I keep a short mental list of VR shooters that feel like slipping on an old glove. Contractors is on that list. It’s not the prettiest, not the most populated, and definitely not the most finished — but when I want twenty minutes of fast, brain-off competitive shooting without reading a wiki or managing an inventory, this is where I land.
Here’s the thing: Contractors is VR-native. No flat-screen version exists. Caveman Studio built this from the ground up for headsets, launching on Steam Early Access back in December 2018 and dropping on Quest two years later. That makes it one of the longer-running Early Access titles still kicking around. You buy it, you install it, you’re in a lobby within minutes. No BepInEx. No runtime injection. No config files to wrestle. For VR, that kind of frictionless entry is still rare enough to notice.
And what you get is essentially Call of Duty in a headset. Team-based multiplayer, tight arcade maps, fast time-to-kill, snap aiming, and reloads that demand actual physical motion. The guns feel weighty in a way that flat shooters can’t replicate — racking a shotgun or slapping a fresh magazine into an AK hits differently when your hands are doing the work. The control mapping is intuitive enough that I stopped thinking about it after one match. Sprint, aim down sights, toss a grenade: it all maps cleanly to standard VR controller layouts. After about ten minutes, the muscle memory from a decade of controller shooters kicks in, except now you’re actually shouldering a virtual rifle.
The November 2024 Mobilized Update pushed the scale upward, adding 24-player Ground War matches and a Rush mode that plays like Battlefield’s classic attack-and-defend loop. Caveman also shipped an upgraded Modkit, letting creators drop in vehicles, ziplines, parachutes, and vaulting mechanics. That update matters because Contractors has a genuinely ridiculous mod community. We’re talking full recreations of Nuketown, Shipment, Terminal, and Hijacked from Call of Duty. Zombies modes. Star Wars Battlefront maps. Team Fortress 2 ports. Warhammer 40K and Battlefield 1 recreations. If you can think of a classic shooter map, someone has probably tried to rebuild it here. The mod browser is built into the game, so you don’t need to hunt down external sites or unzip files into mystery folders. Browse, subscribe, restart, play. It’s seamless, and it gives Contractors a content depth that its official map pool simply doesn’t have. I’ve lost entire evenings just rotating through fan-made maps, and some of them — particularly the Zombies conversions — are better implemented than you’d expect from unpaid hobbyists.
But — look, I’m not gonna lie — the game is not in a confident place right now.
It is still in Early Access on Steam after more than seven years. There is no 1.0 release. Caveman Studio has visibly shifted attention toward Contractors Showdown, a spin-off that started as a battle royale and recently pivoted into an extraction shooter called ExfilZone. That pivot has left the original Contractors community asking how much longer the old girl gets patches. The Mobilized Update was substantial, but it was also the first major sign of life in a while, and it came from a studio that now has two live products competing for bandwidth. That split focus shows. Some players report inconsistent reloading behavior and characters getting stuck on geometry after patches. Nothing game-breaking, but the kind of polish gaps you’d expect from a team whose attention is elsewhere.
Population is the other ghost in the room. Steam player counts are thin. Peaks in the double digits on quiet weekdays, maybe scraping into the low hundreds on a good weekend. The saving grace is cross-play: Quest, Rift, SteamVR, and Pico players all share lobbies. The Quest player base is larger than Steam’s, so matches are still findable, but you’re not drowning in server options. During off-peak hours you might be staring at a lobby screen longer than you’d like. That’s a real caveat if you prefer jumping into a match instantly rather than waiting. Compared to something like Pavlov, which benefits from a larger and more consistent PCVR population, Contractors can feel like a private club. Friendly, but small.
Comfort-wise, it’s moderate intensity. Fast locomotion, quick turns, and snap aiming are the defaults. You can tweak settings, but this is an arcade shooter — it wants you moving. If you’re prone to motion sickness, you’ll feel it in the first ten minutes. Performance, though, is generally efficient. It’s built for standalone Quest hardware, so it runs well on modest PCVR setups and holds a steady frame rate on Meta headsets. I’ve rarely heard complaints about stutter or reprojection, which is more than I can say for some heavier VR titles.
Who is this really for? If you grew up on Call of Duty and want that same rhythm in VR — quick matches, recognizable guns, familiar maps — Contractors delivers it better than almost anything else in the space. If you love mod content and don’t mind a smaller community, the custom map scene alone justifies the purchase. But if you need the reassurance of a thriving player base, active developer roadmaps, and a 1.0 release date, this is a harder sell. It’s playable now. It’s fun now. I just don’t know how long “now” lasts.
Okay, so: if you’re the kind of VR owner who fires up a headset for a quick competitive fix and doesn’t mind waiting a minute or two for a lobby to fill, Contractors is still one of the best arcade shooters in VR. But go in with your eyes open. You’re buying into a game whose modders are currently more reliable than its roadmap.