Beat Saber is Guitar Hero for wannabe Jedi

“May the Force rise to meet you” because the monks and altar boys of the Star Wars universe say. In Beat Saber, a VR rhythm sport described by its creators as “a mashup of Guitar Hero and Fruit Ninja”, that is precisely what occurs. The Force, manifesting right here as colored panels with glowing arrows portray on them, fly towards you in time to a wholesome beat. You’ve acquired to hit them together with your laser sword (VR wand issues) to maintain on bumpin’. It seems neat, and a lot better demonstrated within the following video.

Obviously, it is not going to look half as swish if you’re enjoying it. It’ll be out on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and the music will probably be composed by the builders, a minimum of at first. Here’s what Jan Ilavsky, one of many studio heads at Hyperbolic Magnetism, needed to say once we requested the place the music will come from.

“We will release it on early access with our own music first. In next updates the editor will be released and probably some integration with streaming services like Audioshield has. There won’t be any procedural levels, everything will be created by hand by us or by the community, because we think this really feels very different.”

Audioshield was the VR follow-up to Audiosurf, which has the identical thought however asks you to block incoming notes with an energy shield reasonably than slicing them with a vivid stick (it was additionally one in all our 23 best VR games on PC, says Alec). It allowed you to play songs streaming from YouTube however lacked Spotify integration when Alec final performed.

As for Beat Saber, it seems enjoyable however it has massive spaceboots to fill if it needs to bop off in opposition to the original Star Wars rhythm game. It’s due for launch on early entry in “early 2018”.