great.’ They’re incredibly generous with ideas and information, while also encouraging us to invent. I invent a lot of minor characters, and then tend to kill them off equally quickly. People sharing a stage with Darth Vader don’t really have a great life expectancy! For major characters, they’ll be in the proposal. Generally speaking, it’s additive. I’ll pitch why a character is interesting and necessary, and they’ll make it more interesting and necessary.”

George Lucas aside, Dave Filoni has possibly had his hands on more new Star Wars mythology than anybody else. As supervising director on the The Clone Wars, he oversaw 121 episodes of Jedi action – equivalent to about 20 movies – and has now moved onto Star Wars Rebels. He’s therefore in a unique position to compare two eras of Star Wars storytelling.

“Clone Wars was very different,” he says. “Before, there was basically George and I. When I had a problem or needed an answer, I’d just call George and ask him about it. And if George said that was it, that was pretty much it! There was no big debate necessarily. What we have now is an opportunity to have a group of people come together that all love Star Wars and know it well. We all know that no one person is going to be able to replace George, the guy that created this story. I have found it tremendously collaborative and rather exciting… I think it’s opened up our story a bit. It’s taken some of the pressure off because now you’re working as a team.”

Though writing and managing the Star Wars universe must seem like a dream job for a fan, we can see one slight drawback – you’ll never get to experience a new story as a newbie. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” counters Hidalgo. “Here’s an example: I knew Ahsoka would be coming down the Ghost’s ladder well before a single episode of Rebels even aired. That’s just how it goes. But the day the idea was pitched is a great memory, getting to watch that scene come together is great memories, and then getting to watch everyone’s reaction when that episode aired is a great memory too.”

“It’s been fun to be here and talk to the Story Group about Star Wars,” adds Filoni. “We all love Star Wars and we want to get it right. I think the one thing everyone in the Story Group has in common is such a tremendous respect for Star Wars and its legacy.”

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You’d think being thrown into the heat of battle minus all those god-like Force powers would be frustrating, but whether you were playing it tactically – systematically dominating sections of the map – or just looking to shoot some wookiees in the face, Battlefront 2’s Rise of The Empire campaign offered a fresh take on this well-told saga. The same thinking was applied to the returning Heroes (and Villains). These formally non-playable generals (Vader, Mace Windu, etc) had a huge effect on the outcome of each conflict. You could only use each one for a limited time, so deploying them in the right place could turn the tide of a skirmish. There was always a moreish thrill to fighting your way to an objective, only to have Vader turn up and decimate everybody.

The long-awaited addition of space-based dogfights was another big change for the series. These optional gold mines brought the Battlefront experience to a whole new level, enabling you to pilot your starship of choice and take down enemy fighters in a barrage of laser fire. You could also land inside an enemy’s vessel and meticulously dismantle the floating behemoth from the inside out, before swiftly escaping to watch the ship explode in your rear-view mirror.

The real star of the show came to life when you booted up the now defunct servers and took the fight online. Multiplayer saw up to 24 players battle it out in a variety game modes, ranging from the quintessential Capture The Flag to the titanic new mode Hero Assault – which saw all the aforementioned generals face-off on the sandy streets of Mos Eisley. Sure, you could just jump into a quick match and raise hell, but as a team you could own any battle. Chipping away at an enemy Star Destroyer as a band of bros (and sisters) captured a squadron mentality that foreshadowed the success of online gaming to come.

With Battlefield devs DICE drafted in to resurrect the aging series, we can only hope that it acknowledges both the triumphs and tribulations of this classic PS2 blaster. With games such as Dust 514 and EVE Online merging real-time battles across space and surface engagements, the scope for a new Battlefront game is tantalisingly broad.

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Just imagine being able to capture a base on the ground, grab a ship and launch into a space dogfight, all in real-time. Branded as more of a reboot than a direct sequel, this new entry could be a legacy-defining release in the timeline of this cherished franchise. Help us DICE, you’re our only hope.

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Coming in to E3, there were already concerns amongst some Halo fans that 343 Industries was steering the series into becoming more like Activision’s Call of Duty series. This feeling stemmed from some of the divisive changes introduced during last December’s Halo 5 multiplayer beta, such as the introduction of things such as Smart-linking which is, in effect, Call of Duty’s Aim Down Sights (ADS).

A chat I had with Josh Holmes, Halo 5 Studio head, last February did much to quell these suspicions for me; he talked long and openly about how his team is making physical alterations to the maps playable in the beta, as he felt some of them were too wide open with too many points of entry. Which is an interesting observation to make, as wide-open maps with multiple entry points are one of Call of Duty’s calling cards.

“The main difference between Halo and Call of Duty is that in Halo, when you’re shot, you have the ability to turn around and fight back” Holmes explained to me at the time for Official Xbox Magazine. “We want to give players better ability to control a zone, and that means not giving them more entrance points than can be reasonably controlled”.

Those are all the right words, but perception can be a tricky thing to shift. And the Halo 5: Guardians campaign gameplayer trailer ‘Battle of Sunaion’, which kickstarted Microsoft’s E3 Conference, was to that perception what cold water is to an electrical fire.

The trailer sees Agent Locke and Fireteam Osiris scuttle through the titular alien city, as part of their ongoing search for The Master Chief, who’s done a runner. I won’t give you a blow for blow account of the trailer, as you can watch the thing in its entirety here, but it doesn’t take a trained eye to spot that things are a little…off.

It isn’t the fact that the level design is basically one big linear corridor that concerns me – Halo might be at its best when it blows the level design wide open, but even the best entries in the series allow themselves to be slaves to the narrative once in a while. What should be a wider concern is what the demo mistakes for drama – a spaceship exploding in the distance, a pathway crumbling beneath Locke’s feet, a seemingly impassible Promethean warship that is bypassed not by cunning but by flaccidly giving the orders to one of your teammates to lay down fire. Basically you’re trained to have your eyes fixed anywhere but on the action. It’s the same set of parlour tricks we’ve come to associate with Call of Duty, and frankly speaking that’s not what I’m looking for in a Halo game.

For clarity’s sake, I should point out that I like Call of Duty. But it does what it does so well, and what it does is so limited in scope, that I really have no desire to see other studios do a bad cover version of it, when their talents lie in making other, different things.

‘So you can appreciate why the Halo 5 trailer made me do a scream in my mouth. Particularly as the ethos of Call of Duty and Halo are so intrinsically different. The former likes to build excitement through theatrics, carefully-managed set-pieces and Hollywood bombast. Halo favours a more emergent, cerebral sandbox style of play, where the theatrics come not from fireworks but from the gunplay itself.

It’s not just one thing that makes a Halo game a Halo game – it’s everything – the finely-balanced spread of weapons, vehicles and enemy types, and how the interplay between these things allows the designers to remix the action simply by plugging in and out different toys from their extensive toybox.

There’s a famous quote from Jamie Griesemer, a designer who worked on the first three Halo games, that describes Halo as ’30 seconds of fun, over and over again’. But taken out of context, Griesemer’s quote doesn’t really get across what he was getting at. Really if you think about it, all you do in your average Halo campaign mission is lurch from skirmish to skirmish – the same 30 seconds of fun, if you will – but no two sections ever feel the same, such is the wealth of options Halo has at its disposal to throw at the player, and such are the tactical options the wide-open playing spaces give the player to throw back at the game.

The campaign trailer displays little of this. New Promethean soldiers and warships whet the appetite – the more toys for the toybox, the merrier – but the context they are placed in certainly does not. Take the Doom trailer we mentioned in passing at the beginning as a comparable; the gore might not be to everyone’s tastes, but, it is unmistakably coded as a Doom game – from the meaty shotguns, to the fast, whirling combat, to the art style, to the brief BFG cameo, it is everything you could reasonably expect a modern Doom game to be.

So is the Battle of Sunaion representative of the entire campaign? Is Call of Duty influencing Halo 5’s design more than we’d like? I asked exactly that question to Chris Lee, Lead Producer:

“I would say for the E3 keynote demo that some of the destruction and chaos that was going on in the mission was intended to be indicative of a specific design principle where we want to create more options and more flexibility for the player when they play through the spaces.

“With the tracking system, the player can be dropped into much larger playing spaces with multiple different ways of acheving the objective with your squad. Throughout the campaign, as you progress, you’ll actually get more and more of these larger spaces that we were only able to build when we moved to dedicated servers on Xbox One. You didn’t really get to see that in the demo, but that is definitely something you’ll see”.

Promising – as with Josh Holmes, all the noises coming out of 343 Industries are the right ones – but the proof is in the playing. And that is where my hands-on with Warzone, Halo 5’s epic-scale, 12 v 12 multiplayer mode, did much to make me a believer. It’s difficult, of course, to extrapolate too much about a campaign mode from its tag-along multiplayer, but that’s not taking into account what Warzone’s mission objective is – in 343’s own words, it’s an attempt to smush everything that is good about Halo into one, catch-all multiplayer mode.

That means player v. player, but it also means player v. AI. It means that every toy in the toybox gets to comes out to play. Only this time you get the keys to the box; points earned during combat can be traded in at requisition stations for weapons and vehicles of your own choosing.

343 Industries still gets to play designer, of course – enemy waves are carefully stage-managed, even if they don’t necessarily run by clockwork. But by giving players the agency to work towards their weapons of choice, they create a battlefield which has a very natural, very exciting sense of escalation. And it’s all staged in a vast environment, filled with with small pockets of carefully-crafted design that allow the same exhilarating sense of tactical freedom that Bungie’s works provide at their best.

So actually, if you shared my concerns about the Halo trailer – and a cursory glance at social media reminds me that, mercifully, I haven’t just made it all up in my head – then be soothed by the news that both the words 343 Industries speaks, and the clever, sandbox-oriented design of Warzone, sing of a studio that’s fully in tune with Halo’s unique rhythm, having hit the occasional bum note with Halo 4.

I could be wrong, of course, and the sandbox stuff could be restricted to its Warzone ghetto while the single-player mode goes full Captain Price in Halo’s quest to remain ‘culturally relevant’. But I no longer fear that’s the case at all. Delving deeper into Halo 5’s design served as a timely reminder that at E3, with dozens of loud, bright trailers bouncing around the cauldron, competing for eyes and ears, seeing isn’t always believing – for better and for worse.

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