I like rhythm games. I played my fair share of Guitar Hero back on PlayStation 3 and Thumper is one of my favourite games of all time. I’ve had my eyes on Beat Saber for many years, but didn’t purchase it until recently for PSVR2.
My first contact with the game was magical and just what I could expect. Hitting blocks with the lightsabers to the rhythm of the beat feels fantastic. I played a couple of songs and it was hard to put it down.
Then I started the campaign and immediately ran into trouble. Not because it was hard but because I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I touched all the blocks but couldn’t get the scores needed to continue. Turns out that you get scores based on the distance the lightsaber travelled and the angle on which you hit the block. That was not communicated in the tutorial so I had just been touching the blocks with the minimal amount of swing of my arms. Once I started to really swing around the lightsabers I could get the necessary scores to continue.
Then I ran into another problem. A level where you need to swing your arms as rapidly as possible to get 650m “arm travel” during the level. Meaning you’re swinging your arms like you’re a chicken trying to take flight. It looks and feels ridiculous and this is where I had it with the campaign. It just felt stupid, like it was designed by a 5 year old.
I played the rest of the original soundtrack on solo mode, and the songs got quite repetitive after a while. It stops being fun because you’re doing the same thing to almost the same songs over and over. There are music packs from other artists but the base game hasn’t really convinced me it’s worth it.
I also noticed a problem with the mechanics where you crouch and get back up, the headset looses tracking and the whole world starts to shake violently inside the headset which gave me a bit of nausea. Not a great experience over all.
I rate this game as OKAY.
Replay 