Whenever I want to show VR to friends who’ve never tried it before (which is one of the great pleasures of owning a headset), Beat Saber is the game I fire up first. Few other games so quickly and effectively get across the appeal of this technology as it does, throwing a stream of color-coded boxes at your face and turning your controllers into a pair of mismatched, off-brand lightsabers with which to slice and dice them in time to pumping electronic beats. Honing your skills to turn frantic flailing into precision swings is as satisfying as it is sweaty.
As VR games go, Beat Saber doesn’t push the limits of the technology too far. You play it standing still and facing straight ahead with nothing going on behind you, so you don’t need a room-scale setup – even the PlayStation VR’s basic single-camera tracking can handle it fine. The shiny neon-rave graphics are simple but clear and easily readable, so it looks nearly as good on the Oculus Quest as it does on a Vive Pro (with just a few effects turned down). These unlicensed lightsabers don’t make the signature whizzing sounds of Star Wars, which I can’t help but feel a tad disappointed by, but the sound they do make meshes well with the music they’re timed to, and that creates the feeling of being a participant in the song.While I don’t consider myself much of a fan of electronic dance music in general, I have to say that Beat Saber’s original soundtrack by Jaroslav Beck surprised me with how catchy some of its songs can be. Legend, $100 Bills, and Escape are all hard to get out of my head, and few of the 19 included songs have gotten annoying no matter how many times I’ve played through them. That said, it’s a somewhat limited selection to work with next to most rhythm games, and only the PC version (via Steam or the Oculus Store) supports importing custom songs and maps using mods or the level editor that was added with the 1.0 launch version. Developer Beat Games has committed to providing both more original music and tracks from big-name artists, some of which will be free and some as paid DLC, but it’s currently the biggest limitation if you’re playing on PlayStation VR or Oculus Quest. There, the only expansion option is the $13 Monstercat Music Pack Vol 1, which contains another 10 tracks.Asymmetrical patterns feel like patting your head with one hand while rubbing your belly with the other.
While playing through a track is mechanically straightforward, there’s a significant amount of nuance to it that makes replaying them to chase higher scores fun and challenging. On a basic level, it’s about hitting the right block with the right saber in the right direction. The incoming blocks are color-coded to your sabers, most of the time you’ll be hitting red blocks on the left and blue blocks on the right – sometimes in symmetrical patterns, others in asymmetrical patterns that create a challenge of coordination that feels like patting your head with one hand while rubbing your belly with the other. Some songs like to embed a single blue block on the left side during a flurry of reds (or vice versa) to throw you off. That sounds simple to deal with, but when the pace picks up it’s surprisingly easy to miss – and when you miss once it’s hard not to miss some more before you recover your composure.“
On Normal or Easy modes it’s a breeze to blow through a course, but on Hard and above things really heat up to challenge you. A torrent of blocks will come at you so fast that you need to be looking two blocks down the line from the ones you’re actually swinging at to keep up and plan for where your swords will need to be in order to hit them with the correct directional swing. Most of the time sequences are designed to help you out with this by following an up with a down or a left with a right so that you naturally can swing one way and then the other, but the meaner ones will do the same direction repeatedly, forcing you to swing and then quickly swing back to reset for the next block. You’ll also see rapid-fire sequences of up-down-up-down-up-down, forcing a drummer-like movement where if you miss one you’ll miss them all. Or they’ll follow one cross-swing with another so that if you overcommit in one direction it’s tough to swing back the other way.
Other than that, there are a few sparingly used obstacles like walls and low ceilings that force you to sidestep or duck out of the way, respectively, usually while still swinging your swords. You’ll also occasionally see spikey mines coming down the pipe that cause a score multiplier and combo string reset when hit, but on Hard mode at least I haven’t seen those used in ways that felt like I was ever in any real danger of actually hitting one.
Theres's a lot of room to improve your technique even after you’ve slashed your way through a song without missing.
Placing high on the leaderboards isn’t just about hitting every block before it gets past you – there’s some precision to how your swing should be executed. You’re scored based on whether you follow through on the swing rather than limply tapping a block, and how close to the center of the block your blade passes through. That creates a lot of room to improve your technique even after you’ve slashed your way through a song without missing anything, and encourages wildly exaggerated swings that make it feel like I’m actually trying to cut the blocks with force and momentum.“
The biggest annoyance for me is that when I miss a block during a vigorous section of a song, it’s often hard to see precisely what my mistake was – you just get the fail sound effect and your score multiplier and streak counter get reset to zero. Unless you’re recording your gameplay there’s no way to rewind afterward to see if you swung in the wrong direction or with the wrong saber, or if you just outright missed due to either misjudging the timing or a tracking glitch that actually robbed you.
The difficulty jump from Hard to Expert is pretty crazy – I can S-rank pretty much every song in the catalog on Hard, but can barely make it through an Expert song without missing enough blocks to fail the level. Expert doesn’t just increase the speed that blocks come at your face – it’s a very different course with harder-to-hit arrangements of blocks. And then there’s Expert+, which is so insanely fast and difficult that if you beat it you’ll find Nick Fury sitting behind you waiting to recruit you into the Avengers Initiative when you remove your headset. Watching videos of people tearing through one of these courses is really quite a sight.
There are a few other modes to play in for a different type of challenge: one is a campaign that gradually ramps up the difficulty and puts different spins on all the existing songs by, for example, showing the directional indicator for only a moment before hiding it so that you have to remember which way to swing when it gets to you. Another mode removes the directional requirements entirely and lets you whack at the red and blue blocks any way you choose but compensates by dramatically upping their quantity and mixing the different colors together much more closely than in the normal mode. There’s also a single-saber mode that is similarly difficult to keep up with. All of them are tough in their own ways, and it’s a good way to extend variety when the track selection runs out.
