The Oculus Quest makes it easier to give VR a try—and fun enough to be worth it—compared with headsets that require cables and expensive PCs. The Quest has two capable controllers and is compatible with some of our favorite games. It’s also small enough to toss into a tote bag or a backpack, so you can break it out at the office or a party. You can set it up and start playing in less than a minute; thanks to built-in sensors that track the two Touch controllers and your other movements, you can navigate an entire room, and the headset won’t ever lose your location. And with an Oculus Link cable, the Quest can be connected to a PC for more full-featured VR experiences.

There’s plenty to do inside a Quest headset. We welcomed the return of several of our favorite games, including the addictive Beat Saber, which on its own could be justification to buy the Quest. We also like the Matrix-like Superhot, the 3D-painting experience Tilt Brush, and the adventure-puzzle game Moss. If you have a PC, you can plug in the Quest and play the highly anticipated Half-Life: Alyx (using the separate Oculus Link cable).

The Quest is one of the first standalone headsets that can track you as you walk around a room. You can also move in any direction or tilt your head to the side or back, and your virtual body will do the same. It makes for a much more realistic experience compared with that of lower-end standalone headsets, which immerse your eyes in virtual reality but rely mostly on controller input for movement. The Quest’s movement tracking brings a sense of really being there that is similar to what a PC headset can provide. Although a PC headset with more-precise tracking, such as the Valve Index or the HTC Cosmos Elite, can better replicate your movement and avoid reality-breaking glitches, like your hands floating away, the Quest is convincing enough to cross that initial threshold into “realness.”

When you’re exploring a virtual world, it’s also freeing to have the ability to walk around a room without the headset losing your location. PC headsets are attached to a computer by a cord (unless you buy an expensive wireless adapter), which both limits the area where you can walk and creates an annoying trip hazard. But Oculus’s Guardian system throws up a virtual fence when you’re about to run into a wall or other object. An area of at least 5 feet by 7 feet is best for Quest, though we were also able to play games with just a few feet available to us. However, a smaller space means you have to be more conscious of your surroundings—it’s easy to end up punching a wall if you’re caught up in chucking ninja stars while playing Superhot.

The Quest’s screen displays 1440×1600 pixels per eye, which beats out the original Rift screen. It’s hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison to the single displays on the PC-connected Oculus Rift S and the lower-end standalone Oculus Go, but we slightly prefer the screen on the Rift S, and rank the Go’s screen last. You may still notice the Quest’s “screen-door effect,” which is a light grid laid over your field of view. The Quest has a maximum refresh rate (think of this as the VR way of saying “frames per second”) of 72 Hz, which is less than the Rift S’s 80 Hz and the Cosmos Elite’s 90 Hz. But the difference is small enough that, to our eyes, it wasn’t noticeable. However, higher refresh rates are generally believed to decrease the likelihood that users might experience motion sickness while using a VR headset.

Weighing 571 grams (1.26 pounds), the Quest is a hair heavier than we prefer our VR headsets to be (it’s like hanging a 20-ounce soda bottle from your face). But due to cushy foam padding that rests on your face and adjustable straps that reach around to the back of your head, the Quest is fairly comfortable to wear for hour-long play sessions, though we had to fiddle with the fit to get it to sit correctly.

The Quest’s Touch controllers, which are similar to the original Rift Touch controllers, are our favorite style of VR controller. The two controllers are molded to sit in your hand, with your pointer fingers resting on triggers and your middle fingers resting on “grip” buttons. Your thumbs can reach a small joystick, plus A, B, and home buttons. Sensors built into the headset track the location of the controllers, so moving your hands physically moves them in VR. The Quest’s Touch controllers are intuitive to use and easy to hold for long periods.

It’s like hanging a 20-ounce soda bottle from your face.

Like the Oculus Rift S, the Quest does not have built-in headphones. Instead, it has built-in speakers that direct 3D sound toward your ears. The Quest’s audio quality is good enough for immersive VR, though it isn’t as clear as you’d get with a pair of nice headphones. Thankfully, there are two spots to plug in your own headphones. Oculus also makes $50 earbuds that plug in to each side of the headset, if you don’t want to deal with long headphone cords. We do like the open-ear setup in a social setting, where the speakers can clue onlookers in on what the person wearing the headset is seeing.

Oculus advertises that the Quest’s battery lasts two to three hours, which we found to be accurate. That’s plenty of time for solo play. However, when we used the headset with friends, it always ended up running out of battery power. You can use the Quest while it’s plugged in, though obviously you won’t be able to move around as much when you’re connected to a cable. We managed to play Beat Saber with the headset plugged in for a while, but we eventually ripped the cord out of the socket.