System: Valve Index & HTC Vive Price at Time Of Review: £9.99 Comfort Rating: Green Genre: Music and Rhythm Input: Tracked Motion Controllers Best Playing Position: Standing Multi-Player: No Age Rating: PG
Description: Slice and dice! Beat Ninja is a rhythm-based VR game that has you cutting up music like never before. Slice through the music notes as they fly at you from all angles while a tower defence mini-game plays out to your actions. Works with any .wav, .mp3, .flac, .aif, or .ogg file and supports user-made beat maps in addition to auto-generated ones.
Review: Beat Ninja could have been something great, the start of something much bigger than itself. While basic looking this is pretty much like Beat Saber only with a sword instead of a lightsaber. But like so many other music rhythm games it fails when it comes to gameplay. The beats are not in tune, you get no satisfaction of hitting those said beats and many times your swing is for nothing as it doesn’t register unless it is the exact angle the cutting line in the beat note is. With some small changes, this could have been big, REAL BIG! But those days are well past this game and while it is a shame, it just goes to show how far we have come in the genre with VR. Do have a look at this if you can pick it up for a quid ($1) or so, but I certainly wouldn’t pay much more than that.