This says it doesn’t require VR. I am lucky in this case, and I am about to get gifted a hand-me-down VR set from a friend who is upgrading in a few weeks, so I will get to try it out in VR.
That being said, the track list so far looks awesome. I am a long-time metalhead, so seeing Blind Guardian, Nightwish, and Dragonforce is super exciting to me.
Downloading the demo now to see how it plays without VR, but will be trying it in VR in the future once I finally have a PC VR headset. Currently I only have a PSVR1 and Beat Saber, which doesn’t get much use because of there being so many wires on it and cats who want to chew on those wires.
Edit: (Purely from a personal musical preference here) From a metalhead and just loving the music perspective, after playing a bit and looking more at the tracklist/DLC (and also after my early first impression reply below) I am hopefull for this to continue because I want more Blind Guardian and others. I am familiar with Epica and Symphony X and want more of them in here. I have been recently exposed to Alestorm and Gloryhammer and want more of them too. Been intriged by Sabotan for quite a long while and really have no good reason to have not been pursuing their music further like I should have been since I’ve heard of them (going to rectify this right after I post this), and this game gives me hope that more of these bands that I love will make it into rhtyhm games to gain more exposure, and I will continue to find new awesome \m/ things to listen to.
Very early, aprox. 1 hour of playing (also somewhat inebriated), impressions.
First thought was that I love seeing more heavy metal representation in rhythm games. I feel outside of the old Guitar Hero and Rock Band series, rock and metal have been underrepresented in the rhythm games I have known of.
Second, despite not having VR at the moment and using a controller, the controls felt good. There are 4 lanes, and I’m using an XBox layout knock off controller at the moment for my PC, and the keys are D-Pad left, down right for the left side of the track and X, B, A for the right side of the track. That means the D-pad down and right overlap with X and A. That worked out really great in trying to play on controller and also made it feel like what I imagine properly playing drums is like with needing your arms to be independant, and also synchornized and also all over the place to hit the thing you need to hit. For reference here, I have never played actual songs on the drums before, but I have always been interested in the muscisionship side of them.
My final thought of the game is that while it seems like it would be fun to play on a new medium of a controller or in VR with wands, the track list (admitedly played on the difficulty 2 of 3, whatever that is called in this game) seemed like, as a veteran of expert mode in Guitar Hero/Rock Band, an absolutely simple thing to crush with the guitar controller, even adding in the necesscity to strum. I have played other games (shoutout out to Metronomicon on PC) where I changed the control bindings on the keyboard to just mimic a Guitar Hero/Rock Band guitar layout and that massively boosted my performance.
Overall, I will be checking this game out more once I get ahold of a VR headset because I think it will be super fun to play in VR. If I were skilled enough in rhythm games and shooting for score, I think I would just remap the keys to F1234 and hold my keyboard like a guitar to get highscores easily.
