You can now play Counter-Strike 1.6 in VR thanks to the modders who already gave Half-Life and Doom the same treatment

When dabbling in any of the titles on our best FPS games list, the goal is to feel locked-in and immersed. You want to feel the bright-white flash and piercing ring of a flashbang, the satisfaction of a long-range snipe, or the sensation of flicking onto the cranium of an opposing player. Virtual reality attempts to increase your immersion, but transplanting a competitive experience into a headset is a real challenge. That hasn’t stopped a team of modders from porting one of the greatest shooters of all time to VR, and the timing seems apt given Valve’s Steam Frame is on the way. Yes, Counter-Strike 1.6 is now in VR.

While it sounds like a recipe for guaranteed motion sickness, CSVR brings one of the most significant games of all time to virtual reality. There have been attempts at this before, but Team Beef’s stands out as the most complete and best supported. While you can get to grips with the gunplay or simply explore Counter-Strike’s iconic maps in an offline mode against bots, you’ve got access to local or online PvP as well. Servers can be hosted right from your headset, making it surprisingly breezy to set up matches, and team chat is supported to ensure you can communicate just like in the PC version of the game.

Proper 6DoF controller tracking is featured too, so gun handling and aiming actually looks way more fluid and realistic than when playing CS 1.6 on a monitor with a mouse and keyboard. It also supports bHaptic gear – for the unaware, these are wearables with built-in haptics that can imitate the feeling of explosions or being hit by bullets.

While the mod runs from the SideQuest platform, which you need to link to your VR headset, you will also need to own a version of Counter-Strike 1.6 on Steam. However, I’m sure many folks of a certain age will already own the original CS, and for those who don’t, it’ll only set you back ten bucks.

Team Beef is very well-versed in porting classic FPS games to VR. Half-Life has already been ticked off, as have the likes of Doom, Quake, and Prey. With such a focus on online competitive play, this Counter-Strike project certainly seems like a bigger challenge, but from what I’m seeing, it’s really pulled it off.

CSVR is available right now as a free mod to Counter-Strike 1.6 for those with Meta Quest and Pico headsets. You can find out more about it and check out how to get it running here.

I do wonder, too, with the Steam Frame arriving this year, if support for CSVR (and maybe Team Beef’s Half-Life port) will be extended to Valve’s shiny new hardware. While the Steam Frame could technically let you play Counter-Strike, as it’ll run any game in your library, it won’t have the proper support like CSVR has.