What are the best VR fitness games? One seasonal food coma later and you’re already pondering how you can use your new VR headset to go from roleplaying as an anime gremlin to improving your health. You’re far from the first, you won’t be the last, but you’ve entered the space of VR fitness at just the right time. Forget the gym. Don your new and fancy space specs and get ready to move.
With little to no physical resistance or weight at play without wearable wrist and ankle weights, even the best VR fitness games won’t do much to build muscle mass. By mixing movement with beat-heavy music, otherworldly visuals, and scoreboards, gamified fitness can be the shake-up you need to keep sweating. While you’re here, our list of the best VR games on PC can help you build up your library, with the best Meta Quest 3 games varying slightly due to its own app store. Just getting started? We’ve also got the best VR headsets this year.
The ten best VR fitness games
Here’s a list of the ten best VR fitness games you can play on most VR headsets.
Beat Saber
There’s no getting around this one. Beat Saber is so synonymous with VR at this point that we’re rattling it off first. Beat Saber knows just how to keep you moving. It’s a rhythm game a lot like Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution — you simply hit objects flying at you to the beat of your chosen music track. It sounds simple enough, but the nature of spatial play means you mix things up with 360-degree playing fields for more intensive workouts.
Though it’s best played as a full-body workout, you can tailor things to your liking with options like one-handed mode, or rid the need to chop note blocks in a certain direction or with a certain hand if you just want to focus on the game and not your score. When done correctly, a great Beat Saber workout plays out like a dance you can repeat time and again for consistent exercise.
Pistol Whip
Though it may not look like an exercise app, Pistol Whip works in a similar way to Beat Saber by using a fun concept and a brilliant soundtrack to encourage you to keep moving until the song comes to a stop. Instead of slicing blocks to the beat, you’re firing rounds at polygonal assailants popping up in your peripheries as you slide through a course pieced together by carefully placed obstacles.
Once you find your groove, you’ll be swaying to dodge bullets, ducking through tunnels, side-stepping through narrow passages, and blasting baddies, working up a sweat while feeling like John Wick. The modding scene isn’t quite as big on this one as Beat Saber, but given it’s still getting new courses and music packs years after release, there’s already a stacked library to get stuck into if you do decide to give being an action hero a go.
Racket: Nx
Want to relive the glory days of Wii Sports? Racket: Nx is the way to go. Though it doesn’t emulate Wimbledon, this VR fitness option more closely resembles squash or a tennis training drill. You’re dropped into a space where the walls are made up of breakable hexagonal segments. Serve your shot, then keep up the volley as it ricochets off each panel, adjusting your wrist, stance, and swing to aim at specific targets to rack up points and bonuses.
If you’re not too great at keeping to a rhythm but need a tight goal to keep you motivated, Racket: Nx is potentially the best VR cardio workout you can ask for. There’s a beat-heavy soundtrack to keep things interesting, of course, but the gameplay loop isn’t as intrinsically wrapped around it as most other VR games designed to get you moving.
BOXVR
Short on space? Throwing punches and jabbing the air could be the best way to work a VR fitness routine into your schedule. Rather than swing wide to chop blocks, you can get a similar experience through BOXVR’s rhythm-based gameplay that simulates sparring in the ring.
By donning your headset, you can transport yourself to grand virtual spaces to find your zen; all the while bopping balls to the beats and dunking and weaving out of the way of obstacles coming your way. The minimal hub on either side of the note rail helps you lock in while keeping track of things like calories burned and time spent working up a sweat. It even uses a similar closing ring mechanic to Apple’s own fitness efforts to gamify your workout goals.
Until You Fall
If you can’t get behind the idea of a workout turned into a game, why not try a game turned into a workout? Until You Fall is one of the better examples of melee combat working as intended in VR. Tied to the tune not of music, but of a roguelite RPG, you’ll uwittingly break a sweat in this one by throwing hands, swords, and fireballs at increasingly challenging monster encounters and encampments.
Dare to walk the path of a monster much stronger than yourself, and you’ll sweat more knowing fatigue will play just a much a part in your failure or success as your actual skill at dodging swings and countering with your own blows. It’s as much a mental workout as a physical one, and it’s all wrapped around the idea of getting stronger with each new attempt. It fits like a glove.
HoloDance
Slice, dicing, and beating up blocks and balls not for you? Turns out you can fuse all that and more in HoloDance to make your VR workout just that little bit more kinetic. By taking a few cues from the popular PC-based rhythm game Osu!, HoloDance incorporates things like hold notes, trace notes, and slide notes to the mix, meaning more wide-arm movements at the very least. The OST focuses more on pop and electronic music, too, which should naturally see you side-stepping and swaying between swings and jabs.
HoloDance is exactly as it sounds — a VR rhythm title that encourages more full-body movement, easing you into a natural boogie as the notes come flying down the road. You can even chance the sort of weapon you use to fend them off, with even laser blasters being an option if you think your aim is up to snuff. So if you can’t decide between BoxVR, Beat Saber, or Pistol Whip, turns out you can basically have the lot in HoloDance.
The Fastest Fist
Need a personal trainer to keep you motivated with your VR fitness goals? The Fastest Fist might just offer that. There are better options available on other game marketplaces for Meta Quest and PSVR users, but The Fastest Fist is one of the originals. Released way back in 2016, it’s still rated highly by the VR Health Institute when it comes to actual expected expenditure at around 6–8 per minute.
So if simply swinging your fists to the beat of a tune isn’t enough to keep you going, give this one a try. You’re always throwing punches at an NPC instructor’s palms, simulating mittwork with a genuine trainer. You’ll be feeling like Rocky in no time. Pair it with some wrist weights for resistance and you’ll certainly start to feel the burn. Now if only they could add a multiplayer mode to let you and a partner take turns being the athlete and the trainer.
Hot Squat
How it took developers years to turn squatting into a viable VR workout routine, we’ll never know, but there arguably is no better way to do it than with Hot Squat. Both it and its sequel are entirely free to play. And even when it wasn’t, profits for the titles went to a refugee charity you can still gift with the old cost if you’re up for continuing the tradition.
Hot Squat dumps you into a colourful and wacky environment and has solid objects come for you at speed. This time around, they’re whole walls with low cutouts, encouraging you to drop and lift to fit through. Besides an optional need to side-step to line up your next squat, there’s little in the way of surprises here, ensuring you can get into the groove of squatting potentially hundreds of times. If you need to work your legs and core, Hot Squat and Hot Squat 2: New Glory is a superb (and free) VR fitness game. Throw some punches between squats to up the ante.
Thrill of the Fight
Want your sparring partner to actually fight back? If throwing punches at pillows in The Fastest Fist just isn’t cutting it for you, you can channel the glory days of Wii Sports Boxing further with Thrill of the Fight. It’s far from the most graphically impressive VR title out there, but that just makes it easier to run at those all-important high frame rates that keep motion sickness at bay and your swings feeling real.
Thrill of the Fight builds on what made The Fastest Fist work as a viable VR fitness routine by letting the NPC fight back. You’ll have more reason to duck, weave, and pull your punches until an opening presents inself. The extra brainpower you’ll exert trying to read your opponent should help you lock in, keep focused, and work up a motivated sweat. It’s one of the highest rated caloric expenditures on VR Health Institute for a reason. It’s dirt cheap, and can also be bundled with a multiplayer version in Virtual Fighting Championship if VR’s answer to Tekken is what you’re truly after.
Cross Country Skiing VR
With Winter finally settling in, Cross Country Skiing VR seems like an appropriate VR fitness game to try out. Though it’s nowhere near as taxing as something like Thrill of the Fight, the developers made this one entirely free to play to spark discussion about the benefits of VR fitness. Billed as a short workout warm-up, the need to squat low and thrust your arms in wide movements to simulate pushing yourself down the slopes can really get your heart pumping.
A simple title with racing at its core, the competitive spirit should be enough to encourage you to give it your all, with timers, distance markers, and NPC rivals regularly in view to help motivate you. If anything, it being wholly free can serve as not only a great warm-up to more strenuous titles, but a solid entryway into the sensations of VR as well. If your stomach doesn’t play well with the downhill motion, you’ll know to stick to the more stationary experiences listed above.
And that’s your lot: the ten best VR fitness games available right now. If you’re running a Meta headset, FitXR is one of the more feature-complete VR fitness packages around. And for PSVR or Meta users both, Les Mills Body Combat is almost like VR’s answer to a Peloton subscription. Need a seated experience after all that? Here are the best PC games of 2023, or the perfect games to play over Christmas to work through your backlog.