VR Tarkov Is Great - Ghosts of Tabor Review - Tarkov VR

There’s a number of people who are both Escape From Tarkov fans and VR shooter enthusiasts who have always wanted a VR Tarkov. Well you won’t have to wait any more, Tarkov VR is here in Ghosts of Tabor.

This game is fantastic, and takes everything that is great about Escape From Tarkov and puts it in VR. Ghosts of Tabor will be available on the Oculus Quest/Meta Quest headsets as well as on PCVR through Steam.

There’s also planned releases for the Pico 4 and PSVR2. Here’s a complete review as to why this VR Tarkov game is great and everything we could have asked for.

Note that Ghosts of Tabor is currently in Open Beta, and so not all planned features are implemented and there are the sorts of bugs you might expect from a game still in development. When changes are made this article will be updated.

The Premise

This VR Extraction Shooter takes a lot of cues from Escape From Tarkov in its premise.

Even their website looks really similar with a bunch of elite looking guys in full combat gear on the front page.

Basically extreme Russian Nationalists (you might call them Ultra-Nationalists) have declared war on the world and nuked a NATO stronghold. You are a special forces member in the area, known as a “Ghost”.

You are completely surrounded. You’ll have to fight the Nationalist Russians (called the Volk) as well as the FENIX rebels, and even fellow Ghosts as you struggle to survive.

Core VR Tarkov Gameplay

Alright so let’s address the question that’s probably the most on your mind. How is Ghosts of Tabor a Tarkov VR game? How similar is it? Does Escape From Tarkov’s gameplay work well in Virtual Reality?

The answer to that last question is yes, it is extremely fun. As for the first ones, the easiest way to answer those is to explain exactly how Ghosts of Tabor plays.

You start the game in your bunker hideout. There’s an Armory where you keep your weapons, and even a storeroom for any loose items and valuables you’re holding on to.

The bunker is huge too, with a lot of areas meant for crafting, performing surgery on yourself, and so on. So anyway you grab your gear (more on that later) and go to the terminal to deploy to a raid.

The loading times are extremely quick, and you’ll be in a raid in thirty seconds at the most. After joining and loading you’ll be standing, equipped in your chosen gear, somewhere in the raid map.

So you start walking around, looking in containers and boxes for anything of value that you can shove in your backpack. You’ll probably hear gunshots pretty soon.

That’s because all around the raid map are these guys, the FENIX.

They’re dressed in basically civilian clothes and are pretty lightly armed with pistols, submachine guns, or rifles. You can even sneak up on the FENIX members if you approach quietly enough and they aren’t looking at you.

Every one you kill will drop their weapon and some magazines for it. So if you want to get another weapon and some ammo, FENIX members are an easy way to get them.

They’re basically Scavs from Escape From Tarkov, and are hostile to everyone that isn’t them.

Of course as you’re scavenging loot from the map and fighting FENIX, you’ll come to realize that they aren’t the main threat.

Other Ghosts, other players, are. You can tell other players from how their body moves, and that they’re wearing military fatigues.

Every player’s mic is always on and other players can hear you talk, so you can freely chat and try to negotiate your way out of a gunfight if you care to try.

Though if you start talking they’ll be able to hear exactly where you are. They might try to shoot you to get your stuff, or just because they think you’ll shoot them. All of the social dynamics in Escape From Tarkov are here in Ghosts of Tabor, except with the added benefit of the greater emotion, body language, and interactivity VR.

You can even throw down your gun and raise your hands to try to surrender. That’s one of the things that makes Tarkov VR truly amazing.

Each raid is on a generous timer of 30 minutes to an hour.

You have to find an extraction radio and leave at some point during that time. Dying is another way to leave a raid, but you probably don’t want to do much of that. Green glowsticks near a radio lit up green show you when you are at an extract that you can use.

Even better, you can now see what direction extracts are in using your compass at the top of your view. So there’s no need to take your headset off and furiously google where the extracts are like you would when you’re new to Tarkov.

You can see that the gameplay is basically VR Tarkov.

The classic extraction shooter formula now in Virtual Reality. With all the same surprising situations and dynamics that constantly keeps the game fresh and fun. While at the same time Ghosts of Tabor always gives you something to care about each raid, and something to lose.

All of this with the immersion and physical presence of Virtual Reality.

With that in mind, let’s talk about some of the key features of an extraction shooter game and how they turn up in Tarkov VR. Like, how do you gear up?

Gear and Progression in Tarkov VR

Ghosts of Tabor brings all of the gearing options and potential of Tarkov to VR, and even enhances it. You don’t just put chest rigs and helmets into a slot on a menu.

No, in VR Tarkov you put it in your actual body by grabbing it and draping it over yourself.

You don’t just control click items to put them into your backpack.

No, in Ghosts of Tabor you pull your backpack off of your back and manually put stuff in there. Oh, and those things in there collide. So you’re no longer concerned with how many slots a backpack has, but how physically big it is.

Get creative enough and you can fit a lot of things into a small space, it’s a skill of its own though.

You can fully customize your chest rig by putting pouches on it so that you can grab magazines and grenades wherever they are.

You have to physically grab them in VR, so personal preference is huge.

You get a holster for a pistol and a holster for a long gun like a rifle or SMG. If you want to hold a knife you’ll need to get a pouch on your chestrig for that.

Guns are heavily moddable just like in Escape From Tarkov too, and you’ll find and buy all sorts of attachments for them that you then physically slot on to the gun.

The entire gearing experience is way more personal and in depth since you’re doing it to your actual body instead of just clicking and dragging things on a screen.

You can even craft bullets with the right materials and your very own workbench (more crafting will come).

There’s insurance too, just like in Escape From Tarkov. You pay a portion of the item’s worth up front, and if you die but nobody takes your insured item out of the raid you get to keep it!

Since loot is all physical objects, any that you want to store you’ll need to put on special loot shelves that will save the item for later, just leaving stuff lying around your bunker will make it disappear.

You can also sell anything from assault rifles to spark plugs by putting them on the conveyor in the Trade Room and selecting which trader you want to sell it to.

Just like in Tarkov the progression isn’t only based off of what items you manage to hoard here in VR. The Traders give missions that give you reputation points when completed, as well as cash.

Selling a trader enough stuff and getting enough reputation with them means that you level them up and can buy even better equipment from them.

There’s a bazar that you go to through a menu option where you can browse each of the trader’s kiosks and buy items at your leasure by scanning them with a scan gun and checking out.

When you go back to your bunker you hit the “Receive” button on the screen in the Trader Room and your items spawn in on a rack.

While a little more time consuming than trading and gearing up in Escape From Tarkov, the very personal nature of doing all of these interactions with your actual hands makes it very satisfying to physically hold what you’ve acquired.

Not to mention looking at it. Guns and equipment all look very true to life and detailed, and even work just like their real life counterparts.

If you’ve ever played Into the Radius, then the looting, stashing, and gearing experience is very similar.

What Ghosts of Tabor VR Lacks

There are still a few things in Ghosts of Tabor that keep it from being the absolutely complete VR Tarkov experience is just a few things, and those are currently being worked on by the developers.

For instance, there are currently no Scav runs, which are raids that you can participate in as one of the mostly NPC FENIX members with a random assortment of equipment. You stand to gain by extracting with gear, and stand to lose nothing in a Scav raid.

Though there is a “rations” system which gives you some gear every 6 hours, day, and week so that you’ll always have a little something to go into raid with if you wait long enough.

Hopefully nobody ends up dead broke in Ghosts of Tabor due to the absence of the Scav mechanic.

Also there’s no base building or stash expansion to sink junk items and money into to improve your character, and no skills to level to get better over time. The only way your character improves is through personal skill and better equipment.

Lastly there are no in depth healing mechanics, only syringes heal your health pool at the moment. These are all things that are being worked on, and this article will be updated when they are added.

Potential Problems with Ghosts of Tabor

A lot of existing issues with Ghosts of Tabor at the time of writing will be resolved in time. There are bugs, like things disappearing through the ground, the magazine loader not working, mags not coming out of mag pouches, and so many more that will be fixed.

The mission system is also rudimentary, but the developers of Ghosts of Tabor do promise a series of missions to discover the secrets of Tabor and ultimately escape.

There will also be new features like more in depth healing mechanics and so much more.

The biggest existing problem is the sound. Sound is extremely important in an extraction shooter, and even while using headphones it can be really hard to hear which direction footsteps and actions are coming from.

Someone will open a backpack two rooms away and it will sound like it’s right next to you sometimes. For anyone well versed in extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov, sound is an extremely vital part of the game that is currently not well implemented.

Still, it’s early in this game’s life and there are a ton of ways to improve.

It will likely only get better. For now if you jump into Ghosts of Tabor expect some bugs and some jank. That’s really the only downside,

Conclusions on VR Tarkov

Bringing the revolutionary extraction shooter gameplay of Escape From Tarkov to Virtual Reality is what Ghosts of Tabor does and it does it well.

It does this not only with the features and gameplay loop of Tarkov, but by also adding all of the things that makes VR Shooters great.

If you like VR and you like Tarkov then Ghosts of Tabor is a no brainer to get at 20$ for the base package, and it’s coming to every VR platform and HMD out there.