The virtual reality scene is moving surprisingly quickly. Last year at PAX West, there were only a few VR games at the show that felt like full modern releases in their own right, rather than a sort of full-price score attack mode. It reminded me of the early CD-ROM era in a lot of ways, when many of the games (by no means all, but many) were more about showing off the tech’s potential rather than actually doing anything interesting with it.

Then there’s Insomniac’s Stormland. It was a Cadillac project last year, when Insomniac rented a storefront near the convention center to show it off in public for the first time. While it was still clearly an unfinished production — the controllers wigged out on me about halfway through my demo — it was also more ambitious and polished than anything else at the show. Stormland has a lot of gameplay mechanics that could be, and indeed have been, made into entire standalone games by other VR studios, but here, they’re just a part of a larger whole.

At this year’s PAX West, Stormland was tucked into the Oculus booth on the fourth floor of the Washington State Convention Center, alongside games like Asgard’s Wrath and Lone Echo II. The VR scene has gotten bigger and more elaborate in the intervening 12 months, so Stormland isn’t quite as far ahead of the pack as it used to be (I’d point here to other projects like the forthcoming After the Fall), but it’s still got a strong layer of polish and craft going for it.

The game’s plot is still a little murky, but the broad strokes have been revealed. A group of androids were surveying a seemingly ideal planet that they called Stormland, which used to be the home of a human civilization. Stormland is also inhabited by a force called the Tempest, which suddenly tears the androids’ forces apart and scatters them across the planet, leaving you — a former gardener droid who’s barely functional — as their last hope.

The big feature that Insomniac brought Stormland to PAX to show off this year was its multiplayer mode, but they didn’t tell me what that would entail until I was backstage. I was half-expecting to get dropped into a VR deathmatch with a couple of Insomniac’s testers. ("We heard what you said about Fuse," they would snarl, and then the virtual beating would begin.)

As it turns out, though, Stormland’s multiplayer is a full co-op mode. You have the option to play all the way through Stormland’s campaign with a partner, drop-in/drop-out style, and even crack into its post-game content together.

It makes a lot of sense, as Stormland feels a lot like it’s designed as an introductory product for VR newbies. Its moment-to-moment gameplay is basically a polished first-person shooter, pitting you against a hostile environment and a bunch of enemy droids, with a lot of cool little extras to enhance the game’s immersion. You can look down to see your grenades slung on your chest, and where your weapons are holstered on your hips. Accessing your map requires you to rotate your left wrist so the AR display on your character’s arm lights up. The same arm also has an energy field built into it for portable cover, so if you’re caught out of position in a firefight, you can throw up your shield like Captain America and limp back to relative safety.

All that you’d need to make Stormland a decent baby’s-first-VR sort of game is a personal tour guide, and if you have a VR die-hard handy to play with you, they can fill that role.

The big rockstar moment in Stormland, both last year and this year, was how you navigate through it. The surface of Stormland is covered in small islands, each of which is handcrafted by Insomniac’s designers but are randomly placed in the world. The space between them is covered in roiling clouds, and when you need to travel between islands, you can point your hands out like you’re superhero-flying and take off at a breakneck pace across the cloud layer. It feels a lot like waterskiing. It is fun and crazy enough on its own that it’s sometimes hard to switch back to simple run-and-gunning.

(I also consistently had a problem where I’d ramp off a particularly high cloud wave and end up flying through the air, which engaged my droid’s Pilotwings-style glider function. The Insomniac developer I was playing with often had to wait a minute or so for me to figure out how to land. Sorry, man.)

After my time with it at PAX, Stormland actually ended up reminding me a lot of Ratchet & Clank. The two games share a certain ramshackle aesthetic — Stormland's crazy robots and Ratchet's crazy backwater planets match up well together — but more importantly, both games have a seething distaste for crates.

You can smash pretty much anything that doesn’t run away fast enough in Stormland to gather currency or resources, which are used to upgrade your weapons at certain stations scattered throughout the world. Those weapons are fairly standard-issue first-person shooter guns, but each one has a more interesting alt-fire that’s activated by taking a two-handed grip on the weapon. The submachinegun becomes a long rifle, and the grenade launcher acquires the ability to fire mines with a proximity fuse.

I did get the feeling from the PAX demo that if both players are roughly of the same skill level, you’d probably want to either split up or turn up the difficulty, but that’s a hard call to conclusively make from a highly curated sample of the final game. It did seem like most of the robots we fought were falling right over.

I was also told by Insomniac’s Tim Salvitti, senior community developer on Stormland, that there’s a substantial challenge-based endgame available after the completion of the story campaign. Once you’ve cleared the final mission, the world “shifts,” enabling you to work your way towards three new, more challenging realms in the Tempest. It could very well be that the multiplayer is actually balanced around co-op in the endgame, which means there’s a real challenge waiting for you and a friend after the credits roll.

Insomniac’s Stormland will be published by Oculus during 2019’s holiday season for the Rift and all related platforms. As Stormland’s production predates the recent acquisition of Insomniac by Sony, it’s unaffected by that deal.

For more coverage from PAX West 2019, be sure to head over to our PAX West 2019 hub. 

There are undoubtedly many, many more games set to hit the virtual reality market in the coming months, but these are the ones we're most excited to try out.

What did you think of our picks for the top 11 VR games slated to land in 2019? Did we miss any that should have made this list? Sound off in the comments below!

Population: One

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• Release date: 2019
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• Platform: Crossplay between Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows MR
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If you aren't sick of Battle Royale mania yet, you should be excited by the prospect of this growing genre finally coming to VR.

Yep, you'll be falling from the battle bus, building structures, plundering empty buildings, and struggling to survive to the #1 spot as the circle shrinks all in glorious virtual reality. 

If this catches on, I'd expect to see Fortnite add on a VR mode next year as well!

Ghost Giant

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• Release date: Unknown (maybe 2019?)
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• Platform: PSVR
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VR is tailor-made for this kind of experience, where you are just a pair of giant disembodied hands looking down on a virtual world and deciding how you are going to interact with it.

This seems like an excellent attempt to embrace the standard tropes of virtual reality games and expand on them, rather than try to hide them. With any luck, Ghost Giant will show all the other games how it's meant to be done.

Trover Saves the Universe 

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• Release date: 2019
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• Platform: PSVR, with PC likely down the line
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Speaking of over the top, hoo boy, Trover Saves The Universe is going to strain the patience of anyone not fully onboard with the Interdimensional Cable episodes of Rick And Morty.

This is going to be pure, grade-A, weapons-grade nutso that will put all other attempts at bizarre gaming to shame by several orders of magnitude.

I still can't decide if this will be the best thing ever or if I'll be rolling my eyes and pulling my own hair out, but either way expect this game to make a splash.

Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot 

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• Release date: Expected sometime 2019
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• Platform: PC, PSVR
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VR has pretty consistently shown an affinity for spin offs offering new ways to experience a well known franchise.

With Cyberpilot, we'll get to saddle up in giant mechanical doggos to light Nazis on fire. What's not to love?

I do have to wonder how much of the over-the-top grisly imagery from Wolfenstein 2 will make it over in the translation, as that might become a bit much to handle in VR mode.

Gadgeteer 

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• Release date: Early 2019
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• Platform: PC
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While plenty of VR games these days are become ever more ambitious and working in fully movement, there are still plenty of great games where you remain more stationary and just interact with the environment.

That's what's on display with Gagdeteer (previously going by the code name Ruberg), which has you setting up and knocking down intricate chain reaction puzzles. I would expect this one to be a party hit like Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes.

Stormland 

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• Release date: Unknown 2019
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• Platform: Oculus Rift exclusive
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This is probably the one big VR release of 2019 that's getting the most buzz right now and its being developed by Insomniac Games and Oculus Studios.

Some of VR's biggest triumphs so far are games that change your perspective and offer a different kind of experience, and that's what it seems like we'll get as a broken down robot (the Short Circuit comparisons are coming strong and fast).

The combat here looks like a more fully realized version of Blasters Of The Universe, and that's a very good thing, and the visuals will make you think of Horizon: Zero Dawn, but minus the humans.

Ace Combat 7 

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• Release date: January 18, 2018
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• Platform: PSVR
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Surprisingly, the number of air combat simulations in VR are pretty sparse on the PlayStation 4 right now. There's that super short Call Of Duty Jackal entry, and not a whole lot else.

Rather than a full VR game, Ace Combat 7 will include a series of VR-specific missions, but what we've seen so far looks very slick. Hopefully this is just the start of the virtual reality dog fights headed to Sony's flagship console.

Age Of Wushu 2 

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• Release date: TBA 2019
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• Platform: PC
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This upcoming Chinese action MMO will include something you haven't seen in the massively multiplayer realm before.... a VR element for exploration (although sadly not for combat).

There's not a ton of info yet on exactly how the VR sections will work and how you will switch back to non-VR during combat, but you can officially color me intrigued.

Seeing virtual reality aspects worked into more games will go a long way towards see VR get adopted on a wider scale.

The Mage's Tale 

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• Release date: Very up in the air
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• Platform: PSVR (already out on PC)
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This full VR RPG set between The Bard's Tale 3 and 4 is actually already out now on Steam, but it was actively in development for a PSVR port in early 2019.

Sadly, the fate of this one is now very up in the air sadly, with InXile just being bought out by Microsoft.

We can't imagine they'll be keen on letting their new acquisition release a game on a rival console, but there's been no official word yet on whether this is actually cancelled or not, since it had already been announced and was deep in development.

Borderlands 2 VR

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• Release date: December 14th, 2018
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• Platform: PSVR
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OK, OK, we're cheating even more with Borderlands 2 VR! This one comes out December 14th, a half month before its officially 2019, but that's not going to stop us from putting it here.

This is easily my own most anticipated title as it provides another opportunity to face off against awful dad Handsome Jack and interact with the amazingly psychotic Tiny Tina yet again.

Who else absolutely cannot wait to joy puke your face off in virtual reality? Of course, with this version of the game arriving soon, it leads to a more important question... where the hell is Borderlands 3 already?

Star Child 

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• Release date: December 31st, 2018
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• Platform: PSVR
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Yes, Star Child does in fact arrive one single day before it officially becomes 2019, but you'll forgive us, right?

This looks like the new unexpected VR game that's going to provide a totally different experience than you'd expect, much like Moss did for PSVR at the beginning of the year.

Based on the trailer, it seems like we're in for some crazy platforming and giant boss-dodging action in a unique alien landscape.

Any given trailer for a VR title these days still gets hit with the running gag about how 5 people will love the game when it releases, but the notion of VR remaining firmly underground is about to be strongly challenged in 2019.

A whole lotta killer games have already arrived since our article earlier in the year looking at whether PSVR in particular is worth investing in at this point.

Between horror games like The Persistence, shooters like Firewall Zero Hour, and platformers like Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, there's just no reason not to jump into the VR fray anymore.

There's plenty more slated to land in the next month before the year's over as well, such as Arca's Path coming soon and two Persona dancing games arriving in early December.

That's just the beginning though, as 2019 is unquestionably going to be the year VR breaks out into the mainstream. In the slides ahead we round up the 11 most anticipated tiles in every possible genre!

While many of the upcoming games in our top 11 picks will be available for the PSVR, we've broadened out our search across the entire VR lineup, including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality.