The first time I dropped into Hubris’s alien ocean, I actually swam. Not “held a stick and watched my avatar paddle” — I pulled both arms through cold blue water, kicked toward a glowing reef, and felt the quiet panic of running out of air before I broke the surface. That single minute is why this game exists. Cyborn built a VR world you move through with your whole body, and for a Belgian animation studio’s first swing at a full-scale VR title, the result is a stunner that keeps almost, but not quite, living up to its own looks.
Hubris is a standalone VR action-adventure — no flat version, no monitor mode, just you in a headset. It’s available across every major VR system as a native port: PC VR through Steam and Viveport, Meta Quest 2 and Quest Pro, PlayStation VR2, Pico, and Vive XR Elite. Same game on each — two motion controllers, full locomotion with a comfort vignette and snap-turn if you want it, no teleport but seated and standing both supported. Wherever you pick it up, you’re a recruit of the Order of Objectivity dropped onto a hostile twin-planet system to hunt a missing agent, and the job involves a lot of shooting, a lot of climbing, and an unreasonable amount of swimming.
The movement is the magic
Everything good about Hubris comes back to your body doing the work. You climb by reaching and pulling hand-over-hand up a sheer cliff face. You jump gaps by actually jumping. You pilot a vehicle by grabbing the controls. And you swim — the arm-driven stroke is the most convincing water I’ve moved through in VR, and Cyborn leans into it hard, sending you through flooded caverns and open reefs as a core part of the level design rather than a gimmick.
The tactile systems around it land too. Crafting pulls from over your shoulders — right for health, left for scrap — and you shove fruit into a juicer to brew potions or feed materials into a shredder for upgrades. Reaching behind your back to grab a medkit mid-firefight beats any menu, and it makes you feel like you’re wearing the gear instead of selecting it.
Visually, this is the bar. At launch it was one of the best-looking PC VR games you could run, with detailed alien biomes, looming terraforming towers, and lighting that makes the world feel lived-in. On PSVR2 the eye-tracked foveated rendering actually sharpens it further. I caught myself stopping to look at a waterfall more than once, which is not something I do in most shooters.
Where it stumbles
Here’s the honest part: Hubris is a shooter, and the shooting isn’t good enough. Aiming the pistol and submachine gun is a guess — the sight picture is vague, so you correct on the fly and spray when you’d rather place precise shots. Enemies are bullet sponges with no readable weak points, and the AI is dumb in a way that kills tension: most foes file in one at a time to a choke point so you can pick them off. The reload is an intentional 10-to-15-second hold-the-gun-to-your-head wait meant to force tactical play, but when you can’t trust your own aim it just makes you cautious to a fault.
The pacing inherits the weakness. Because there’s no reason to rush, the smart play is to scoot back and let the dumb AI deliver itself to you in a line — efficient, but not fun. The helper-bot Lucia narrates everything like a kindergarten teacher, and the story is standard sci-fi fare that holds your hand from objective to objective. The last quarter of the campaign finally opens up with tougher enemies and real variety, but you earn that payoff by sitting through a lot of hand-holding first.
None of this is broken. It plays fine. It just plays like a gorgeous tech demo with a competent-but-uninspired shooter bolted to the middle of it.
It kept getting better
Cyborn didn’t ship and vanish, which matters for a game this pretty. A launch-window patch tightened the combat and added enemy variety, a later overhaul reworked hundreds of systems, and a free Arena survival mode arrived with wave-based fights, grenades, and upgrade combos. The game you buy today is meaningfully sharper than the one that launched, and the movement that carried it at release is untouched.
What you’re buying is a place and a way to move. If you want a VR world that rewards reaching, climbing, and swimming with your actual arms — something to explore because it looks and feels incredible — Hubris delivers that better than almost anything else in its class. If you’re here for tight, satisfying gunplay and smart combat, you’ll walk away wanting. The shooting is the one pillar that doesn’t hold, and for a game built around firefights, that’s the catch you need to walk in knowing.
Who this is for
This is for the VR owner who wants to inhabit a beautiful alien planet and physically haul themselves across it — the swimmer, the climber, the explorer. Skip it if you measure shooters by their gunfeel. Hubris is a stunning place to spend six hours; just don’t expect the fight to be the reason you stay.