Typically, the excitement for a new game hardware launch is tempered by a lineup of rushed, undercooked games. Devs throw all kinds of stuff at the wall while coming to grips with new hardware—and that’s only worse when it looks like the system hinges on a “gimmick,” like the Wii or the Kinect.

That said, the HTC Vive has one of the most diverse and satisfying selections of launch software we've ever seen. Sure, the selection of more than 100 games listed with “VR Support” on Steam includes plenty of instantly forgettable clunkers, nearly unplayable experiments, and demos that need another coat of polish. But after trying our hands at dozens of VR titles in recent weeks, we can heartily recommend all eight of these games that really highlight the appealing new kinds of experiences that are possible with full, room-scale virtual reality and accurate head and hand-tracking.

These are the games that have kept us eagerly coming back to the Vive's simulated holodeck again and again on the review hardware, and we'll keep coming back to these games in the weeks to come. And if you're looking for compelling non-gaming content, check out our fuller write-up of the magic of 3D painting in Tilt Brush.

Audioshield

Developer: Dylan Fitterer

Price: $19.99

Steam Link

I haven’t cried this hard playing a video game in years.

That's not “boo-hoo, so-and-so died” crying, nor “jarring existential plot twist” crying. Audioshield found some neuroreceptor in the deepest cavern of my brain—one that can only be stimulated by an incredible combination of sight, sound, and motion—and flooded it with a sensation that has left me reeling for days.

The core game is just as I described it in my gushing January preview. Audioshield, like Audiosurf before it, analyzes your MP3s (or songs pulled from Soundcloud) and converts them into playable rhythm-game levels. But where Audiosurf was stuck in an Amplitude-styled 2D track, Audioshield has a full virtual world’s space to work with. As such, the game sends colored orbs at players from the sky, which they must strike with colored shields in their hands to the rhythm of whatever song is playing. (Strike the blue orbs with the blue shield in your left hand; strike the orange orbs with the orange shield in your right.) You’re punching to the beat. You’re Rocky, fighting the music.

Not every song works well in Audioshield; in particular, vocally driven, repetitive tracks such as hip-hop don’t play out in interesting ways. But any song with even the slightest instrumental intricacy will produce a pretty cool playable level, one in which you thrust your hands across your body in tricky fashion to keep up with the rhythm.

Since these levels are all algorithmically generated, you can expect a certain amount of gameplay repetition in terms of the directions orbs fall and the patterns you have to wave your hands in. The secret, I have found in extended play sessions, is to pick out songs I have a pre-existing attachment to. It’s the Guitar Hero effect: plucking away at the same colored buttons in that game stays fresh so long as you love the songs, and that’s only with a dinky plastic controller. Fill your entire visual and aural field with such a song, conversely, and you will feel a level of synesthesia so intense, it could unfreeze Walt Disney from his ice tomb and make him create Fantasia all over again.

Any person who values the idea of “music gaming” should run, not walk, to their nearest friend who owns a Vive—with a flash drive full of their favorite songs—and prepare to be overwhelmed.

-Sam Machkovech

Fantastic Contraption

Developer: Northway Games, Radial Games

Price: $39.99 (currently free with Vive purchase)

Steam Link

Of the HTC Vive’s three pack-in titles, Fantastic Contraption comes closest to resembling a classic video game. But that’s not what makes it the system’s most exciting freebie. This puzzle game, like its free, Flash-based forebear, is composed of a series of rooms where the goal is to move a small pink orb to touch a larger pink target.

The method for moving the ball is building a machine made of wheels, sticks, and connectors that can either carry the ball as a payload or push it toward the goal area. This requires some clever industrial design to build machines designed to move through 3D space in specific ways—whether to cross giant gaps, automatically make big turns, climb walls, or push things on opposite ends of a puzzle.

With the limits of a mouse and keyboard or standard controller, building detailed 3D machines like this would likely be a cumbersome and frustrating mix of strange button and motion combinations. Ask anybody who has built giant 3D Halo levels in the Forge mode, and they’ll reply to you in a confusing, foreign language of menu and button-combo requirements.

In the Vive, perfectly placing an object in 3D space, adjusting junction points, or rotating pieces of the structure at whatever axis you please is as simple as moving your arms. A wheel goes here, a rod connects there. You can yank another rod up and over to connect to the other end. Let’s pick one part up to rotate it. Now pick the whole thing up and move it.

There’s no confusing menu system, either; you just grab new parts from a glowing helper-cat at your feet, test your creations by hitting a single button, and then fine-tune and try again. Using your hands to virtually construct feels amazing. Fantastic Contraption has limited its number of building elements to let players focus on learning—and enjoying—this new style of game control.

The only catch, honestly, is that this comfortable building system is too freeing. FC lets players solve puzzles pretty much however they want, with the notable exception of the rods' maximum length (otherwise, players could sometimes auto-poke the solution target). As such, gamers who appreciate narrowly designed puzzles will probably feel intimidated. Other levels would have benefited from specific limits (“use only one wheel,” “create something no bigger than one meter tall,” etc).

Otherwise, Fantastic Contraption isn’t just a fun game, it’s an excellent proof-of-concept that the future of computer interfaces may very well be something beyond mice or touchscreens. We may not wear vision-suffocating VR headsets in a few years' time, but when you think about the future of computing and how 3D-tracked hands in virtual space can change what we can do, forget Minority Report. The new blueprint has been drawn out by Fantastic Contraption.

-Sam Machkovech

Hover Junkers

Developer: Stress Level Zero

Price: $34.99

Steam Link

While Space Pirate Trainer rocks as a solo, high-score-challenge game, Hover Junkers could be the more impressive VR shooting experience. For starters, it’s the only “first-person online shooter” currently available on any VR platform (Eve Valkyrie cockpit-based space battles notwithstanding). Even better, it’s actually really, really good.

Running around with a gun as in Call of Duty could never work on the Vive—unless its tracking system is ever upgraded to work in a giant warehouse space, at any rate. The team at Stress Level Zero still found a way to recreate gunfights with the Vive’s limited maneuverability. Players pilot a small hovercraft around a giant arena, using one of their hands to handle acceleration and direction while using the other to shoot a pistol or shotgun. (Players can also put the steering mechanism down to dual-wield in a pinch.) Then, whenever enemies approach, players can physically sidestep, duck, and roll around their hovering deck to line up shots while dodging enemies doing the same.

You won’t find upgrade trees or loadouts in Hover Junkers; in fact, the arenas don’t even hide weapon upgrades a la Quake. Instead, players can find scrap and junk, which they can either stick to their ship interior to create cover or feed to their “loot chute” to accrue ship health and match-winning points. (Meaning you can win a match even if your kill/death ratio isn’t the best.) We were wondering where the weapon upgrades and beefier options were, but we came to appreciate the simplified “pistol or shotgun” options, along with the chunky, flick-to-reload system.

Sadly, the game has launched with some rough edges, including a few arenas that struggle to lock at a 90-frame-per-second refresh and some wonky multiplayer matchmaking. But the extended online battles I’ve gotten into have felt pretty incredible in terms of offering a combination of large-level maneuverability and granular showdowns. Dancing around an online opponent by strafing with my ship until I pull up to a foe’s under-protected hovercraft side and then jumping out of cover to blast them to bits is among the most satisfying deathmatch scenarios I’ve ever encountered in my decades of gaming.

-Sam Machkovech

Job Simulator

Developer: Owlchemy Labs

Price: $39.99 (currently free with Vive purchase)

Steam Link

There's a joke from an old episode of The Simpsons where Bart is eager to play a virtual yard work simulator, despite slacking off from actual yard work earlier in the day. If every joke has a bit of truth to it, Job Simulator gives truth to that decades-past Simpsons gag.

Job Simulator takes the idiosyncratic setting of a far-future world where robots (basically faces displayed on clunky, hovering CRT monitors) have taken over the world, and they seem to have only the vaguest memories of how the old human world actually functioned. The game takes place in a museum where these robots can relive their slightly twisted memories of what a human's day-to-day life was.

In Job Simulator's world, you can repair a car by simply taking out the engine and pouring in some hot sauce as coolant. You can make a sandwich by stacking a whole tomato and a wedge of cheese in between two slices of bread. You can use the office copier to actually make full-fledged copies of physical objects or use a "super sizer" in a convenience store to increase the volume of cans of soda.

A curator leads you through 16 pre-set tasks in each of the four available jobs, but there's also a freeplay mode where you can just play around with all the interactive bits and bobs in each setting. There's a real sense of childlike joy to this physical experimentation and discovery. You're like a baby surrounded by shiny new toys, each with some familiar elements but also plenty of unexpected interactions you'll be eager to find.

The game makes great use of physical space in the virtual world, forcing you to turn and reach in place to find the next item you need. The presentation is top-notch, too, rendered in an appropriately bright and clean style that feels like being inside a cartoon. There are tons of hidden jokes buried in background scenery and signage, too, and some great, amusing voice work on the part of the robots. I particularly liked the faux human radio station in the mechanic's shop area, which glosses over details .

There's not much in the way of actual challenging gameplay in Job Simulator, but it's the kind of off-kilter playground that's just a joy to inhabit and observe without a real goal.

-Kyle Orland