Assassin's Creed Nexus VR

Assassin's Creed Nexus VR is an action adventure by studio Ubisoft Red Storm, released on Meta Quest in 2023, bringing the Assassin's Creed series into full-fledged virtual reality for the first time. Over the course of the game, the player successively becomes three iconic characters from the series - Ezio Auditore, Kassandra and Connor - and in their skin traverses historical settings, performs stealth eliminations using the hidden blade, climbs buildings and fights enemies with a sword, tomahawk or other weapons typical of the era, with each character having their own weapons, abilities and approach to the environment.

The game strives to preserve the series' key elements - rooftop parkour, social stealth amid crowds, hiding in crowds, and the signature hidden-blade assassination - and adapt them to physical movements in VR, which required reworking many mechanics compared to the console entries in the series. Visually, the game draws on the series' renowned graphical quality, adapted to the headset's performance, and the settings of Renaissance Florence, ancient Greece and colonial America are reconstructed with an emphasis on atmosphere and historical accuracy, accompanied by music in keeping with the series' style.

Nexus VR was received as an ambitious and, so far, the most comprehensive attempt to bring a major action series into VR, praised for the variety of its three playable characters and criticized for the technical compromises necessary to run on a standalone headset. For fans of the series it offers a unique opportunity to experience the key Assassin's Creed mechanics from a first-person perspective and physically perform the famous leap of faith from the heights of cathedrals and castles, one of the series' signature hallmarks. Collecting memory fragments and side objectives in each setting further rewards thorough map exploration, in keeping with how players have long approached the Assassin's Creed series on other platforms as well.

Why play it: For series fans wanting to physically experience the famous leap of faith and the key Assassin's Creed mechanics from a first-person view, despite the technical compromises of a standalone headset.