A Free Mod Turns Metro Exodus Into a Full PC VR Campaign, Down to Swapping Your Own Gas Mask Filter

Metro Exodus VR is a free mod that runs the main campaign of 4A Games' 2019 shooter Metro Exodus in a PC VR headset with full 6DoF, short for six degrees of freedom: the game follows where your head and hands move, not only which way they point. The first public beta, version 0.9.0, went up on GitHub on November 6. Version 0.9.1, a bug-fix build, followed on Monday.

The 0.9.0 zip had been downloaded 1,885 times by Monday morning, and the repository, created on November 4, had 65 stars. The developer goes by RippeR37. The earlier project on that account is q3vr, a PC VR port of Quake 3 Arena built on ioquake3 and the Quake3Quest port.

Your gear is on your body now

You aim, reload and handle every weapon with your hands, through custom animations and poses. Standing, seated and room scale all work, left-handed play is supported, and keyboard and mouse still function if you want them.

The mod also moves your equipment onto your body. Putting the gas mask on, swapping its filter and using a medkit become things you do with your hands. In a series where running out of filters in poisoned air kills you, that is not a small change.

Most of the remaining work is in rendering. The mod supports DLSS up to 4.5 and FSR2, two upscalers that draw fewer pixels and rebuild a sharp image from them, plus foveated rendering, which spends less detail toward the edges of your view, and a related mode it calls Foveated Upscaling. bHaptics vests get experimental support.

What a 0.9 beta leaves out

• Main campaign only. The expansions, The Two Colonels and Sam's Story, are planned for a later version.
• Standard Edition only. Support for the Enhanced Edition "has not been decided yet," according to the README.
• Steam only, on the current 1.0.0.7 build. Epic and GOG versions are listed as work in progress.

Monday's 0.9.1 is a stability release. It fixes occasional crashes on VDXR, the OpenXR runtime built into Virtual Desktop, a crash when NVIDIA's Smooth Motion is switched on, and a bug that kept the game out of VR mode on PCs running HDR.

What you are actually running

The repository holds no source code. It contains a README, a header image and a funding file. The mod ships as compiled builds attached to each release, with no license listed, so you are trusting RippeR37's builds rather than code you can read.

What the releases do carry is a paper trail. Each one includes a manifest.json listing the version, the zip's size and its SHA-256 hash, which is a fingerprint that changes if a single byte of the file does, plus a separate signature file for that manifest. The README does not describe how the built-in updater checks them, so VR.org checked by hand: the 0.9.1 zip's hash matched its manifest. Inside are the launcher executables, the mod's DLL, NVIDIA's DLSS library, the bHaptics library and their license files. No game files.

On first launch the updater asks whether to install new versions automatically, ask you each time, or stay off. If you would rather read the release notes before anything new runs on your PC, pick the middle option. Deleting updater.json brings the question back.

How to play it

What you need: Metro Exodus, Standard Edition, on your own Steam account, updated to version 1.0.0.7, plus a Windows PC, a PC VR headset and a VR runtime such as SteamVR or Virtual Desktop. The game is $29.99 on Steam. The mod is free.

1. Install Metro Exodus from Steam. Use the standard edition and let Steam bring it up to the current build. Epic and GOG copies do not work yet.
2. Download the mod. Get the latest zip from the Metro Exodus VR releases page on GitHub, MetroExodusVR-0.9.1.zip at the time of writing. That page is the only official download.
3. Extract the zip. You get a MetroExodusVR folder with the launcher at the top.
4. Start Steam and your VR runtime. Both have to be running first: SteamVR, or Virtual Desktop's VDXR if you play on a Quest over Wi-Fi.
5. Run MetroExodusVR.exe. Answer the update question, then click the game window once so it has focus. The README warns that an unfocused window can cost performance or stop the controller pointer from clicking anything.
6. Tune it under Options, then VR. The VR menu runs from Graphics and Movement to Scopes and Comfort, and the VR HINTS tab in the pause menu shows every body interaction with your current bindings.

Your flat saves carry over, because the mod shares save files with the regular game, so you can pick up mid-campaign. Movement sits on the left stick by default. If smooth stick movement gets to you, go through the Comfort tab before a long session. For frame rate, the README's own order is DLSS or FSR first, then Foveated Upscaling, then a lower quality preset with tessellation off.

Bugs go to the repository's issue tracker, which had 14 open on Monday, or to the mod's Discord server. To uninstall, delete the folder.

Metro already has an official VR game. Metro Awakening, Vertigo Games' 2024 prequel, was built for headsets from the start and sits on our ranking of the scariest VR horror games. This mod is the other route into the series: the full 2019 campaign, rebuilt around your hands. We are adding it to our VR mods guide alongside the other big conversions.