The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset launches March 28, the first salvo in 2016's crowded VR gaming war. When the Rift hits later this month, it will be accompanied by some 30 launch titles, which range from smaller VR game experiences that cost just $4.99, to full-featured games priced at $59.99.

In advance of this week's Game Developers Conference, Oculus offered the media extended hands-on time with dozens of launch titles and other games that are expected a little later, when the Oculus Touch motion controllers arrive. The Touch is slated to ship in the second half of 2016, and many titles depend on the motion controller to deliver a proper, immersive VR experience. We've played many of the Oculus Rift's launch games, and you can read impressions from Polygon's Brian Crecente, Charlie Hall, Matt Leone and Michael McWhertor in our round-up below. (Keep in mind that many of the following titles are slated to debut on Oculus Rift on March 28, while some are dependent on Oculus Touch for their control. Those games do not yet have release dates.)

Adrift Release date: March 28

Price: $19.99 Of all the games I saw at the Oculus event, Adrift was the most claustrophobic. I was trapped inside a spacesuit the entire time, moving from room to room in search of oxygen canisters to refill my air supply. Moving my head in the real world meant moving my head inside my helmet in the game world. There was a padded surface behind me, a clear visor in front of me and the detail of it all was striking, but also oppressive. On the plus side, up close — whether the interior of the helmet itself or the objects found floating around in the environment — Adrift provided some of the most high-fidelity visuals I'd ever seen in an Oculus game. Further away though? Not so much. One of the first things I did was press my helmet against a viewport on the side of the space station and look out into the stars. Outside the habitat it wasn't very pretty at all. Blocky, low resolution modules drifted by surrounded by a muddy nothingness. Perhaps I'm expecting too much, but Adrift's version of outer space simply isn't the same outer space our astronauts send pictures of back from the International Space Station. I also had issues with the locomotion system. I wanted to reach out with my virtual arm to brace myself on a wall, or kick off a bulkhead with my legs and go sailing down a long hallway. Instead, I could only puff out jets of the same oxygen I used to breathe and scoot along. I felt out of control nearly all the time, but not simply because of the weightlessness. I felt incorporeal, like a basketball with a camera inside rather than a human with arms and legs. — Charlie

Adventure Time: Magic Man's Head Games Release date: March 28

Price: $4.99 Adventure Time seems like the sort of cartoon — outlandish, funny, smart, often referencing video games — that would be an easy fit for a video game. But the Cartoon Network property has had quite a few failed attempts at making something that lives up to the show. From our limited time with Adventure Time: Magic Man's Head Games, it seems like developer Turbo Button has managed to do just that. Head Games is a 3D platformer that plays a lot like a Zelda title but is packed with the character and witticisms of an Adventure Time episode. The Samsung Gear port has you controlling Finn and Jake, who rides shotgun in Finn's backpack, as they try to deal with the shenanigans of the Magic Man. Players can use their god's eye view of the world to peek around corners and look out for secret stashes, dangers and second paths. — Brian

AirMech Command Release date: March 28

Price: $39.99 The Oculus Rift version of Carbon Games’ AirMech, the action strategy game that’s been around in various forms since 2012, arguably plays best in VR. The mix of third-person action and real-time strategy plays spectacularly on Rift, thanks to some smart control and UI design decisions from Carbon. I played a co-op session with Carbon’s James Green, who helped me relearn how to play AirMech in VR, which was surprisingly intuitive to pick up and play. Experiencing the action-RTS in virtual reality felt like playing with a huge box of Transformers in a fast-paced, fantastical robot war. There’s a ton of content stuffed into AirMech Command — AirMechs of all types, skins, pets, hats and other customizations. It’s a blast just playing around in the menus and seeing the breadth of units available to unlock. AirMech Command is a fun, refreshing take on an already great game. I quickly lost 30 minutes in the game I meant to spend just 10 with. — Michael

Albino Lullaby Release date: March 28

Price: $9.99 Of all the games I tried during my six or so hours in virtual reality earlier this week, Albino Lullaby was the only one that made me feel sick, immensely sick. It's rated as "intense" in terms of comfort levels, but that still didn't prepare me for the wave of hot and cold flashes mixed with nausea that hit me about five minutes in. Developer Ape Law dropped its surreal first-person PC game into the virtual reality of Oculus Rift with a control system that seemed to be causing the motion sickness issues for me. While players can freely look around, the game still relies on classic two-stick controls to move. That means its essentially treating your body like a tank. The controls move your body, while you can look in any direction. The end result is a disconnect from the way people really move that really hit me hard. I found that if I turned my head as I turned my body it reduced the feeling, but it still left me feeling a bit woozy. The experience of being inside of Albino Lullaby definitely did add to the sense of unreality, unease and general creepiness. It felt, at times that I was inside a real world haunted house, which was very neat. — Brian

BlazeRush Release date: March 28

Price: Not announced Targem Games’ BlazeRush makes the leap from traditional console and computer to virtual reality with a neat take on porting the car combat game. The game still has you controlling your vehicle from a floating perspective, but in virtual reality it feels sort of like you're standing above a toy racetrack, guiding a car equipped with flaming thrusters, saw blades and homing missiles. The racing game controls sort of like that 1986 arcade classic Super Sprint. The big difference, beyond the much, much better graphics and using a console controller instead of a giant steering wheel, is that your perspective shifts as you move around. So you can lean in for a closer view, lean back to take in everything, or look around as you're racing. It's a neat adaptation of what amounts to a modern day arcade game made in virtual reality. — Brian

Chronos Release date: March 28

Price: $49.99 Coming from Gunfire Games, a team made up of staff who worked on the Darksiders series, Chronos is part adventure game, part RPG. The game uses a fixed camera angle for each room like the old Resident Evil games, so you enter through a door, look around, fight enemies, explore or solve puzzles, then exit out another door. Sometimes you’ll backtrack through the same rooms — like early on, you get a key and then take it back to unlock a computer. Based on a short time with the game, I found it slightly uncomfortable to move my head back and forth to track my character every time I ran through a room. Director David Adams says that one of the main reasons for the fixed camera is that the game lasts 12-14 hours, and the development team wanted to avoid making players dizzy when playing for long periods of time. That length alone makes it one of the longest story-based VR games coming to Rift at launch, which should make for interesting endurance tests. — Matt

The Climb Release date: April

Price: $49.99 The Climb is Crytek's game about rock climbing. Players interact with a number of different environments by clambering up the side of cliff faces with a pair of disembodied hands that extend out in front of them. This was my first experience with the game, and I was told by my guides that there wasn't really anything new to see in this particular demonstration. My personal impressions of the game are mixed. For one, I like the giddy sensation of height the The Climb gives me. As a person decently afraid of heights in real life, it's nice to be able to explore them in virtual reality without consequence and — oddly enough — without fear. But, for the most part, The Climb is a game about staring at a few square meters of rock for long periods of time. I caught glimpses of rushing waterfalls and beautiful sunsets here and there, but it would be nice if the game gave me more of a reason to turn around every once in a while and take a break from the monotony of putting one hand over another, forever. — Charlie

Damaged Core Release date: Spring

Price: Not announced High Voltage Software's Damaged Core is a first-person shooter for Oculus’ Rift. While in many ways shooters seem like a natural fit for VR, with the player looking through the eyes of the main character, they don’t always work as well as they seem because the amount of movement often makes players feel uncomfortable. High Voltage’s solution was to take out the movement. Read more.

Dead & Buried Release date: Not announced

Price: Not announced Dead & Buried, a collection of Old West-themed arcade games from Oculus’ internal studios, is a stylish showcase for the Oculus Touch motion controllers. The first-person shooter multiplayer mini-game that I played with three others was a blast. Four players settle their differences in a saloon, ducking behind cover and blasting each other to bits with a pair of six-shooters. The controls are mostly intuitive: lower the Touch controllers to your hips to grab and pull out a pair of pistols; flip them sideways and flick upright to reload; then aim and shoot. Players can also grab and toss sticks of dynamite, or grab a shotgun to add some variety to their arsenal. Turns out the Touch replicates grabbing objects and pulling triggers pretty well. It’s a very physical, but not exhausting experience. You’ll duck and lean to avoid the hail of bullets. There’s some subtle magic, too, to seeing your teammates and opponents look at you, then wave in real time — or high five you — with their own Touch controllers in hand. — Michael

Dead Secret Release date: March 28

Price: $14.99 I didn't get a lot of time with Dead Secret, the point-and-click murder mystery adventure from Robot Invader, and what I experienced won't really have me running back any time soon. The conceit of Dead Secret is right up my alley. You're investigating the disappearance of a quirky professor from his home in rural Kansas in 1965. Explore the environment, uncover the mystery and get spooked by phantoms that wear creepy masks. The game, currently available for Samsung VR for $9.99, even has an impressive trailer on its website. But the trailer doesn't really give an accurate depiction of how the game plays. The area of Dead Secret that I explored seemed an awful lot like a three-dimensional slideshow. Say you start at one end of the room. To get to the other end of the room you click in the middle distance. The scene fades away, and fades back in again once you've taken two steps forward. You're then free to look around, turn around a bit and manipulate any objects in the environment that are within reach. Done looking at that desk? Then turn yourself around 90 degrees in 15 degree increments, like the second hand on a cheap watch. Click into the middle distance again. Fade out. Fade in. Congratulations! You've gone another few steps. I'm sure the story is fine and good. I'm sure that there's something there that, given more than a 10-minute unguided demo in the corner of a crowded press event, I could latch on to. But as far as first impressions go, Dead Secret doesn't make a very good one. — Charlie Update: The game's marketing team reached out to let us know that Dead Secret actually has two modes of locomotion. We were playing in "comfort mode" and the stops and starts we experienced were designed for players more susceptible to motion sickness. There is another mode that allows for more fluid movement, very similar to the one we played on the Gear VR. We plan to spend more time with the game as it approaches release in order to try that mode out, and give the nuanced mystery game its due.

Dragon Front Release date: Spring

Price: Not announced Coming from High Voltage Software — a team that has bounced across all types of genre, subject matter and platform over the years — Dragon Front brings a collectible card game in the spirit of Hearthstone to the Rift. You build up points, spend them on cards that consist of troops, spells or other items, and try to balance your spending with your opponent’s in the hopes of overtaking their side of the game board. It doesn’t seem like there’s much here that couldn’t be done outside VR, but the game is a lot of fun and the interface works great. It’s also one of the first free-to-play Rift games that charges only for in-game purchases. — Matt

Eagle Flight Release date: Spring

Price: Not announced Eagle Flight is Ubisoft's major launch title for the Oculus Rift. It's an experience that lets you soar along the streets of a Paris long ago lost to humanity, zipping through arches, around trees and over peaked chapel rooftops. But the game, first introduced as a demo last year, isn't just about aimlessly exploring the empty town. There are also challenge modes that you have taking out enemy eagles with a shriek or zipping through floating hoops for a low time and high score. Read more.

Esper 2 Release date: March 28

Price: $9.99 Solve puzzles with telekinesis. That’s the core of Esper 2, an Oculus Rift game with shades of Valve’s Portal that primarily uses head tracking to play. In my hands-on time, I mostly played through tutorial levels that taught me how to pick up and move objects with my mind. I telekinetically lifted and tossed spheres and cubes, sometimes at targets, sometimes to slot into round or square holes. The mechanics blossomed as Esper 2 introduced types of glass through which my mind control powers would or wouldn’t work, and mechanisms that required this object plugged into that power source. There’s something fun here in this low-key brainteaser of a game. It may smack of Portal a bit too much early on, what with its sterile lab setting and jokey instruction from off-screen employees, but it’s a low cost puzzler that appears to go in some strange directions, and might be worth spending more time with at the Rift’s launch. — Michael

Eve Valkyrie Release date: March 28

Price: $59.99 While Eve Online is immensely complex, Eve Valkyrie is simple, straightforward space shooting fun that’s easy to get into and hard to put down. Ever the software showcase game for the Oculus Rift — and other VR headsets — the version of CCP’s space dogfighting game that I played focused on six-on-six team deathmatch mode. The launch version of the game will also ship with a control game type, in which players deploy probes at a capture point and then focus on defending that point against the other team. Eve Valkyrie will feature three ship types (a mobile fighter, an armored heavy and a support class ship) that players can customize and trick out through the game’s progression system. Players will unlock new ship abilities, new skins and, eventually, the means to make hybrid ships that cross classes. Players who are less interested in versus multiplayer can play the game’s Chronicles mode, missions that offer backstory on the game’s Valkyries told through audio logs. A Survival mode, in which players cooperatively battle waves of bots, will hit post-launch. Of all the games I expected to wreak havoc on my stomach, thanks to the spinning, looping action of fast-paced space combat, Eve Valkyrie didn’t make me even slightly motion sick. — Michael

Edge of Nowhere Release date: Spring

Price: Not announced When Edge of Nowhere was announced this past June I'll admit I was a bit puzzled. The value proposition simply didn't make sense to me at the time. Why would an early adopter, investing in the immersive promise of the Oculus Rift, even bother with a third-person adventure game? But, after 30 minutes with the demo shown at Game Developers Conference 2016, I'm of a different mind entirely. Edge of Nowhere is shaping up to be a must-have Oculus title. It represents a carefully calculated and confident leap by Insomniac Games into VR, and I can't wait to experience the final product. Read more.

Fantastic Contraption Release date: Not announced

Price: Not announced Unlike many of the early Rift games, Fantastic Contraption instantly feels like something that plays better in VR than it would otherwise. It’s not just something that feels more immersive, but something that makes more practical sense. The game gives you a puzzle, like trying to knock an orb off the top of a stack of blocks. Then you hover around a workstation, grabbing parts like wheels and wood sticks out of the sky, stretching pieces and snapping them together, poking and prodding at your contraption so it has the right balance and strength, trying to build something that will roll forward and knock over the blocks. It’s like a children’s construction set, where you feel fully in control as you put something together, then see that confidence fade as you activate it and see how its physics play out. And it works extremely well. It’s probably better with a chaperone, since you walk around a lot and could bump into things in the real world or get tangled in the headset cord, though the game shows an outline on the floor which helps mark your boundaries. — Matt

Fly to Kuma Release date: March 28

Price: $14.99 The planet Kuma is inhabited by thousands upon thousands of identical pink bears who wear sport coats and dapper little ties. Their planet is dying, and it's up to you to save them. The levels of Fly to Kuma that I played took place in a kind of spherical test chamber. In front of me was an obstacle course floating in mid-air — a deadly combination of sharp, spinning mechanisms and broken bridges. Using an Xbox controller to move an in-game cursor, I had to place blocks and platforms in such a way as to make the path safe for these bears. It got old quick. I did as I was told for a while. I bounced the bears off of a triangle, directed them safely over chasms and teleported them out of harm's way as needed. A cacophony of tiny little cheers were my reward as they boarded their spaceship and sailed away. Yes, they were adorable. Yes, this did began to grate on me after a while. And yes, I did eventually run them purposefully toward their elaborate deaths. You'll be pleased to know that in their final moments the cuddly little bodies just sort of bounce around a bit until they stop moving, whereupon a bear-shaped angel ascends up through the test chamber to its final reward. It's a Lemmings game in 3D, and it's just okay. — Charlie

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes Release date: March 28

Price: $19.99 Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a party game where one player takes on the role of a clueless bomb disposal technician — the person wearing the VR headset — while their friends pretend to know how to defuse bombs. It's a game about isolation and communication, telling your friends what you see and having your friends tell you what to do next to prevent yourself from becoming a hot steaming pile of partially vaporized meat. It's a hell of a lot of fun. Watch us play it.

Pinball FX2 VR Release date: March 28

Price: $14.99 The Oculus Rift version of Pinball FX2, the digital pinball game that features original creations from Zen Studios, does what it says in the title: This is digital pinball in VR. The virtual reality perspective doesn’t add greatly to the familiar experience. Players can spend time with one of three already-released Zen Studios tables — Secrets of the Deep, Mars and Epic Quest — in a virtual living room. The option to see these tables in 3D VR makes the experience feel more natural, but doesn’t seem worth reinvesting in if you own Zen Studios’ pinball games on another platform. Strangely, the VR versions of these pinball games are full of distractions. While playing Secrets of the Deep, virtual sharks will swim by you and chomp on pinballs. As you play Epic Quest, a lanky knight will walk around the pinball table. It can be … creepy. — Michael

Project Cars Release date: March 28

Price: $49.99 I was only able to do a few laps in Slightly Mad Studios racing game before the Oculus rig I was using was beset by some particularly bad calibration issues. It's very hard to drive a car, I've found, while looking out the driver's side window with your head tilted slightly to the left. Thankfully, a technician came to my rescue, rebooted the Asus machine I was playing on, and all was right with my virtual world. From what I played of Project Cars I was impressed. While clearly a much lower resolution than the PlayStation 4 version I'm used to, the driving mechanics felt very consistent between the two. Scanning the track left and right was natural and effective, and it was really nice to be able to use my sideview mirrors in a realistic way. However, the car I was in had a very authentic sort of Head and Neck Support (HANS) device that obstructed my peripheral vision. It's obviously a nod to the game's roots in simulation, but that simulation was ruined when I turned my head and clipped right through it. With design decisions like this one, and an unforgiving physics engine, Project Cars is unlikely to appeal to Oculus users who aren't already fans of racing simulations. But, with the right wheel-and-pedal set and a decently comfortable chair, I could see myself having a pretty good time. — Charlie

Radial-G Release date: March 28

Price: $24.99 A relatively straightforward futuristic racing game, Radial-G follows in the footsteps of games like F-Zero yet moves you along the outside of a tube. You aim for green boosts to move faster and try to avoid red spots that slow you down, and the game features a variety of ship types, weapons and subtle strategies. The game’s director, Geoff Cullen, has worked on a wide variety of racing games in the past, including Extreme-G, Re-Volt and Split/Second, which may explain the game’s hyphen, but also likely means it’s in good hands. Personally, after my first few minutes playing I felt a bit uncomfortable with the sense of motion. Others have had better luck. Oculus lists it as an "intense" game on the company's comfort scale, so head in cautiously if you’re on the fence. — Matt

Rooms Release date: March 28

Price: $14.99 Rooms is the virtual reality port of a Handmade Games puzzle title originally released on Steam last summer. It's a beautiful dollhouse of a game with a detailed aesthetic, but not a lot added to the experience of playing in virtual reality. In the game, you direct Anne through a series of puzzles that have her entering a scene filled with compartmentalized rooms and then sliding the rooms around to get to the exit. As the levels progress the sliding puzzles become more complex and the new mechanics are added to make things harder to sort out. It's a fun, hard-to-put-down title, but playing it in virtual reality didn't seem to change the experience substantively from playing without the immersive VR. — Brian

Smashing the Battle Release date: March 28

Price: $19.99 When you first try Smashing the Battle, it’s hard to shake how different it feels from most action RPGs seemingly simply because of the camerawork. In many ways, the game is straightforward for the genre, with anime-styled visuals and quick combat. But the perspective gives it a unique feel, making it seem like you’re playing with action figures on a dining room table despite the fantasy setting. I wasn’t able to play enough of the game to get deep into the combat and customization specifics, though at first glance they seem quite deep. I wouldn’t mind a bit less on-screen text, at least in the chosen font and how it’s displayed on the Rift headset, but the perspective makes it appealing regardless. — Matt

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Release date: March 28

Price: Not announced I played this supernatural murder mystery front-to-back when it came out on Steam a few years ago and marveled at its graphical fidelity at the time. After my experience with Adrift, I'm delighted to say that The Vanishing of Ethan Carter's visuals hold up both at a distance and up close. I found myself standing on a bridge, looking down through the wooden latticework and marveling at the detail in the textures on every surface all the way down. My gaze floated out across a lake to the trees in the distance, and then to the rail car rusting in the middle distance. Inside of the rail car was a weather-worn seat that looked remarkably real. Frankly, I spent more time exploring the environment than actually playing the game. Where the experience started to break down for me was with the investigation system, specifically the part from early in the game that's used to arrange visions in chronological order. It's very jarring to be moved against your will to various locations in such a detailed environment. Perhaps it was because I was standing while I played, but after about five minutes of arranging and rearranging memories and then viewing them played back to me I needed to take a break. All the jump cuts and scene transitions had begun to make me a little woozy. Maybe next time I'll give it a try while sitting down. — Charlie

VR Tennis Online Release date: March 28

Price: $24.99 A game I’d hoped would capture the simple, arcade magic of Sega’s Virtua Tennis games comes close, but has more than a few faults. VR Tennis Online from Colopl lets players pick from a selection of anime-style tennis players, in singles or doubles matches. In addition to lobs, slices and drives, players can customize their player with so-called Killer Techniques, special shots that perform superpowered hits. Tennis fans looking for a Mario Tennis or Virtua Tennis-style game might be left wanting by VR Tennis Online, a game that doesn’t seem to benefit much from being in virtual reality. — Michael