My First VR Game Experience - Beat Saber
Last week, to take a break from work, I decided to get into the world of VR gaming. Most of my gaming playtime was either on a PC or a console. So gaming in VR was a completely new domain for me (even though I was involved with their development, not owning a piece of VR headset limited my experience).
The game that I got into was Beat Saber. Well - actually the demo version. Beat Saber is a music-based and reflex-based “hack-and-slash”, where the player has to cut cubes in specific directions, and the cubes generally follow the beat and tempo of the song being played. I had seen videos of other people play it and it had always intrigued me. It had everything I look for inside a video game - unique gameplay mechanics, great sound design, and of course, lightsabers.
My initial couple of games were great. The game tests your reflexes as well as your concentration, because not only do we have to cut the cubes quickly and on-tempo, but also we need to take care of the direction we have to cut in. And on top of that, each light-saber in our hand is of a different colour, and can only cut cubes of the same colour. Overall, I feel that the game tests the players’ reflexes very well. Also, the graphics are minimalistic so, there’s not much to say there. It looks good and feels wells made.
One complaint I have with the game is that sometimes the controllers tend to lag. It might be an issue of the VR setup too, but since it occurred only once or twice during a span of a couple of hours, it was not that big of a problem to be honest. Motion sickness was almost non-existant (but that’s because the game doesn’t rely heavily on movement). Overall, I liked the game, and my first experience with a proper virtual reality-based game went really well.