You’ll Need Speed and Firepower to Capture the Flag in ‘Flag Games,’ Available Today on Meta Quest Shooter Flag Games is Available Today on Meta Quest

A hulking facility looms before you. You and your teammates have what sounds like a simple mission: capture the base's flag. But with the base bristling with defenses, you'll need all the speed and firepower you can muster if you want to make it back out alive.

This is Flag Games, available today on Meta Quest — a VR shooter from Normal VR that reimagines the familiar concept of “capture the flag” in a whole new way. Where most shooters treat capture the flag as a competitive multiplayer mode, in which two teams fight to grab the prize from the other's base, Flag Games flips the concept into a cooperative campaign. You'll fight your way through sci-fi locations packed with enemy defenders, from a massive solar power plant to a fleet of drifting airships to a coastal hydraulic station. You can take on each base yourself or with up to two other players, but whether alone or with a squad, your goals are the same: infiltrate the facility, grab the flag, and escape.

That last part is where things get interesting. Reaching the flag is only half the battle, because once you have it, every defender in the facility descends on your position. The scramble to get out is where Flag Games really comes alive, and it's where Normal VR's approach to movement gives you an edge against overwhelming odds.

The low gravity of the facilities means you're not just running through corridors. You’re taking the fight into all three dimensions, using your positioning and momentum just as much as your aim. Normal VR drew on the award-winning movement system it built for its earlier game, Nock — a VR take on soccer, played with bows and arrows in a low-gravity arena — and expanded on it in Flag Games. It supports both joystick locomotion and physical movement, including climbing and ziplines, to keep the gameplay quick, tactile, and intense. It's fast — Normal VR calls Flag Games "VR's fastest shooter," and it's not hard to see why.

Where Flag Games stands apart from other co-op shooters, though, is how all those systems work together. The weapons fall into two categories: grounded, realistic guns tuned to feel satisfying in your hands, and one wildly overpowered weapon per level that throws the whole dynamic sideways. Pair that with the movement, the low gravity, and the escalating chaos of an escape under fire, and you've got a shooter that rewards creative problem-solving as much as quick reflexes.

For the launch of Flag Games on Meta Quest, we sat down with the Normal VR team to talk about the game's shooter influences, its movement systems, and what makes cooperative capture the flag such a different experience.

What were your inspirations for Flag Games? What was the genesis of creating a cooperative capture the flag shooter?

We wanted something that felt huge, classic shooter games like Halo, Titanfall, Destiny. Visually, it was a lot of striking symmetrical cinematic compositions, and scenes that were stark industrial but on the fringe of surreal. The overall vibe of A24 was a big influence, mixed with that classic action movie power feeling.

Capture the flag has a place in a lot of competitive multiplayer shooters, but Flag Games focuses on the cooperative experience — what drove that decision?

Flag Games started as a PvPvE game, but it was really hard to get the right balance. We’ve seen a lot of titles try this and sometimes you can get the worst of both worlds. We all realized we were having the most fun with the PvE direction, so we really leaned into that and built the levels around it.

Is there a story being told in Flag Games? What can you tell us about it, and what themes you’re exploring with it?

We opted for a more thematic vibes and environmental approach to the story telling. There are strong parallels and we’d love to hear what the community thinks as they play the game.

From the trailer, it looks like there are a lot of really interesting movement elements available in Flag Games that can make it really fast-paced. What can we expect from those aspects?

Our first prototype was taking our fast-paced physical movement system from Nock and adding guns. From there, we really refined it, getting the joystick to perfectly match the feeling of the Nock movement, adding physical climbing, ziplines, slam reload, physics-based weapons, and more.

Flag Games draws a lot from your previous game, Nock, particularly in its movement systems. What did you learn during the development of Nock that contributed to Flag Games?

Two things we took from Nock were embracing sliding and verticality. Flag Games has, by far, the fastest and smoothest joystick locomotion of any shooter — at first it feels very different from other titles, but once everything clicks, it feels natural to the world. The other thing we took from Nock is verticality, there is nothing like it in VR — being able to jump and climb 10 times higher than real life and physically feel the sensation.

What can you tell us about the weapons in Flag Games?

The weapons in Flag Games fall into two camps. Most are grounded and realistic: tight, satisfying, and tuned to feel good in your hands. Then each level has one OP weapon, something absurdly overpowered that throws the whole dynamic sideways. Designing levels around that mix was some of the most fun we had.

Do you have any post-release plans for Flag Games?

Stay tuned. :)

You can grab a few friends and start your campaign of flag-capturing mayhem in Flag Games right now — find it on the Meta Quest Store for $19.99 USD.