“Time is running out!” the voice declares urgently, and I glance up to see 30 seconds left on the clock.

I’m not concerned, though. The game is close but I'm in a strong position. I watch as my opponent pushes his champions down the left lane in a desperate gambit, and I pause to deliberate: do I defend and push the game into overtime, or do I go for the win now? With a single fluid motion, I make my decision, commanding my adorable squad to attack the enemy Glass. It's risky, but what the hell. I’m all in.

Just as I pass the point of no return, I hear the sound of the already weakened Sway Stone breaking and realize that their attack had been a feint. My opponent is now pushing on my central Glass with a big damage advantage. For the first time in the match, I’m in trouble.

With an easy gesture, I put my squad into retreat, though I’m out of position and weakened by their defensive turret. I mount a valiant final attempt to defend my Glass, chaining special attacks to swiftly take down their tank, but it's too little, too late. With seconds left on the clock, a brutal AOE spell finishes off my squad, and my Glass along with it.

But so it goes in Glassbreakers, a game where every decision matters, and it definitely ain’t over until it's over.

Mighty Mouse

Set in the same charming universe as the Moss series, Glassbreakers takes that world’s tiny woodland heroes and drops them into fast-paced, strategic tabletop battles. Each player commands a team of three champions - small but mighty creatures that range from a crossbow-wielding rat and an armored hamster to a mechanical insect and mischievous sprites. Fans of MOBAs will feel right at home and recognize the archetypes instantly: tanks, healers, damage dealers, support, and control - they’re all here.

The aim in Glassbreakers is simple: shatter your opponent’s ‘Glass’ before they destroy yours. Flanking the main Glass are two smaller ones: defensive turrets, of which at least one must be destroyed before the central base becomes vulnerable. It seems simple enough, deceptively so as with all good strategy games. Every match becomes a delicate ballet of micro-decisions, positioning, timing, and calculated risk.

Glassbreakers is a predominantly online competitive game. However, there are still options available for those who wish to play solo. While there’s no campaign to speak of, players can spar against AI opponents across three difficulty tiers. At first these will provide an ample challenge and ensure that there’s always something to enjoy solo, but experienced players will likely find the challenge dwindles after a few hours.

As with many online games, long-term success will likely depend on community strength and how active the player base is. This review-in-progress is based largely on a preview weekend that took place in late October, so it’s not been possible to comment on how active the servers are at launch. Nor have I been able to try the Steam or Apple Vision Pro editions yet for comparison.

There is also a co-op mode where players can team up, splitting control of the three champions between the players, though I've been unable to try that myself during this pre-release period. Glassbreakers also offers cross-platform support and a player base drawn from Quest 3, Steam, and Apple Vision Pro ecosystems.

In The Deep End

At a glance, it might be easy to miss the level of nuance and depth that Glassbreakers offers. The tutorials are well established to show players how to play the game, but what they don’t do as effectively is show you how to play the game well. My first few forays were graceless exercises in repeated, floundering assaults that, understandably, ended in my swift defeat.

With a little perseverance, however, it's one of the most sophisticated and well-balanced strategy games that I’ve ever played, and I’m beyond glad I took the time to delve deeper than that first session.

Once you get the hang of it, Glassbreakers offers a brilliantly layered system that forces players to adapt constantly, shifting between offense and defense, darting between risk and reward. It ebbs and flows in real time, where every decision matters and matches can turn on the tiniest miscalculation.

During the early game, battles tend to be cautious, cat-and-mouse affairs. Each time you knock out an opponent, your champion will level up, activating stronger abilities as they do. Playing recklessly gets you knocked out early on, and you’re handing your rival a power boost. There are also various objective points to compete for that, when captured, let you power up one of your champions. Then there is also the all-important ‘Sway Stone’ to contend with, which temporarily amplifies your damage output against the enemy’s Glass once destroyed.

With all these elements at play, each game of Glass becomes an evolving eight-minute balancing act of risk vs. reward. It’s an intoxicating blend of micro and macro-strategy. There’s always something to think about: who to engage, when to retreat, whether to press an advantage or turtle up and force your opponent’s hand. And because every match is short, defeat never feels punishing; it just makes you want to jump back in and try a new strategy immediately.

Squad Goals

The core of navigating this strategic depth lies in building and executing a cohesive team strategy. Players begin with just three champions, but as you play and level them up, more are unlocked, eventually providing access to a roster of twelve. Each champion has a distinct personality and play style, but it’s the synergies between them that define the real depth here.

One of the game’s greatest strengths lies in how differently it plays depending on your team composition. Two tanks and a healer can form a defensive wall that can grind down your opponent, while a high-risk, high-reward trio of damage dealers can obliterate a careless enemy in seconds. There is an excellent array of viable combinations and play styles for players to concoct, and crafting and trialing these is one of the real joys of playing the game.

Beyond this roster of champions, Glassbreakers also offers four maps that introduce different dynamics, changing the flow of battle and rewarding experimentation and creativity.

The VR Of It All

Most VR tabletop or strategy titles struggle with one key question: why does this need to be in VR?

Glassbreakers answers that question emphatically through its brilliantly tactile control scheme. Rather than relying on traditional gamepad-style commands or complex radial menus, it lets you control your champions using simple, physical gestures that feel instantly natural.

Standing (or seated) above the board, you direct your team by grabbing, reaching, and pointing in space. Want to send all three champions into battle? Reach over your shoulder and pull the trigger to select them all, then bring your hand down to point where you want them to go. Need a quick retreat? Just put your hand over your shoulder and double-tap the trigger, and your team will fall back and converge on your central Glass.

Additionally, using gestures like those in Demeo, you can rotate the entire battlefield around you, raise yourself up to get a better vantage of the action, and then zoom back in to move your champions around the board. It’s almost like handling a living hologram.

What really makes this shine is that it’s just as comfortable for gamers who prefer a couch-style experience. You can play seated, relaxed and still feel deeply engaged. It’s this hybrid design philosophy that makes Glassbreakers so special. Many VR games that rely on minimal movement end up feeling like glorified 2D experiences shoehorned into a headset. But here, Polyarc uses VR’s physicality to enhance the experience, not demand effort from it. The result is a perfect midpoint - a game you can play for hours without fatigue but that still leverages spatial awareness, physical presence, and immersion beautifully.

Here To Slay

Polyarc has always been synonymous with charm and artistry, and Glassbreakers continues that legacy with style to spare.

Each of the twelve champions is meticulously designed, bursting with personality and life. Their animations, gestures, and expressive reactions make them feel like living toys. Just as in Moss, Glassbreakers provides heroes you can’t help but get attached to. Even without a narrative, it retains the storybook magic of the Moss franchise.

Importantly for a game where there is so much to concentrate on at once, Glassbreakers is not only beautiful, but easy to read. Icons and symbols don’t clutter the board. Even in the most hectic of skirmishes, it’s easy to get the right information easily so you can make decisions quickly.

Even the menus and home space (set within the iconic Moss library) exude warmth and polish. Sitting there arranging your team, tweaking their colors and skins, feels intimate and personal.

Sounds Like A Plan

Audio design in Glassbreakers is as impeccable as its visuals.

Each champion’s voice lines are delightfully characterful - distinct enough to feel alive but used sparingly enough to avoid repetition. The soundscape of the battlefield is filled with satisfying detail: the muted crunch of Glass under attack, the metallic ping of Sahima’s chakram bouncing between your opponents, and the satisfying whoosh as Barnard’s spell lands.

The music sways from warm and inviting to building tension as the fight rages on, setting just the right tone for the world - playful, daring, and triumphant all at once.

Spatial audio cues are particularly well implemented. Take your eye off an area of the board, and you’ll hear enemies flanking you before you see them. Whether it's objectives spawning behind you or your Glass taking hits from across the map, the sound design tells the macro while your eyes are focused on the micro. This attention to directional sound makes every match more immersive and helps maintain focus during fast-paced engagements.

Glassbreakers - Current Verdict

It’s difficult to overstate just how much Glassbreakers gets right. Polyarc has crafted a delightfully polished and truly unique experience - one that blends the strategic depth of classic RTS games and the character class/squad mechanics of a MOBA with the tactile immersion of VR.

Glassbreakers is smart, competitive, and highly addictive and stands as one of the best strategy experiences available in VR - and one of the most charming. I'll update this review after spending more time with this in the coming days, but it's a beautifully balanced and brilliantly designed small-scale masterpiece. It deserves a large-scale following and already comes highly recommended.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines. As a review-in-progress, this is currently unscored, and we'll revisit this review soon.

Vampire Survivors VR is now available in a surprise shadowdrop on Quest, taking a 3D diorama approach.

Announced during the latest VR Games Showcase, developer poncle has teamed up with Radical Forge and Meta to bring the BAFTA award-winning roguelike to Quest. As with the flatscreen version, the Vampire Survivors VR port lets you choose a character based on stats like damage and armor before letting them loose on voxel environments as wave after wave of enemies arrive.

The difference here is that while trying to keep your health bar above zero, you're immersed in iconic game locations, including the Mad Forest, Inlaid Library, and Dairy Plant. Vampire Survivors VR can be played either standing or sitting, with a resizable game board that you can adjust to your liking. This also includes the Tides of the Foscari and Legacy of the Moonspell expansions.

Between bouts of survival combat, you'll open spin-to-win chests and use your hard-earned gold on new characters, permanent upgrades, power-ups, and weapon varieties to enhance your runs. The gothic gameplay is, of course, backed up by Vampire Survivors' signature synth-heavy soundtrack, and we'll bring you dedicated impressions soon.

Vampire Survivors VR is available on Quest now for $9.99.

Pocket Lands lets you create miniature worlds in mixed reality before exploring them in VR, and it's out next month in early access.

Marking the latest game from Thomas van den Berge, creator of VR painting app Vermillion, Pocket Lands sees you building miniature worlds in your home using MR. Letting you resize this diorama to fit your entire living room, hand tracking controls allow you to grab building material with your hands before jumping in at any moment to explore in first person through fully immersive VR.

Today's reveal at the VR Games Showcase follows a series of pre-announcement teases, showing a concept reminiscent of Microsoft's famous Minecraft HoloLens demo during E3 2015. Pocket Lands will release in early access this December with various biomes you can discover, while the VR mode promises multiple locomotion options.

With the full release, Thomas van den Berge is currently targeting “the second half of 2026.” This aims to include cave systems and underground biomes, additional surface biomes, creatures roaming the lands, and multiplayer build battles with leaderboards. Co-located and remote creative multiplayer are also planned.

Pocket Lands enters early access on December 11 on the Meta Quest platform.

CharacterBank revealed its latest project is Knights of Fiona, a full-scale RPG adventure for SteamVR and Meta Quest.

Closing out today's VR Games Showcase, Knights of Fiona is the studio's latest game following 2022's Ruinsmagus, and it's described by the team as a “hand-crafted narrative experience designed from the ground up for VR.” Set in the world of Gallia, you assume the role of Fiona, leading her team of knights against the threat of evil engulfing the realm.

Knights of Fiona incorporates a fully immersive first-person action-RPG battle system as you undergo numerous quests and challenges on your trek to save the world, fighting hordes of enemies and participating in large-scale boss fights against dragons and other creatures. You also explore the city of Gallia from its train station to seaside ports.

The game also promises that players can interact with an array of NPC characters, expanding the depth of the setting beyond the company’s previous titles. According to its director, HOI, Knights of Fiona seeks to build on the experience players had with Ruinsmagus while promising more to the world beyond the missions themselves.

“Knights of Fiona is the result of us closely evaluating everything we heard from players from the release of [that title] and amplifies every area they enjoyed.”

Knights of Fiona is scheduled for release in 2026 on the Meta Horizon Store and SteamVR. 

Lushfoil Photography Sim gets PC VR support in a free update next month on Steam.

After launching on Steam earlier this year, the atmospheric photography sim Lushfoil is making its VR debut next month on December 5. Announced in today's VR Games Showcase, it features a diverse range of locations, from quiet mountainous areas to urban spaces, providing avid shutterbugs with opportunities to explore and snap their perfect shot. You can check out the new trailer below:

Across the trailer, we can see the player wielding various cameras, including a traditional DSLR and a smaller digital camera, as well as non-photography items like a flashlight, umbrella, and paper airplane. We can also see them forming an L shape with their hands to create a rectangular frame, which provides an alternative means of taking a photo.

Those looking to get into the nitty-gritty of settings will be able to alter important features like the aperture, focus, and zoom, as well as the exposure, contrast, and white balance. Additionally, you can also alter the weather conditions as you please, adding moody effects like snow, fog, wind, and rain.

Lushfoil Photography Sim will make its PC VR debut on December 5 as a free update on Steam.

PC VR survival game Bootstrap Island just received its last major update before next year's full release.

Following four major updates during its early access period, the most recent one adding the Riverlands, a fifth update is now available for Bootstrap Island on Steam. Visions adds a new sickness and hallucinations system that warps reality as the illness spreads, which can only be cured through a Lotus Flower. Cures can also be found in the new Medicine Box, which contains six mysterious bottles with unknown contents.

Visions is also introducing a new story-driven tutorial that reveals your character's backstory, alongside new in-game item unlocks that appear across the island. New environmental features include subterranean sinkholes that may contain rare resources and quicksand. Dead shipmates killed in your shipwreck will now appear, too. Chests with new items gradually regenerate over time, and this update also promises a quality-of-life improvement for your grab pull.

“With ‘Visions,’ we wanted to push players beyond mere survival,” confirmed Rein Zobel, Creative Director of Bootstrap Island, in a prepared statement. “Illness, hallucination, and uncertainty become part of the experience. Just like in real survival situations, it’s not only the environment you must fight, but your own body and mind.”

As for what's next, May's full release roadmap confirmed that the full release will reveal the mysterious island's deepest secrets, adding tribal inhabitants you can only communicate with via body language. Further updates are planned post-launch focused on new lands and dangers, though little else was confirmed at the time.

Bootstrap Island: Visions is now live on Steam Early Access, with a full release tentatively scheduled for Q1 2026.

Asymmetric co-op platformer VR Giants is heading to Meta Quest headsets this December.

Developed by Risa Interactive, VR Giants originally launched on Steam Early Access in 2023, where one person plays flatscreen using a gamepad as a tiny companion called David, while the VR player controls Goliath to assist him. After confirming online multiplayer plans, the studio advised last month that it's coming to Quest, and today's VR Games Showcase announced a December 11 launch.

Though it's unclear if this is also being introduced on Steam, Risa Interactive states both Quest players will be able to play fully in VR. The studio's also using a 'Free Friends Pass' system for VR Giants, which lets you invite another player to join in without both of you needing to buy the game.

Previously detailing this further, Risa Interactive confirmed that VR Giants includes 23 levels across four biomes: Ice, Desert, Volcano, and Pasture. Goliath can transform into three separate forms, unlockable cosmetics are available for both characters, and the studio states this campaign will offer “8 hours” of gameplay.

VR Giants is out now on Steam Early Access, while the Quest version will follow on December 11.

Deadly Delivery confirmed a release date on Quest and Steam early next month.

In Deadly Delivery, you and up to three friends take on postal jobs to earn cash, with the warning that the recipients of your precious parcels are located in sprawling, peril-filled mines. With monsters lurking around most corners and an all-important quota to hit, your hopeful group will need to work together - or against each other - to earn their keep. You can check out gameplay below:

Communication in Deadly Delivery relies on proximity voice chat. As such, if a teammate strays too far from the safety of the group, you won't necessarily be able to hear them talking or screaming. To navigate, players can also take advantage of the realistic physics throughout the mines and can climb on top of one another to reach objects or evade danger.

The monsters across Deadly Delivery's underground setting aren't simple brutes alone, either, with some able to impersonate your teammates in looks and sound to lure you or trick you out of success. As you make more cash, you'll eventually be able to upgrade your kit with new gear, cosmetics, and pets.

Deadly Delivery arrives on December 4 on Quest and Steam.

Ready or Not will be available for PC VR players through a free mod tomorrow, supporting both the base game and DLC.

Developed by VOID Interactive, Ready or Not is a first-person tactical shooter where players defuse high-stakes situations as members of the Los Sueños Police Department. Initially shown in August, content creator and 2080 Games co-founder VR Oasis confirmed he's working with modder KITT (MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries VR Mod) to bring the SWAT simulator to PC VR. Now, today's VR Games Showcase gave us another look.

The Ready or Not VR Mod will be available for free through the game's official mod store, supporting crossplay with flatscreen PC players. This reimagines mechanics like weapon reloading and riot equipment for an immersive platform. Additional features include a handheld tablet to manage missions, a custom body rig kitted with ammo and equipment pouches, and hand gestures to relay squad commands.

This upcoming mod includes additional features like left-handed support, working tactical weapons like grenade launchers, using your voice to control the AI squad, and custom VR door interactions. Supported headsets include Quest, Valve Index, and PS VR2 with a PC adapter, and the press release recommends using “a mid to high-end” gaming PC.

The Ready or Not PC VR mod arrives on November 14, and the full game is available on Steam.

Espire: MR Missions builds upon Espire 2's mixed reality stealth missions, and it's launching on Quest next month.

Starting life as an add-on mixed reality mode to Espire 2: Stealth Operatives in 2023, Espire: MR Missions builds on those foundations by utilizing the boundaries of the player's home as the backdrop for its perilous, militant levels. Announced at today's VR Games Showcase, this standalone release contains new missions and systems, and it launches on December 16 for Quest. You can check out gameplay below:

Espire: MR Missions features 29 different challenges, offering 21 small-scale single-room missions and eight large-scale multi-room missions. It integrates your furniture and home decor into the game world, adding new details like roller doors and lighting effects on top. So while the overarching objectives remain the same throughout, your tactics and gameplay can vary depending on your playspace.

Throughout missions, you'll take on gun-toting OPHIS Guards and navigate cleverly placed laser traps, all while evading the enemy's eyeline. Across the launch trailer, we can see the player disarm and knock out enemy soldiers, as well as grab them and use their retinas to unlock doors and loot them of their firearms.

Espire: MR Missions arrives on December 16 for Quest. Players who already own Espire 2 on Quest before the launch date will receive Espire: MR Missions at no additional cost.

The Lightkeepers promises a supernatural tale of nautical solitude with a new co-op action game on Quest.

Developed by Spectral Games, likely best known for its work on Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, The Lightkeepers takes place in the 1920s in a world “where daylight unveils discoveries and nightfall demands survival.” Though it's unclear exactly how many players this supports, you're tasked with exploring mysterious islands and solving puzzles to prepare for the imminent threat.

Revealed during today's VR Games Showcase, The Lightkeepers promises “new challenges, different enemies, and unpredictable places” across each expedition, featuring weapons ranging from muddy rifles to hand-crafted grenades. The studio states light comes at a price, while fending off the dark involves exploring, crafting, and directly fighting these nocturnal terrors as a team.

Strangely, this isn't the only VR game we've recently seen that's set in the 1920s. Last month saw Curvature Games share more about The Amusement, an Art Deco-style roomscale adventure that's inspired both aesthetically and in its setting by Luna Parks during the 1920s post-war period.

The Lightkeepers launches next year on Quest 3 and 3S.

Syberia VR is an immersive reimagining of the narrative adventure game of the same name, and it's now available on Quest 3 and 3S.

Developed by Virtuallyz Gaming and Microids Studio Paris, Syberia VR puts players in the shoes of Kate Walker, a New York lawyer who's thrust into an enigma-filled adventure across Eastern Europe when a job to settle an estate goes awry. Initially starting life in 2002, this VR version revisits the events of the first game in the series, asking you to solve the mysteries of its steampunk-inspired setting up close.

Kate isn't alone in her journey and is joined by an informed automaton companion called Oscar, who assists the accomplished lawyer with her investigation. Together, the two chase an elusive inventor called Hans Voralberg, who's seeking to find the last remaining mammoths on the titular island.

From a gameplay perspective, this means exploring dioramic spaces, interacting with residents, and solving puzzles across 3D recreations of the original game world. Across the trailer, we can see a handful of the locations Kate visits, including spiderweb-ridden crypts, mechanized factories, and medieval castles, to name a few.

Syberia VR is now available on Quest 3 and 3S. While we didn't receive pre-release access, we'll aim to bring you our full review soon.

Full Steam Undead promises comedic zombie-killing action in an occult Victorian world on Quest and Steam.

Marking the latest game from By Grit Alone developer Crooks Peak, Full Steam Undead takes an action-over-horror approach in a Victorian-inspired open world “with zero loading screens.” Serving at Queen Victoria's behest on Necropolis Island, this lighthearted single-player shooter also gives you a drivable steam engine to assist in your battles.

Crooks Peak states this comes with various minigame-style 'Crypts' that range from mine cart riding to boss battles. Should rage overcome this island, zombie swarms will quickly overwhelm you, and the studio advises this campaign will likely last for around 4 hours.

Various optional gameplay modifiers will be available such as difficulty settings, instant reloads, zombie damage immunity, and a self-explanatory “Zombies explode when they get close” mode. Accessibility options include snap and smooth turning, a swappable gun hand, vignettes, and more. Crooks Peak also says it included a “very forgiving” autosave system.

While Crooks Peak advised these plans are speculative, it's considering additional features that are currently “out of scope before release.” Targeted post-launch updates presently include adding one-handed play support, a realistic steam engine controls mode, additional localizations, a global zombie kill counter, support for both LIV and bHaptics, and more.

Full Steam Undead launches in spring 2026 on Quest and Steam for $12.99.

Orcs Must Die! By The Blade is a VR reimagining of Robot Entertainment's action-tower defense series, and it's launching on Quest next year.

Developed by Teravision Games, who previously released Captain Toonhead vs. The Punks from Outer Space, Orcs Must Die! By The Blade expands on the franchise's monster-slaying lore, rebuilding the core gameplay loop for VR. Alongside setting up traps and surviving a wave of baddies, you also wield various destructive tools in first person to defend your home. You can check out gameplay below:

This campaign features 12 missions across three main chapters, which involve placing intricate traps on a map before taking out Orcs with weapons like axes and swords. By The Blade opts for free locomotion for its combat, letting you move defensively by blocking and countering Orcs, or offensively by swiping and slashing at them.

As you progress through the campaign, you can upgrade your pool of weapons and traps with elemental effects to diversify your destructive portfolio. Those who prefer not to scheme solo can also jump into By The Blade's co-op mode with an additional player.

“My favorite thing to do is hitting orcs with the head of their fallen brothers (or any other limb for that matter, haha),” explained Teravision Games Design Director, Cesar Solis Galindo in a prepared statement. “Building complex combinations of traps and experiencing the explosion of limbs and blood has a familiar but unique feeling, since the orcs in this game will HUNT YOU instead of going straight to the rift.”

Orcs Must Die! By The Blade will launch on January 22, 2026, exclusively on Quest.

Banners & Bastions adds new enemies to the mixed reality tactical tabletop roguelite with today's update, and it enters full release next month.

Created by Not Suspicious (Airspace Defender), Banners & Bastions is an MR tabletop roguelite with hand-tracking controls that's currently available in early access. Following last month's addition of controller support, a further update is now live that introduces a dragon boss battle. Two new enemy types are also available - Witch (ranged) and the Elite Swordsman (melee) - alongside a new playable Minefield card.

For the unfamiliar, Banners & Bastions sees every battle occur across procedurally generated maps as you defend your kingdom, with tougher foes emerging across each wave. You can keep investing in your local economy or fortifications, while your troops range from spearmen, knights, archers, and more. More features are on the way next month in a further content update.

Banners & Bastions is out now in early access on the Meta Quest platform, with the full release arriving this December. You can check out our previous early access hands-on to learn more.

Banners & Bastions Hands-On: Satisfying Strategy In Mixed Reality

Banners & Bastions, the mixed reality tower defense game from Not Suspicious, is available now in early access on Quest.

UploadVRDon Hopper

Men in Black: Most Wanted promises a new story for the comedic sci-fi franchise on Meta Quest next month.

Set in the early 1990s, Men in Black: Most Wanted will have players shrugging on the slick black suit of an MiB agent called Agent I. In Most Wanted, it's up to you and your partner, Agent L, to confront the Cylathians, a hostile alien race that's already attacked MiB agents more than once.

Players will use iconic gear and weapons from the MIB films to investigate paranormal mysteries, uncover clues, and solve environmental puzzles. These include famous MIB weapons like the Noisy Cricket and the memory-wiping Neuralyzer, as well as new toys like the Magnet Gloves, Omni Scanner, and Scout Bug.

Men in Black: Most Wanted is being developed by Coatsink, who previously brought suspense and terror to VR headsets with Jurassic World Aftermath. That dino-themed game used a gorgeous cel-shaded art style that's now been carried over to MiB: Most Wanted.

“We are really excited to announce Men In Black: Most Wanted to the world,” said Eddie Beardsmore, Coatsink COO in a prepared statement. “We’ve worked really hard to capture iconic elements from the series in an experience that blends infiltration, investigation, and combat.”

Men in Black: Most Wanted will debut on Meta Quest on December 5 for $24.99.

Valve confirmed that it's not currently working on a new first-party VR game.

Today saw Valve officially announce Steam Frame, a “streaming-first” standalone VR headset that's launching in “early 2026”. While the company is aiming to make your existing Steam library more valuable, this naturally raised the question: following 2020's Half-Life: Alyx, is Valve developing new VR games for the headset?

Speaking to UploadVR during our recent visit, Valve told us that it's “not talking about content today.” However, Road to VR says that "a member of the Steam Frame team" denied that it has any VR content in development, offering what the publication described as a "simple and definitive no".

While Alyx wasn't a launch title for the Valve Index headset, the groundbreaking title arrived less than a year after launch. Before that, Valve had previously confirmed it was developing a flagship VR game, whereas Steam Frame will seemingly rely on existing and third-party titles.

Valve Officially Announces Steam Frame, A “Streaming-First” Standalone VR Headset

Steam Frame has an included wireless adapter, and is launching “early 2026”. Read the full specs, features, and details here.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

As for Steam Frame itself, the newly announced headset uses a lightweight modular design and runs a VR version of Valve's SteamOS, which it previously used with Steam Deck. This also uses an updated version of the Proton compatibility layer, meaning it can run almost any Linux, Windows, and Android games.

If you're interested to find out more about how it runs games, you can check out our hands-on impressions and the hardware specifications for more.

Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR’s Impressions Of Valve’s New Headset

UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton and David Heaney went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, trying both standalone use and PC VR.

UploadVRIan Hamilton

If you've spent money on games from Steam, Valve's aim with Steam Frame is to make that library more valuable.

50 percent of Steam users still run their games at 1080p, according to the latest Steam Hardware Survey. How many of those gamers have never seen a monitor refreshing faster than 60Hz? Or a modern VR display running its content at 120Hz?

Ignoring the subset of people, mainly gamers, who have a concept of the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz, how many people worldwide have never seen motion displayed on a screen faster than 60Hz?

In 2026, Valve will follow the Steam Deck by starting to sell its most portable standalone PC ever. You wear Steam Frame on your face with experimental display support up to 144Hz.

What Is Steam Frame?

Steam Frame is a VR headset, personal computer, and probably a whole lot of other things once its community verifies Valve's claims that you can swap out the operating system or plug in other accessories into its high-speed nose port.

"We don't block anyone from doing what they want to with their device," Valve's Lawrence Yang said.

Valve Officially Announces Steam Frame, A “Streaming-First” Standalone VR Headset

Steam Frame has an included wireless adapter, and is launching “early 2026”. Read the full specs, features, and details here.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Developers and Steam Frame buyers can use high frame rates in different ways, but at its core this headset features a stereoscopic portable display as its compute unit. There's dedicated hardware to enable high quality streaming from nearby PCs also running Steam and, while in standalone mode, you can still get something like a 1440p picture on what feels like a 70-inch virtual display running at 90, 120 or potentially 144Hz.

UploadVR played Hades 2 at Valve HQ in a demo that conveyed the power of having a virtual display comfortably floating anywhere with smoothly animated content displaying in the Steam Frame at rates usually only associated with high end gaming monitors tethered to desks. Arms at your sides with a controller in each hand, Valve says Steam Frame works in the dark too.

"All of these games can support arbitrary resolutions and refresh rates," Valve's Jeremy Selan said during our briefing. "We're thinking about it as very much a per-game setting. Some games just by the nature of the play want to be very high refresh and more modest res. When we were showing you Hades, it was at 1440p at 90 Hertz."

Hades remains a strong memory from my time in Steam Frame at Valve headquarters because of that high frame rate, and it bears calling out amid all our coverage that having some “VR and non-VR” games running at an extremely high frame rate – even reclined on a couch or bed – will be an eye-opening experience for many people, including Steam Deck owners.

"While it is a wireless streaming first headset," Yang told UploadVR. "We did want you to be able to play your Steam library when you're not next to your PC or laptop, so we made Steam Frame a PC by itself. It has an ARM chip that's running SteamOS."

Could playing existing games at high frame rates in a lightweight standalone headset make it hard to go back to 60 or 30 fps screens entirely?

For long-time UploadVR readers as well as newbies learning about the market for the first time, it’s important we convey just how meaningful this feature alone might be in daily use as Valve works to optimize the system and rally developers into supporting new surfaces for their games on Steam.

During our time with Valve I dug into questions of openness, tracing the path from the Vive and wired PC VR-only Index to the standalone Steam Frame with wireless streaming.

“This is a Linux OS, this is SteamOS brought to ARM. If there are other operating systems, for instance, that support these chip sets, you're welcome to do so,” Selan said. “You'd at that point be responsible for the tracking stack and everything else, but very much in the spirit of Steam Deck, this is your device, your computer, you own it, you can mod it and extend it in any way.”

Steam Input Alignment

Valve looks to align controller input in Steam Frame with traditional gamepad and Steam Deck, with backward compatibility to existing VR content on both Quest and PC. That’s why there are two index buttons instead of one on each controller, matching the shoulder and trigger buttons on traditional gamepads.

Valve’s Jeff Leinbaugh introduced the controllers by saying their design is “going along with all the goals of the headset and a lot of our hardware. We want this device to work with all of your VR games but also all of your non-VR games and just make your whole Steam catalog more valuable, deliver you a bunch of value no matter what you happen to be playing.”

What Is Steam Frame's Price?

"It's a premium headset, but we're really aiming to be cheaper than Index," Selan said. "While I said we're gonna be premium, we're still trying to be very cost considerate."

We're due for months of debate over the definition of "cheaper than Index" not due to any fault of Valve, but because that's not a comparison many people know how to make conceptually.

Valve Index was $999 for a room-scale VR kit plus a user-provided Windows PC to drive it. Steam Frame is a standalone headset from Valve. Many people, in their heads, will be comparing the price of a component to a computer.

Trade-Offs: Wi-Fi & Display

Steam Frame's creators acknowledge trade-offs in its design, like the lack of HDR or a true-black display technology like the Steam Deck OLED. My colleague David Heaney asked about the potential of a higher end headset one day exchanging the LCD in its design for OLED or HDR.

"I think about HDR every day," Selan said.

Where Apple brings to Vision Pro its iPad app and Apple TV content libraries as the cornerstone of its leap into VR — while building new Apple Immersive Video content along the way — Valve representatives declined to talk about content made for Steam Frame by their developers.

Valve is “optimistic” about bringing Half-Life: Alyx to standalone at some point. Until then, that's what the streaming focus is about. The story now from Valve is about putting its hardware in end-to-end wireless control of Steam games in more places while improving frame rates, latency and resolution wherever possible along the way.

What makes good Apple Immersive Video so powerful is the amount of photons hitting camera sensors and then reconstructed for your view on a virtual display at a high resolution and frame rate. Almost nobody notices when an iPad app that typically runs at 30 fps on a physical tablet also runs at 30 fps on a virtual display, but you’ll jump when something comes at you in 180-degree video delivered in Apple Immersive Video at Apple Vision Pro’s frame rates and quality levels. You’ll have to stay tuned for our review of the M5 Vision Pro, released in 2025, to see if that specification bump from the M2 of 2024 has a meaningful effect on frame rates across the broader Apple software ecosystem. Still, you should keep some of this in mind as Valve seeks to make an impact with new hardware centered on Steam games in 2026.

"We ask ourselves at Valve, what can we do well?" Selan said. "We keep coming back to the Steam games that you already own."

Developer Feedback & Community

Valve is looking to its developer and user communities to do the lifting here in centering Steam in the market for VR games running on ARM. Developer applications for Steam Frame kits are open today.

The market for VR content on ARM is currently dominated by Quest, but many top apps have ports of their Android-based software packages on other storefronts, like those from Pico or HTC. As of last month, this is a market also being formally chased by Android XR for the Google Play Store.

"The same way Steam OS has been fully expanded and extended by the community. Our hope is to do that same thing for VR. So this would be considered an open PC," Selan said. "This would be like the biggest open VR headset device, and like everyone can richly work together to make that better and better."

The Best Headset Demo Ever?

Valve didn't show experiences like The Lab with mini games like Longbow from 2016, or even Beat Saber from 2018, that might've indicated tracking regressions compared with the Valve Index or HTC Vive laser base stations surrounding a play area. We didn't even see SteamVR Home, just a compositing system for content in SteamOS on ARM.

Apple planted its flag in VR hardware as the future of personal computing with its first public demo of Vision Pro in the middle of 2023, with software showing full control over photos, videos, FaceTime and more. Plenty of software Apple is known for, like Final Cut Pro and GarageBand, still isn't present in its headset from 2025.

Valve plants a flag for all of Steam in VR with its first public demo of Steam Frame near the end of 2025. There's a long path of optimization ahead to make Steam games of all kinds run well with Valve's new headset and input.

Pulling up a Linux desktop in VR for the first time in a headset as lightweight as Steam Frame conveys something about this medium and its steadfast believers that I felt in awe to see with my own eyes. You can use whatever terminology you want to describe this medium, but progress never stops.

We'll be watching Valve's optimization developments closely across all platforms.

Closed vs. Open

The latest generation of VR headsets sees us logging into Samsung, Google, Steam, Apple or Meta accounts to access large quantities of digital content. That doesn't feel truly "open", even if along the way we're getting some unlocked bootloaders and the promise of OS-swapping.

Earlier this year, I did the absurd thing of purchasing a 2 terabyte microSD card which I stuck into my Steam Deck. I've installed everything I could possibly want onto it, including 100s of gigabytes of content I don't expect to work properly in Deck mode ever. Now, instead of waiting hours downloading a 100 gigabyte game from Valve's network to a freshly reformatted PC, I can simply transfer it locally right from the Deck.

I had that card with me at Valve HQ because I had another hope in putting my Steam library on that card. They warned "no screwdrivers" ahead of our demos and said not to take anything apart. So, while deeply curious, I didn't take the step of sticking my card into the headsets there and trying to log myself into Steam Frame.

That said, I look forward to the day I can pop that card out of my Deck and into a Steam Frame and see what experiences work smoothly as I click play on absolutely everything. Valve told us they're planning to distribute review units sometime early in 2026.

Near the end of my time at Valve HQ in 2025, six years after I first visited their offices in 2019, I asked them to frame for me the difference between a computer that's "closed" and one that's "open."

Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais responded.

"If folks on an experience that's more curated and more closed off are having a good experience, that's fine. But in general, we see that people that are trying to experience a variety of games in different ways, there's a bunch of stuff that they might wanna do that we haven't thought of. And what we always observe is that there's a ton of value that is usually distributed laterally in the community, where users between themselves will share stuff that will make the experience better. And that is only possible in an open platform. Like we don't want all the value in a platform like that to be flowing up and down through us, and for us to be determining what's a good experience or not on behalf of all those users that might have different opinions and different aspirations."

"So it's really important for us to keep that open because it creates those kinds of effects that eventually leads to a better experience. Also, anyone that's using this stuff can also go and contribute patches and develop on it. And so we're excited to be able to have stuff get even better because people now want to contribute to it."

"In fact, a lot of the developers that are working on open source have started because they were users and they just want to improve a specific aspect and they go deep into it."

"The lines between user and developer has always been very blurry for us. We've come from a world where some of our most popular game properties actually started out as mods. And modding on PC was always like a strong thing that we were always trying to support. Because so many good concepts and new game genres, you know, free to play, mobile, all that stuff came through mods, initially. If you look at the history of video games, different genres, different ways to experience games, different peripherals, a lot of it came from PC because PC was an open platform where different companies could innovate in different ways, but also users could mod. People that created closed off platforms based on some of those concepts, they're gonna take some of those concepts and kind of freeze them in time. And then PC's gonna keep moving forward because it's open and we have all this value. And we are just applying PC to VR. So it's nothing new for us. We've always applied PC to VR. It's just some folks have opted to like branch it off in different directions, but I think we're just doing the same thing as we've always been doing."

From Valve Index To Steam Frame

In 2019, when I first tried the Index, a Valve representative told me "this is going to ruin you" before I tried Beat Saber running at 144Hz.

Beat Saber was later acquired by Facebook that same year and, sure, at some point in Steam Frame I'd like to see how Meta's cornerstone title performs in terms of tracking and frame rate.

In retrospect, Beat Saber at 144Hz did ruin me in the sense that, when I invited Index into my home, I don't think I really experienced those frame rates in any substantial way running an NVIDIA RTX 2080 for most of the lifetime of the headset.

In Steam Frame, Valve manages end-to-end controller inputs and frame delivery not just in the standalone mode, but when streaming from PCs like Steam Machine too. Even a few minutes playing your favorite game with a few milliseconds less lag in input, or higher frame rates visually, will feel like invisible magic while meaningfully adding value to your day. Ultimately, that's exactly why Valve is making Steam Frame.

UploadVR's Ian Hamilton and David Heaney went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ.

If you missed it, Valve just officially announced Steam Frame, a "streaming-first" standalone VR headset launching in "early 2026".

Steam Frame has a lightweight modular design and runs a VR version of Valve's SteamOS, the Linux-based operating system used in Steam Deck. With an evolved version of the Proton compatibility layer it can run almost any Linux, Windows, and Android game, including SteamVR games. Many titles won't perform well on the mobile chipset, though, so Steam Frame has a wireless dongle in the box to leverage the power of your gaming PC – hence Valve's "streaming-first" positioning.

The headset does not require or support base stations. It tracks itself and its included controllers using four onboard greyscale tracking cameras, two of which can be used for monochrome passthrough, and it also has eye tracking for foveated streaming.

Steam Frame will replace Valve Index on the market, which the company confirmed to UploadVR is no longer in production, and joins Valve's "family" of hardware products, which will also soon include a Steam Machine consolized PC and a new Steam Controller.

Valve Officially Announces Steam Frame, A “Streaming-First” Standalone VR Headset

Steam Frame has an included wireless adapter, and is launching “early 2026”. Read the full specs, features, and details here.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

You can find a full rundown of the design, features, and specifications of Steam Frame in our news article here. This article describes our impressions of using the headset at Valve HQ, where we were invited to a hardware briefing that included hands-on time with the new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and the Steam Frame headset.

Ian's time with Steam Frame was mostly spent in standalone titles on SteamOS, while David's time was entirely in Half-Life: Alyx streamed from a nearby gaming PC using the wireless adapter included in the Steam Frame box. Here's what they thought of their time with Steam Frame.

Ian's Impressions: Standalone Use

In quick succession I played Ghost Town, Walkabout, Moss 2, and Gorn 2 in the lightweight standalone SteamOS headset, and I also briefly tried some Half-Life: Alyx streaming from a nearby Windows PC.

Ghost Town is one of the best VR games of the year and Valve says I played the PC VR version – the version made for x86 processors – completely in standalone through a compatibility layer. Walkabout Mini Golf's build was more fully featured than the one shown during the demo day at Samsung a couple weeks earlier, allowing me to putt with one controller in full VR joined by an iPhone player logged into the same room code via the Pocket Edition of the game. I enjoyed waving at Quill in Moss 2 and, in Gorn 2, I punched barbarians with my fists using the analog sticks to move myself out of the way of their attempts to hit me. Playing mostly seated, they all worked smoothly with Steam Frame running as a standalone personal computer – no streaming from a PC.

Portal 2 ran on a large virtual display, as if on a giant Steam Deck, with what seemed like a very high frame rate. That was a really nice, responsive experience. So was stretching out my farm in Stardew Valley to keep an eye on most of the farm at once. Both of these flat games are pretty powerful to see running well directly on such a lightweight device alongside any number of standalone VR games.

I opened the Linux desktop, went to Chrome and voice searched for the No Time For Caution scene from Interstellar on YouTube. I kicked off my shoes at Valve HQ (apologizing for doing so) and stretched out horizontally on a couch. I propped up a pillow behind my head and left the controllers on my stomach with the screen stretched across the sky. Matt Damon said "there is a moment" and I watched him blast into the gray of space with my controller drifting off with him.

Regressions in controller tracking compared with Valve Index and its SteamVR 2.0 base stations may grate against developers and players who’ve come to expect rock-solid tracking from Steam-based laser systems outside the play area. I tried nothing like Longbow, for example, from Valve's original Lab experience, nor something with lots of physics objects like Boneworks, nor anything with fast motion like Beat Saber.

With the controller in my hand, my index finger had some difficulty reaching both the index shoulder and trigger buttons while also keeping my middle finger on the grip button. Grip straps should be sold optionally at launch and there are capacitive sensors along the base of the controller intended to see when the 4th and 5th fingers release. I saw it in action in Half-Life: Alyx, with Alyx’s pinky and ring finger occasionally moving as I released my grip from that part of the controller. It didn’t seem super responsive, but it also wasn't strapped to my hand and the grips of the Index controllers were never particularly responsive either. The input from the 4th and 5th digits hasn’t proved necessary to game developers for half a decade, so I'm not too worried about it being well supported here. Still, we will closely watch what developers say about their feedback on the Steam Frame controllers.

IPD adjustment is done via a wheel on the top of the headset and, after I got it set right, I largely forgot the headset's weight as it disappeared split between the rear and front in a remarkable feat of engineering. There’s no battery up front but no adjustment knob at the back — you pull on the soft straps at the side to adjust fitting — with the dual-cell thin battery on the back held behind a cushy foam. In hand, the compute unit feels a bit like I imagine a mainline Apple Vision might, with the rear component of Valve's headset able to collapse inside of the front for more compact travel than any other headset I'd want to use.

On head, Steam Frame is a relief compared to all headsets with a battery hanging on the front of your face. The absence of the battery there is easily the most impactful feature of its design. Even though Google and Samsung hang the battery in a pack in Galaxy XR like Vision Pro, I found Steam Frame’s cushy back-mounted battery design to be an enormous relief particularly after spending four days in Android XR’s first headset.

Of course, that’s only after a few minutes watching a movie reclined on a couch while missing OLED displays every second, but Steam Frame feels like glasses or perhaps even a sleep mask because of how well spread out its weight feels across the head.

A Steam Frame Wireless Adapter comes in the box with each headset intended to manage the link to a nearby PC, including to the planned Steam Machine. We’ll be looking for the Steam Frame-verified label on VR games for Steam in the year ahead, and looking to test what it means to truly pump Steam throughout the home with dedicated Valve-managed wireless connections. There’s a lot of space for developers to play here in SteamOS, jumping off a Steam Machine or Deck and into a Frame.

Valve has a lot to accomplish here during a turbulent time in global relations and specifics like cost and availability aren’t finalized. Valve representatives think they can get Half-Life: Alyx running performant in standalone, but they’re not promising it yet and it’s clear there’s still a lot for them to do.

David's Impressions: Wireless PC VR

My two Steam Frame demo sessions involved streaming Half-Life: Alyx from a nearby gaming PC that had the headset's included wireless adapter connected to a USB port.

A hands-on demo can never definitively reveal whether a headset is comfortable to wear for hours, but even in the relatively short time I used Steam Frame it felt significantly lighter and less burdensome than any other fully-featured standalone headset. The visor itself weighs just 185 grams, a remarkable achievement, and the entire unit including the rear battery just 440 grams, meaning the weight is incredibly well distributed across your head.

Further, the material Valve is using for the facial interface and rear padding is an evolved version of the ultra-snug fabric used in the Index, which even six years and dozens of aftermarket accessories for other headsets later, I still find feels the softest on my face.

While I'm cautious about making sweeping conclusions until I have the headset in my home, my initial impression is that Steam Frame is the most comfortable VR headset yet, for my face at least.

When it comes to making Steam Frame an ideal headset for connecting to SteamVR on your PC, Valve is using a combination of both hardware and software cleverness to refine the compressed wireless streaming experience.

Steam Frame has two separate wireless radios. One is used as a client, connecting to your home Wi-Fi network on the 2.4GHz or 5GHz band for the general internet connection of SteamOS. The other is for a 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E hotspot, created by the headset, that SteamVR on your PC automatically connects to via the USB adapter included in the box. It's a dedicated point-to-point connection between Steam Frame and your PC.

This gives Valve precise firmware-level control over the entire network stack for wireless PC VR, and eliminates the problems you might experience using other standalone headsets for this, such as being bottlenecked by a router that's either too far away, blocked by too many walls, congested by other traffic, or just supplied by your ISP because it was cheap, not because it's any good.

The other feature Valve has implemented to make the wireless PC VR experience as good as it can possibly be is foveated streaming. Steam Frame has built-in eye tracking, and when you're using PC VR it's always used to encode the video stream in higher resolution where you're currently looking.

The result of this hardware and software effort, in my demos, was a relatively high detail and stable image that felt as if it could have been arriving from a DisplayPort cable. There were no visible compression artifacts, nor was there perceptible latency.

The exception to this stability was that in the second demo room, I saw a frame skip issue at a regular interval. Asking Valve's staffers about this, they debugged it as an unexplained frame spike on the Windows PC side, showing me the SteamVR performance graph on the PC monitor so I could visually confirm this. The issue didn't occur in the first demo room, and is unlikely to be inherent to the product.

Steam Frame's pancake lenses made the image look clear and sharp throughout, with a similar feeling to Quest 3's lenses (including the wide eyebox) but with a slightly taller field of view, and that increased vertical field of view meaningfully contributed to an increased feeling of immersion. There did appear to be some minor pupil swim, however, meaning the geometric stability of the scene ever so slightly shifted as I panned my head.

I asked Valve's Jeremy Selan about the idea of using dynamic distortion correction, having the eye tracking continuously update the lens distortion coefficients, and he told me that they "haven't found the need" but "could if we wanted to". It probably isn't a big enough issue for most people to notice or care.

The only real problem with the image I saw was its poor contrast, given Valve's description of Steam Frame as a "premium headset".

If you currently use an OLED or micro-OLED headset for PC VR, or even LCDs with Mini-LED backlighting, Steam Frame's contrast would be a huge downgrade. Valve is using regular 2160×2160 LCD panels, with no local dimming of any kind, and in the dark sewers of City 17 I saw the same detail crunch I see with any other plain LCD headset.

To be clear, this is the contrast experience that the majority of SteamVR users have today. But much of this usage comes from headsets that were bought for around $300. Valve isn't yet giving a price for Steam Frame, but said it's aiming to sell it for less than the $1000 Index full-kit. To what degree the regular LCD panels are an acceptable tradeoff will depend on exactly where Steam Frame's price lands.

When it comes to the controllers, tracking seemed flawless in my time, and while on one headset there was a minor positional jitter, on the other it was rock solid. Steam Frame Controllers have 18 IR LEDs, compared to the 8 on Meta's Touch Plus controllers, and this seemed to result in better occlusion resistance at extreme angles.

Overall, Steam Frame felt like a device optimized to be the ideal wireless PC VR experience but without being unaffordable for too many people. It's incredibly comfortable, its wireless adapter bypasses the common issues of home Wi-Fi networks, and its lenses are sharp and clear. It lacks the ultra-high-detail and rich contrast of 4K micro-OLED headsets, but it's also set to lack their multi-thousand-dollar price tag.

I suspect Steam Frame could be the headset to finally convince many tethered PC VR diehards to make the leap to wireless, and I'm eager to spend more time with the headset to see how it performs over multi-hour sessions in a real home environment.

Valve Officially Announces Steam Frame, A “Streaming-First” Standalone VR Headset

Steam Frame has an included wireless adapter, and is launching “early 2026”. Read the full specs, features, and details here.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Valve just officially announced Steam Frame, a "streaming-first" standalone VR headset launching in "early 2026".

Steam Frame has a lightweight modular design and runs a VR version of Valve's SteamOS, the Linux-based operating system used in Steam Deck. With an evolved version of the Proton compatibility layer it can run almost any Linux, Windows, and Android game, including SteamVR games. Many titles won't perform well on the mobile chipset, though, so Steam Frame has a wireless dongle in the box to leverage the power of your gaming PC – hence Valve's "streaming-first" positioning.

The headset does not require or support base stations. It tracks itself and its included controllers using four onboard grayscale tracking cameras, two of which can be used for monochrome passthrough, and it also has eye tracking for foveated streaming.

Steam Frame will replace Valve Index on the market, which the company confirmed to UploadVR is no longer in production, and joins Valve's "family" of hardware products, which will also soon include a Steam Machine consolized PC and a new Steam Controller.

Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR’s Impressions Of Valve’s New Headset

UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton and David Heaney went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, trying both standalone use and PC VR.

UploadVRIan Hamilton

My colleague Ian Hamilton and I went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, and you can read our impressions here. This article, on the other hand, provides a full rundown of the design, specifications, and features of Steam Frame, based on the information provided to us by Valve.

Lightweight Modular Design

Steam Frame will come with a replaceable battery strap, with built-in dual driver speakers and a 21.6 Wh rear battery.

The strap itself is fabric and the rear battery unit has soft padding, meaning it can "collapse" against the lenses for portability and naturally deform when your head is resting on a chair, sofa, or bed.

The core frontbox of Steam Frame weighs just 185 grams, Valve says, while the entire system with the default included facial interface, speakers, strap, and rear battery weighs 440 grams.

That makes Steam Frame the lightest fully-featured standalone VR headset to date.

Steam Frame is a modular system, and Valve will make the CAD and electrical specifications available to third parties to build custom facial interfaces and headstraps. Someone could, for example, build a rigid strap with an open interface, or a fully soft strap with a tethered battery. Expect a range of accessories.

2K LCDs & Pancake Lenses

Steam Frame features dual 2160×2160 LCD panels, meaning it has twice as many pixels as the Valve Index and roughly the same as Meta Quest 3.

The panels have a configurable refresh rate between 72Hz and 120Hz, with an "experimental" 144Hz mode, just like the Index.

Valve says the multi-element pancake lenses in front of the panels offer "very good sharpness across the full field of view", which the company describes as "slightly less than Index", and "conservatively" 110 degrees horizontal and vertical.

Lens separation is manually adjusted via a wheel on the top of the headset, letting wearers match their interpupillary distance (IPD) for visual comfort.

Wireless PC Adapter With Foveated Streaming

Steam Frame does not support DisplayPort or HDMI in. It is not a tethered headset. Instead, Valve is going all-in on compressed wireless streaming, aiming to perfect it with a combination of clever hardware and software.

The headset has two separate wireless radios. One is used as a client, connecting to your home Wi-Fi network on the 2.4GHz or 5GHz band for the general internet connection of SteamOS. The other is for a 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E hotspot, created by the headset, that SteamVR on your PC automatically connects to via the USB adapter included in the box.

It's a truly dedicated point-to-point connection between Steam Frame and your PC.

This gives Valve precise firmware-level control over the entire network stack for wireless PC VR and eliminates the problems you might experience using other standalone headsets for this, such as being bottlenecked by a router that's either too far away, blocked by too many walls, congested by other traffic, or just supplied by your ISP because it was cheap, not because it's any good.

Of course, some enthusiasts already have a high-quality Wi-Fi setup for PC VR, with a premium router or access point in the room where they play. Valve tells us that such people can continue to use their setup instead of the adapter if they really want, but suspects they won't.

The other feature Valve has implemented to make the wireless PC VR experience as good as it can possibly be is foveated streaming. Steam Frame has built-in eye tracking, and when you're using PC VR it's always used to encode the video stream in higher resolution where you're currently looking.

While this feature has existed as part of Steam Link VR for Quest Pro since the app launched in late 2023, Valve says on Steam Frame the foveated streaming has lower latency and greater precision, thanks to the company controlling the entire software stack on the headset side.

Linux, Windows & Android Apps Standalone

Steam Frame can run Linux, Windows, and Android applications through a combination of compatibility layers and emulation.

As with other SteamOS devices such as Steam Deck, Steam Frame can run Linux titles natively as well as Windows applications via Proton, the compatibility layer Valve has been working on for almost a decade now in collaboration with CodeWeavers.

But while Steam Deck is an x86 device, the same CPU architecture as a gaming PC, Steam Frame uses the mobile-focused ARM architecture. That supports a huge advantage: Steam Frame can natively run Android APKs, including those you download in the web browser, as long as they don't require Google Play Services. And Valve will now be accepting Android APKs on Steam, so developers can easily port their Meta Quest games.

But the ARM architecture also means that Steam Frame can't natively run x86 applications, which the majority of Steam games are.

To solve this, Valve has been investing in FEX, an open-source tool for emulating x86 applications on ARM Linux devices that it has integrated into Proton on Steam Frame. The company tells UploadVR that the performance impact here is "shockingly small" – on the order of a few percent.

The ability to run x86 Windows applications means that Steam Frame can, in theory, run almost any VR title on Steam.

However, the key word here is "run". Steam Frame features a roughly 10-watt chipset originally designed for use in smartphones, and has only a fraction of the power of the gaming PC hardware that most SteamVR titles were designed for. Thus, while visually simplistic and well-optimized titles at relatively low graphics settings will run well, and there'll be a "Steam Frame Verified" tag for such titles on Steam, for high-fidelity VR gaming such as playing Half-Life: Alyx you'll want to leverage your PC.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 + 16GB RAM

Steam Frame is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, paired with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM.

Two models will be sold, one with 256GB UFS storage and the other with 1TB, and there's also a microSD card slot for expanded storage. In fact, you can even transfer the microSD card from your Steam Deck or Steam Machine, and your games will instantly be available to play.

So just how powerful is Steam Frame's chip? Well, the XR2 Gen 2 series used in pretty much every other non-Apple headset features the Adreno 740 GPU from the 8 Gen 2 smartphone chip, and the 8 Gen 3 is the successor from the year after with the newer Adreno 750.

On paper, Steam Frame's Adreno 750 GPU is 25% more powerful than the Adreno 740 in Meta Quest 3, and this difference increases to over 30% when you factor in the fact that Quest 3 slightly underclocks its GPU, while Valve confirmed that Steam Frame does not. Further, the effective performance difference will be even greater in titles that leverage eye-tracked foveated rendering.

The CPU, on the other hand, is much more difficult to compare, as the XR2 Gen 2 uses a non-standard core configuration and 2D benchmarks run on headsets don't induce the maximum clock speed. But based on what we know about the chips, expect Steam Frame to have around 50% improved single-threaded performance compared to Quest 3 and around 100% greater multithreaded, as a rough estimate.

Essentially, from a standalone performance perspective Steam Frame is notably more powerful than other non-Apple standalone headsets, though still significantly less powerful than a gaming PC.

SLAM Tracking & Monochrome Passthrough

Steam Frame has four outwards-facing greyscale fisheye cameras for inside-out headset and controller tracking via computer vision. You don't need base stations, and the headset doesn't support them anyway.

Two of the cameras are on the top corners, and the other two are on the front, near the bottom, widely spaced.

To make headset tracking work in the dark, Steam Frame also features infrared illuminators, bathing your environment in IR light that the cameras can see.

You can choose to see the real world around you via the two front cameras at any time, though the view is monochrome, and lower resolution than the passthrough on headsets with dedicated mixed reality cameras. But combined with the IR illuminators, the advantage is that it lets you see in the dark.

Front Expansion Port

While Steam Frame has only low-resolution monochrome passthrough by default, it has a user-accessible front expansion port
that in theory enables color cameras, depth sensors, face tracking sensors and more to be added.

Valve says the port offers a dual 2.5Gbps MIPI camera interface and also supports a one-lane Gen 4 PCIe data port for other peripherals.

"There is certainly enough flexibility in this port to do anything people are interested in doing", Valve's Jeremy Selan told UploadVR.

Included Controllers With Gamepad Parity

The included Steam Frame Controllers have a relatively similar ringless design to Meta's Touch Plus controllers, and are also tracked by the headset via infrared LEDs under the plastic. However, while Touch Plus controllers have 8 IR LEDs each, 7 on the face and 1 on the handle, Steam Frame Controllers have 18 each, dispersed throughout the face, handle, and bottom, which should make them more resistant to occlusion.

The bigger difference between Touch Plus and Steam Frame Controllers is the inputs. Valve has put all four A/B/X/Y buttons on the right controller and a D-Pad on the left controller, while both have an index bumper in addition to the index trigger.

The idea here is that, together, the Steam Frame Controllers have all the same inputs as a regular gamepad, meaning they can be used for both VR and flatscreen gaming. You can switch between VR and flatscreen seamlessly, and you'll need less space in your bag when traveling.

Steam Frame Controllers also feature capacitive finger sensing on all inputs and the handle, as well as advanced tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) thumbsticks. TMR technology means they should have improved precision and responsiveness compared to traditional potentiometer thumbsticks, and should be significantly more resistant to drift – an issue that plagued the Valve Index Controllers.

Unlike the Index controllers, Steam Frame Controllers don't have built-in hand grip straps. But Valve says it will sell them as an optional accessory for people who want them, a similar strategy to Meta.

As with Touch Plus controllers, the Steam Frame Controllers are powered by a single AA battery. They should last roughly 40 hours, though this is highly dependent on how much the haptic actuator gets activated.

Steam Frame does not currently support controller-free hand tracking. It requires some form of input device.

Spec Sheet & Competitors Comparison

Here's a full list of Steam Frame's specs, directly compared to Meta Quest 3 and Samsung Galaxy XR for context:

Spec Sheet & Index Comparison

And here's it compared to Valve Index, the company's now-discontinued tethered PC VR headset from 2019:

Steam Machine

While Steam Frame (of course) supports any gaming PC that can run SteamVR titles, Valve is also releasing its own desktop PC running SteamOS, which, as well as being able to act as a living room console, could make getting into PC VR a more streamlined experience than ever.

Steam Machine is more than 6 times more powerful than Steam Deck, Valve tells UploadVR, with a discrete CPU and GPU, not a unified APU architecture.

Here are the full specs of Steam Machine:

• CPU: Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
  • up to 4.8 GHz
  • 30W TDP
• GPU: Semi-Custom AMD RDNA3 with 28 CUs
  • 110W TDP
  • 2.45GHz max sustained clock
• 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
• Ray tracing supported
• RAM: 16GB DDR5
• Storage: 512 GB & 2 TB SSD models + microSD card slot
• Internal power supply, AC power 110-240V

The RAM and storage are user-upgradable, Valve confirmed, while the CPU and GPU are soldered on.

You'll "eventually" be able to wake Steam Machine via a Steam Frame without needing a physical display or other peripherals attached, though Valve couldn't say whether this functionality will be available at launch. When this does arrive, it means you'll be able to just grab your Steam Frame and jump straight into high-performance PC VR at any time in seconds, no need to manually boot up a PC.

"Aiming" For Cheaper Than Index

Valve isn't yet giving a specific price for Steam Frame or Steam Machine, saying that it doesn't yet know and referencing the volatility of the current macroeconomic environment.

The company did however tell UploadVR that it's aiming to sell Steam Frame for less than the $1000 Index full-kit.

"As soon as we know pricing, we'll be sharing", Valve said.

Steam Frame is set to launch in "early 2026", alongside the new Steam Machine and Steam Controller. It will be available in all the same countries where Steam Deck is sold today, and fully replaces Index in Valve's lineup.

If you're a developer, you can apply for early access to a Steam Frame kit today, though there are limited units available.

Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR’s Impressions Of Valve’s New Headset

UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton and David Heaney went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, trying both standalone use and PC VR.

UploadVRIan Hamilton

Requisition VR: Hunt & Extract, a PvPvE extraction shooter where you duct tape items to form new weapons, gets its SteamVR relaunch today.

Following its full Steam release in 2023, you may recall that the physics-based co-op game Requisition VR received a major revamp with July's Quest launch. Turning this into a PvPvE (player vs. player vs. environment) extraction shooter with a post-apocalyptic setting, this new edition is out later today on PC VR.

Hunt & Extract maintains the original game's crafting system, where you use duct tape to combine objects like sticks, cleavers, and more for new weapons. Environmental traps are also available but can attract zombie hordes, and you team up with friends to defeat AI and human opponents alike. Any loot obtained during these runs is then used to upgrade your base and weapons.

Stating it's been rebuilding Requisition VR “from the ground up” across the last two years, developer Spheroom describes Hunt & Extract as “an entirely new game” that initially began as an update. Later becoming a “full-on reinvention,” the studio confirmed it's launching a separate edition to preserve the original version for its fans.

Requisition VR: Hunt & Extract is out today on PC VR, and it's live now on Quest. Owners of the original Requisition VR can also claim the new game for free via the official Discord server.

2023 saw Triangle Factory release Breachers, a popular 5v5 tactical shooter often described as VR’s answer to Rainbow Six Siege. Now, the studio is scaling up its ambitions with Forefront, a 32-player shooter that aims to bring the large-scale warfare and destructible environments of games like Battlefield to virtual reality.

Recently launched in early access, I’ve spent the past week storming the beaches of Forefront, and it successfully replicates many of the elements that make games like Battlefield so compelling. With just a few small changes, I can see Forefront becoming one of the more popular and successful VR games of its type.

The Premise

Forefront takes place in the near future of 2035, a time when an energy corporation known as O.R.E. has declared war against nondescript local governments over control of a rare mineral. The story is perfunctory, a plausible backdrop for vague military entities to shoot at one another. You play as a dude on one side of the conflict, and you’ve got to shoot the dudes on the other side.

It's structured around large-scale, squad-based multiplayer battles that pit infantry and land, sea, and air-based vehicles against each other. Each match unfolds with two 16-player teams fighting for control over sprawling maps full of semi-destructible environments.

Players choose to play as one of four (currently) classes: assault, engineer, medic, and recon (sniper). These class types will be familiar to most who have played shooters in the last 25 years, and each comes with their own sets of primary and secondary weapons, equipment, and abilities, and supplementary equipment. For example, the assault class can toss down an ammo resupply box while a medic can bring defibrillators out to revive fallen teammates.

Much of this will read as standard to the genre. And it is. The difference comes from VR.

Gameplay

Forefront is rich with tactile mechanics. You manually reload weapons, grabbing and tossing an empty mag, replacing it with one ripped from your flak jacket, and chambering a round. Tossing a grenade requires stowing your primary weapon, yanking the grenade from its place on your body, and pointing with your free hand to direct where and how far you want the egg to go. Zip lines and parachutes need to be gripped.

Weapons respond differently depending on how they’re held (one or two-handed), and physical movement plays a large part in whether you’ll win a firefight. This immersion is a real strength. ADS (aiming down sights) feels realistic in VR. Tossing a grenade feels weighty. Despite a learning curve and the occasional awkward fumbling inherent in complex VR environments, the hands-on gameplay works really well to engage you in the moment.

The arsenal of weapons and vehicles is vast and impressive. Shotguns, SMGs, handguns, RPGs, assault rifles, and sniper rifles - everything that shooter fans likely expect is here. Tanks and helicopters and gunboats allow for drivers, passengers, and gunners to rip across the large environments fast and loud. There’s even a jet ski for when you want to fire up the Wave Race 64 soundtrack and take a break from all the fighting.

Progression is also familiar. Accomplishing in-game objectives, eliminating enemies, earning assists, etc., award experience for both you and your weapons. Leveling up provides character upgrades, load-outs, equipment unlocks, and more weapons.

Online network issues were non-existent in my time with Forefront on Quest 3S. There were plenty of available lobbies and matches, sessions packed with full squads, quick matchmaking, and reliable connections.

Visually it's impressive, the lighting is generally striking, and if we take a moment to notice, the environments are actually rather beautiful. Sound design is handled well, with directional audio being well-implemented.

In short, the structure and mechanics of Forefront bring together the tactical class roles, robust gunplay, vehicular warfare, and compelling progression mechanics of the established games in the genre. If the developers’ target was “Battlefield in VR,” Forefront is mostly dead on. It’s a great and uniquely effective game that brings VR shooters to a more even footing with their flatscreen counterparts.

But Forefront is not perfect.

Collateral Damage

The Recon class is woeful, almost useless. Sniper rifles are the only primary weapons that the class can use, and as these guns stand right now, they are currently underpowered (not a one-shot kill) and almost impossible to use effectively compared with other classes.

While aiming through the scope is novel, since you have to physically raise the gun up to your eye like we've often seen in VR, actually hitting your target is extremely difficult. I've made some absolutely ridiculous snipes in non-VR gaming, but holding the rifle here feels jittery and imprecise with no aim smoothing option like Sniper Elite VR offers. You could argue that this makes sniping more realistic, but is Forefront a marksman training app or a video game? After a few hours with the sniper rifle, I abandoned the class secure in my opinion that the devs should add a very subtle aim assist.

I could also complain about the vehicles being rather pointless, since they're extremely fragile and short-lived. Also, the fully interactive guns can be finicky to use - instead of grabbing the stock, for example, our in-game hands grip the magazine or bolt. I’d also love to see the landscapes more densely populated by buildings and foliage.

Beyond these issues, which could be described as nitpicks or simply not my flavor, are several other almost glaring omissions of established genre norms. For example, Forefront doesn’t currently have any meaningfully implemented directional damage indicator, which means that you often can’t tell which direction you’re taking fire from. This is pretty irritating. There’s no pinging system, which makes communicating with teammates difficult for those who don’t want to mic up. Hit markers are vague, almost to the point of total irrelevance. There’s no party system.

Of course, Forefront is currently in early access, so there's still room to grow. Forefront’s current roadmap is extensive and displayed prominently on a whiteboard propped up on the deck of the virtual aircraft carrier that serves as the game’s main menu, and some of my issues are already noted. If Triangle Factory checks 60% of these boxes, they’ll have addressed 99% of the game’s current shortcomings.

But don’t be misled by those last few paragraphs of complaints; we're striving for balance, and the problems noted are ultimately minor. Forefront's core gameplay is solid, almost perfect for what it aims to be. Combat is exciting and tense, its VR gunplay is tactile and satisfying, and its environments are dynamic and engaging. Currently, it’s difficult to recommend another large-scale shooter over Forefront.

Forefront is out now in early access on Quest, Steam, and Pico.

VRider SBK Connect is a new companion app for the VR superbike racer, letting you race friends who own the full game for free on Quest.

Developed by Funny Tales, VRider SBK is an officially licensed VR racing game based on the Superbike World Championship that first appeared last year on Quest. Following this summer's PS VR2 and PC VR launch, the studio has released a Quest-exclusive companion app that lets your friends join you without everyone owning the full game.

Joined by a simultaneous update for the full game, VRider SBK owners can now create and host private multiplayer race rooms, letting Connect players join using a room code. Custom rules can also be selected to adjust the match type, number of players, circuit of choice, number of laps, and reputation settings.

If you've only downloaded VRider SBK Connect and don't have access to the main game, Connect also offers tutorials and the Hot Lap Practice mode, which lets you train on all of its official tracks with every bike unlocked. Connect owners can later switch to the full release via a paid in-game upgrade.

VRider SBK Connect is out now on the Meta Quest platform. While Connect isn't on these platforms too, the full game is also on Steam, Pico, and PlayStation VR2.

VRider SBK Review: All About The Road

Available now on Quest, VRider SBK is about the love of racing - and it really wants you to know that.

UploadVRK. Guillory

The PlayStation VR2 Sense Controllers are now sold by Apple, priced at $250, and the charging stand is included.

Apple added support for Sony's tracked controllers to Vision Pro headsets with visionOS 26, which released in September, but Sony itself doesn't sell them separately from its $400 VR headset.

The PS VR2 Sense controller support of visionOS includes 6DoF positional tracking, capacitive finger touch detection, and basic vibration support. The precision haptics of the controllers are not supported, however, and nor are their unique resistive triggers.

‘XR Is Having A Moment’: Colocated Pickleball With Pickle Pro From Resolution Games

“XR is having a moment” with colocation experiences like Pickle Pro from Resolution Games.

UploadVRIan Hamilton

One of the first Vision Pro games to support the PS VR2 Sense controllers was the indie title Ping Pong Club, which we tested when visionOS 26 launched.

And three weeks ago, Resolution Games launched a title leveraging the controllers called Pickle Pro, a pickleball game with both local and remote SharePlay, so you can play against other Vision Pro owners in the same room or remotely over the internet as Personas.

The PlayStation VR2 Sense Controllers are available on the online Apple Store in the US, priced at $250, with Sony's official charging stand included.

There's no word yet on availability outside the US.

Technically, PS VR2 headset owners who lose or damage both controllers could also buy the package from Apple instead of a new headset, though it would probably be a better idea to get used replacements on a marketplace like eBay instead.