This is a straightforward report on VR tactical combat shooters.

For some reason I've gotten over the hang ups on Street Fighter. It's weird because I thought losing in any competitive gaming would annoy me similarly.

For the past two months I've moved over to playing Pavlov Shack (think of it as Counter Strike in VR). Naturally it takes time to get good, and I got killed a lot. But it didn't feel the same as it did in Street Fighter. The full immersion of realistic rifles, reloading by taking off magazines, aiming via target scopes, all the next level realism might have something to do with it.

Save for having to deal with annoying kids, I was having a great time. Pavlov was in beta for a long time; being free naturally attracted a lot of kids. The game came in various modes. Ironically the funkier the modes, the more annoying kids there are. Sticking to the standard modes of team deathmatch and search & destroy seemed to minimize social problems.

One day recently, the developers decided to get out of beta. So no more playing for free. I was wondering why it took them so long. By now tactical military shooter has become the killer VR app for me. So that sets me on a path to research what the alternatives are.

This is a mainstream genre, some titles that came into the radar are Breachers and Ghost of Tabors. I could stick with Pavlov; but having played it made me realize how much the quality of community matters.

On that metric, the main contenders narrowed down to Onward and Contractors.

Onward apparently is highly realistic, adopted by even professional soldiers. But the history of its development has made it questionable. It's not clear the team has the ability to keep delivering. The studio being owned by Facebook doesn't work in its favor.

Contractors is billed as the Call of Duty in VR. Not having even dabbled in CoD, that analogy was hardly helpful. I can only assume it's designed to be more fun and less realistic than Onward. That may not be what I'm looking for, but two points tipped me over to buying Contractors.

First is the good reputation of its community. This I really can't tell until I've jumped in, so I have to take the Redditors' words for it.

Second is the mods (community-made games). Some mods are so good they replicated a few classic titles. Which means even if Onward is a superior game, Contractors is going to beat it with quantity of being many games.

By now I've been playing Contractors for two weeks. It's just superior to Pavlov in so many ways. I thought it's going to be as good as it gets in Pavlov, I didn't know what I was missing by sticking to just one game.

For one, Contractors's maps are superior by order of magnitude. But this comparison may be unfair to Pavlov's beta level maps.

On game mechanics, I'm slowly sensing the differences between CoD and CS. But this is so subtle it probably would matter until advanced level.

In Pavlov it didn't take too long before I was able to skill up. On a good day I would get kill/die ratio of 8:1. Not so in Contractors; somehow the tactics don't translate over.

So I started looking for concepts to borrow. That sent me into rabbit hole of real life urban warfare, close quarter combat and shooting drills. I was studying how professionals clear rooms as a team, how formations are done, etc.

It felt useful, but ultimately didn't translate into results. Contractors isn't designed for that level of realism. To be fair, realism can only be so fun.

At the moment it appears the dominant play style is to ridiculously run & gun like you're Sonic with rifles. Doing so while paying attention your surrounding is highly disorientating.

One notable thing about Contractors is the bots. They are clever enough that even single player campaigns are tough.

Zooming out, if you go in line with my thinking of tactical shooter being the killer app in VR, then it goes that picking the right title isn't simply a matter of picking the one that's most fun.

Games now work like web apps, they continuously evolve as long as they can financially afford to. Like some web apps, some games become platforms for other games to build on (in Contractors's case, mods). The quality of its social network is an intangible asset.

A title that's also a platform has a better staying power. Buying a standalone game that doesn't get to evolve means buying only what it delivers now. Buying a platform means investing in its future as well.