Ask people to name some experiences they'd like to have in virtual reality and one of the first you'll hear is "flying." So it's a little odd that there aren't more virtual-flight game demos out there as of yet.

Ubisoft helps fill that void with Eagle Flight, an open-world, mission-based game slated for release on Oculus and other VR devices this fall1. It's got a vaguely Assassin's Creedish vibe to it, in that you're soaring as an eagle over the buildings of Paris. Markers that float above the buildings let you begin missions, of which the demo at the Game Developers Conference this week had two types: Flying through rings, and shooting down other birds.

Simple, yes, and nothing that other games haven't done to death in a thousand other iterations. But as with most things VR, the sense of actually being there heightens the experience. More than that, the fun in Eagle Flight lies in the ease of controlling rapid, swooping flight largely using your head.

The controls of the Eagle Flight demo were polished and intuitive (though it still required a tutorial). Simply look where you want to go, raising and turning your head to navigate. Tilting your head left and right, much like a dog trying to understand words, lets you bank, swiftly reorienting yourself.

Meanwhile, the Xbox controller we used lets you speed up and slow down by tapping the right and left triggers. The X button emits a screech, an ear-splitting sound that manifests itself in the form of a perfectly round ball, a sphere of pure Dustin Diamond that can cause an enemy eagle to burst in a spray of feathers and blood.

The most basic mission involves flying through rings. If you want three stars, because of course your performance is rated with stars, you'll want to fly through the center of the rings each time to add extra seconds to the clock. This, at its best, is simply exhilarating. You fly at high speed, and the rings are laid out such that you'll do all sorts of daring drops and lifts, hugging corners and flying under bridges to nail the rings one after another.

This is great practice for the missions in which you must shoot down enemy birds, because they too will dive and climb at great speed and you'll find that not smashing into a wall may be as difficult as the shooting part. And that is great practice for the game's multiplayer mode. We played the "Capture the Prey" variation: Two teams of three eagles compete to find the "prey" (a dead rabbit) in Paris. It's helpfully marked with a gigantic purple flag that extends to the heavens. Grabbing it, you have to get it back to the nest without being shot down.

It's a one-hit-kill situation, so you quickly learn that you cannot simply fly high in the air. You've got to get low and make some death-defying moves near the ground, which conceals you as you make your way toward the nest. Of course, there is great risk here, especially in a high-tension race, and the odds are good that you'll splatter yourself, dropping the prey where your bird-slime lands.

There almost certainly will be many, many more death-defying dogfighters coming to Oculus and its ilk, but Eagle Flight is a great proof-of-concept for those of you who have long dreamed of taking wing.

1UPDATE 7:30 pm ET 03/16/16: This story has been updated to reflect that Eagle Flight will be released in the fall, not the spring, as Ubisoft's press materials stated.