Okay, integrity demands that I qualify the title of this review with the fact that at the time of this writing I haven't even played 20 different VR games and I've only had an Oculus for most of a year. But I still feel pretty confident that this game won't be beat unless they simply make a better version of it.
When I first picked up my VR kit, it was pretty much for the following reasons: I've never really tried VR, I had the money for it, and I was interested in finally getting to play Resident Evil 4 VR. I figured there are also games out there that I've never really gotten to even try that I finally could, but I mainly expected to be big into immersive adventures in fantasy landscapes and probably some horror games that could get past the inevitable barrier of a monitor/TV screen that keeps the monsters from ever being too threatening given their 2-dimensional prison. What I didn't even consider, despite being moderately into fitness outside of gaming, is that VR games could potently gamify movement and exercise. Additionally, I certainly never realized just how fun that could be.
And that's the best thing about Beat Saber. It is simply just incredibly fun. There are lots of things I look for in my games: story, interesting mechanics, the accomplishment of solving a good puzzle or beating a hard boss, among many others. It's true that almost none of these are involved in Beat Saber. I could say on a holistic level, there are other games I "enjoy" or "like" more because I appreciate the narrative themes or the characters or the strategic depth. But when it comes to the simple fun and joy of gameplay, I think it's safe to say Beat Saber is the most consistent pure fun I've had playing a game and it's probably not even close. About the only real caveat I have is that, as with basically every rhythm game I've played, Normal feels a little dull as the fewer notes barely feel like much real movement, even if some practice is necessary to learn the game and move on to higher difficulties. Hard is better, Expert was when it started getting really fun, and Expert+ is a blast, which I think I worked up to within the first 15 hours or so for at least some songs. I really feel like the easier difficulties are basically just a tutorial though and most people will move beyond them quickly.
On that note, while there's a lot that contributes to why the game works, even beyond just being fun, Beat Saber is surprisingly quite accessible as far as difficulty. While I'm getting into psychology that can vary from person to person, I almost never feel significant frustration even when I'm playing a song well-above my skill level. There are so many to play and several difficulties and modifiers to use that there's always a way to continue climbing in skill and improve your sight-reading. I also learned quickly to basically always have No-Fail mode on and I'd recommend it to everyone of all skill levels as there's little gained by failing over and over simply because you don't have "that one part" down and not getting to see the rest of the song except on the rare occasion you survive your particular hurdle.
I'm of about average fitness and while that does matter, I really believe even people very out of shape would be able to play the game just fine and it's really unlike a lot of fitness activities in that way, since it's all at your own pace and things that seem impossible, you will work your way up toward eventually if you keep at it. And that's one of my favorite things about the skill ladder is that I have so many times thought "I will never be able to play this song" or looked at a run and thought "okay, even if I could process that much info, my arms literally don't move that fast." I have repeatedly been proven wrong. I will avoid ranting on this point, but it reminds me a lot of watching professional RTS players. At first it seems like you could never move that fast and while it's true that tend to do some mouse accuracy training, the bulk of hitting 300 atm is simply learning the game so well your hands will naturally learn to keep up with your brain. That's pretty much exactly how those super fast runs happen. I'm not sure where the skill ceiling is for this game, but I can see myself one day beating even the hardest songs out there if I keep it up. And I promise you, I'm not special in that at all.
But back to the fun, there's a great variety to the kind of fun in Beat Saber. Some songs are great dance tracks with maps that push you to basically dance along with the music because of how you have to move to hit the blocks. Those can be a ton of fun in themselves and are some of my favorites; despite not being into dancing normally, the fact you're in a VR headset I think helps prevent you from being too self-aware and just having fun moving your body how you may not normally feel comfortable (even if I've admittedly paused to raise the visor and confirm multiple times that no one walked in on me playing "Caramelldansen," don't judge me). There are also great challenge maps that are really difficult and push you to improve, bringing all the satisfaction that comes from achieving something really tough. Plus there's just a joy to be found in getting into that flow state groove that triggers all kinds of good feels. It's a great game to take your mind off things when you need that. That's been confirmed to me over and over.
Beat Saber is also one hell of a workout, on par with many fairly mid to high intensity workouts. At the time of this writing, I've played just about 95 hours (feels like way longer) and burned over 60,000 calories playing Beat Saber over the course of about 10 months. One of my biggest issues with fitness is that I don't really enjoy sports much so most all of my exercise is stuff that aside from the runner's highs and such, simply isn't very fun in itself and I probably wouldn't do them if it weren't for the health benefits and those feel-good chemicals. The fact Beat Saber is close to one of the best workouts I can get AND is extremely fun is almost too good to be true.
The soundtrack for the base game I would describe as "okay" but honestly not that great. I admit that despite this otherwise glowing review, I would probably not be that crazy about it if I were basing my review just on the base soundtrack as a good half of the songs I don't really care for and few do I think are especially "good" (though obviously, this all depends on taste). First though, there are lots of DLCs, most of them are each specific to one artist and feature several of that artist's songs. It would probably be pretty expensive if you wanted ALL of them but they do a good job of having a good variety of artists so few people probably like every artist, but most people can find at least a pack or two they like. I also found the DLCs I got (Skrillex, Linkin Park, and Fall Out Boy) to be above average maps beyond just being music I enjoyed more. But what REALLY opened up the game was when I got custom songs enabled. There are hundreds (probably thousands, I dunno) of custom maps made by members of the community that come in all kinds of forms and genres. While the DLCs probably have SOME music you like, there's basically no way you won't find lots of music you like in the custom maps. There are also plenty of maps for songs that are less up my alley but are just super well-made and highly rated. I've found some new music this way as well but there are several maps that are good enough I don't even care if it's not my kind of song. New maps are coming out non-stop and considering how many numerous replays you can get out of a beloved song/map, there's no shortage of solid content.
As a last closing point, playing on the Quest 2 has had some pros and cons. On the plus side, one of the best things about it by far is the kit is wholly independent. I could go outside, far from my WiFi range, and play the game if I wanted. You don't even need to own a PC, let alone a good one. Hell, I played Beat Saber during a power outage once (though heads up the battery life is only a few hours). I'm not sure it still is, but Beat Saber also came free with my Quest 2. On the downside, the graphics are noticeably worse than videos I've seen of the PC version, unsurprisingly. I generally don't care too much about that especially for a game like this, but as far as I've been able to tell, the cool mods to change your sword appearance and other goodies are not (easily) available either, which kind of sucks. Further, enabling the custom song library is very doable, but it did take some setup and finagling that I found annoying at first. However, there are guides online and once it's set up which probably takes 20-30 mins tops, it's very easy to use and download new songs from there so that's only an issue at the start. The only other issue I've noticed with the Oculus version is that given it's running on onboard hardware, which is majorly impressive in itself, there are occasional performance issues given understandable limitations. I've seen rare (but existent) frame drops, which normally isn't the end of the world, but is terrible to run into in a rhythm game. Thankfully these are very rare, no more than 20 very brief 1-second periods in that 95 hours so far. Still, given the wealth of additional mods, I've considered buying the game on Steam and just playing it tethered to get access to anything else I'm missing and getting better performance. Lastly, I highly recommend headphones if you're playing on Oculus as while the speakers on the Quest 2 aren't bad, they don't do the tunes justice and I'm way more into it with a solid pair of headphones. Though heads up, for whatever reason, my usual headset was not working with it and it came out super quiet. I had to buy a different headset marketed for the Quest that works great, even if I wish I hadn't needed to make that purchase. I might've just been unlucky with my usual headset but I will also note you might want a dedicated pair of headphones for it anyway considering you're likely to get sweat on them.
All in all, Beat Saber rocks. I really think it's for most anyone considering I had 0 interest going in and probably wouldn't have played it for a while if it weren't for the fact it came free with my Quest 2 and RE4 was giving me motion sickness. I say this about almost no games, but I absolutely think it'd be worth picking up a Quest 2 just for Beat Saber even if you had no interest in other VR games, it's probably not much more, if at all, than a year's gym membership and unless you're a total gym rat, you're going to use it more and have a blast doing so.
