I mentioned that I got the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset the other day. Those who hang around in the Community Discord already know that I'm quite obsessed with this thing. Apart from finishing up the story of Resident Evil Village I haven't played anything else than VR games the last couple of days. So far I've been trying out Half Life: Alyx, which is amazing, and Beat Saber.
Beat Saber is simply amazing. I've always liked rhythm games and I've had a knack for them ever since playing the oh so amazing Guitar Hero on several consoles and Tap Tap Revenge on my old iPod Touch. This is of course all connected to my love of music. With the rise of VR gaming and the release of Beat Saber in 2018 I've been longing to play this. Every time I see some sicko video online of someone slaying through a song I've just been feeling so envious. Beat Saber had to be the first game I bought when I got my Oculus. And it was.
What is Beat Saber?
For those who don't know; Beat Saber is a rhythm game made for VR (Virtual Reality). Much a kin to the old Guitar Hero games for consoles. The difference is instead of having guitars that you push buttons on you have a controller in each hand that you wave around acting as virtual lightsabers. Blocks of red and blue will then come at you and you have to cut the blocks with the lightsabers in line with the beat.
Blue blocks must be cut with the blue lightsaber and red blocks with the red lightsaber. Each block may also have arrows on them indicating which way you need to cut while some blocks only have a circle which means you can cut it however you like. Every now and then there may be walls coming at you which you need to dodge by moving your body in real life as well as the occasional bomb which you shouldn't cut at all.
All this happens in line with the beat of a song so all in all you're just standing there dancing and waving your arms around like a mad man. It's great! This video should give you an idea of how it goes. Just skip through it for a bit.
It's so addicting!
I started off with the campaign of the game. This has you going through all the originally released songs for the game at increasing difficulty while completing different kinds of challenges. Difficulties range from easy at the bottom to expert+ four levels above. It's a good thing I started at the lowest level. Even though easy may look very easy it really isn't the first few times you play it. You really need to get used to the movement of the controllers.
I managed to blast through the campaign anyways and found myself playing at the hard difficulty within a few hours. This was a major skill check for me. As the difficulty rises you'll see more notes on the board that also require more complex movement patterns. One thing I started noticing here is that the blocks come at you in patterns that kinda just make sense. If notes come at you in quick succession and you start with a downstroke the next note is pretty much guaranteed to be an upstroke. This is really great cause you can start "feeling" the song instead of having to concentrate to hard on discerning if there's an up or down arrow coming.
Some of my greatest hurdles has been double notes where you have to strike each lightsaber in different directions. Like the blue up and the red down. When that comes at you after a long series of notes it's hard to wrap your head around. They're sometimes sneaky and switch around the order of double notes having you cross your arms to strike the red on the right and the blue on the left. A couple of hours of beating my head against the wall and I managed to overcome these hurdles.
What's a little disappointing is that there's only like eight songs in the campaign even though it consists of close to 50 levels. However since you do play these songs at increasing difficulty and with a variety of different challenges each time it isn't all that bad. As far as I can tell the songs are made for the game as well so they're really tailored to fit the experience.
The challenges and pretty cool. Some are pretty standard and only require you to finish the song with a certain number of points. Some require you to hit a minimum combo of a certain length, meaning hitting consecutive notes without missing or doing mistakes. Some require you to finish the song without hitting to many mistakes, some actually require you to make a certain number of mistakes while some require you to make no mistakes at all.
It surprised me that only 3% of players on Steam has finished the campaign and 2.2% has finished all the levels in the campaign. I don't know if that's because it's really hard or people just don't play the campaign. It's probably the latter. My goal is to be among the 2.2% though and I'm well on my way. I started playing this game three days ago and I'm already playing quite comfortably on expert difficulty with only three more levels to go until the campaign is beat. I need to do some grinding though cause the challenges are getting really hard.
This song is really cool!
This is the song I'm beating my head against at the moment. I have to finish the song with a maximum of 5 bad strokes, meaning I can miss notes but if I hit a note and cut it the wrong way I get one strike. I can only do that 5 times maximum. It's rough but I'm slowly getting better at it note for note. At the moment I'm getting about 2/3 of the way through the song before failing. Soon!
The Verdict
Beat Saber is amazing and if you ever get yourself a VR headset you need to get this game. It's extremely fun and addicting! The feeling of mastering a song or beating a campaign level you've been beating your head against is second to none. You'll end up with a real sweat once you hit expert difficulty as well. I had to shower after a two hour session yesterday.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.