Just one year after Endgame, Iron Man VR was the first post-MCU attempt to give the hero his own solo video game outing. The resulting experience was a faithful and engaging representation of the character, paired with a solid campaign and thrilling gameplay. However, its release on the original PSVR headset was complicated. While a fantastic game, it was held back by the significant hardware limitations of PSVR and PlayStation 4.

As we wrote in our review at the time, Iron Man VR on PSVR got all the essentials spot on. The gameplay was an absolute highlight, enabling you to truly feel like Iron Man in every way possible. The variety of weapons, the combat and the flying were all an absolute delight, paired beautifully with an original story that felt both familiar and yet refreshingly unique. Everything we liked about the PSVR release transfers over to the Quest 2 version of the game – the core of Iron Man VR remains compelling as ever, no matter which platform you play on.

However, releasing on PSVR hardware – which was already outdated and at the end of its lifecycle – had a significant impact on the overall enjoyability of the experience. Loading times were abysmal, sometimes taking several minutes just to load one area. Likewise, while the game featured a pseudo-360 tracking workaround that mostly circumvented any PSVR tracking limitations, it was still a wired VR experience. It’s hard to feel fully immersed as Iron Man if a cable is getting tangled around your legs. Nonetheless, we rated the experience favourably overall, despite the hardware hinderances.

This new Quest 2 release, however, sees Iron Man free himself from the shackles of outdated tech. Announced at Connect 2022 (alongside Meta’s acquisition of the game’s development team, Camouflaj), Iron Man VR is now available on the most popular and mainstream VR headset, completely free of any literal and figurative restraints.

So how does Quest 2 improve the Iron Man VR experience? Well, the entire campaign and bonus content remain intact, but with some adjustments for the new standalone setup. For starters, the minutes-long load times from PSVR are not a problem here. Loading on Quest 2 is smooth and near instantaneous. You’ll never wait more than a few seconds to get into the action.

You’re also now completely wire-free, allowing for untangled 360-degree movement when playing. While this wasn’t the biggest pain point on PSVR, it’s one less thing to worry about and make a huge difference. Being able to turn quickly without concern is a huge boon and greatly increases immersion.

These aren’t huge overhauls – they are essentially quality-of-life improvements, solving problems that arguably shouldn’t have existed in the first place. However, it makes this release feel much more definitive and polished than the original PSVR release. The gameplay itself was always been exceptional, but now the entire package works as intended.

General improvements aside, the Quest 2 port is solid and overall performance is fantastic. There are a few moments in busy combat sequences where you can feel the Quest 2 struggling to keep up with the demand, but those sections are rare and short-lived.

The visuals are pretty solid overall, with a a few standout moments peppered throughout the campaign. Environments and general clarity benefit from the increase in screen resolution on Quest 2, though there are still some jagged edges to be found, especially when looking far into the distance. At times, the large fly-over environments can look a little simplistic and blocky, but the stylised nature of the game helps smooth that over. Even if it’s not the most visually impressive Quest 2 game, it’s also far from the worst.

Camouflaj does employ fixed foveated rendering, making the outer edges of the field of view blurry at times, but you’ll only rarely notice. Likewise, there’s a few visual glitches from time to time in cutscenes, but they’re easily forgiven and don’t detract from the overall experience.

There’s also now the option for smooth locomotion movement via the thumbstick, in addition to the node-based teleport system that was available in the original PSVR release. It’s a welcome option that makes the environments feel more alive as you explore, but the implementation isn’t the best. Whenever you reach a waypoint via smooth locomotion, the game still fades in and out, as if you’ve just teleported to the waypoint instead of walking there.

This is likely to ensure the player is facing the right direction and orientated correctly for interactive cutscenes, but it makes some sequences feel a little sluggish. A more seamless transition between smooth locomotion and waypoints would have been appreciated, but likely would have required more work to implement. The current solution is an acceptable if slightly frustrating compromise.

As with the original release, Iron Man VR is an incredibly comfortable experience. Players have access to the usual options for snap vs smooth turning, alongside vignette tweaking. When flying through the sky, the Iron Man helmet HUD acts as its own vignette that grounds the player and should severely curtail nausea for most players.

As someone who usually feels sick after a lot of artificial movement, I played through the entire Iron Man VR campaign without feeling nauseous once – a testament to Camouflaj’s thoughtful (and mostly invisible) comfort implementation.