The Groovin’ Essentials Music Pack, featuring Bruno Mars, Silk Sonic and Starcadian in a 24K-lineup of award-winning hits is releasing today, featuring five songs with strong roots in disco and funk. The new collection will be available from December 15th on Meta Quest, Steam, PlayStation VR and Viveport. 

“Groovin’ Essentials” Music Pack features five paid DLC songs:

• “24K Magic” – Bruno Mars
• “Runaway Baby” – Bruno Mars
• “Skate” – Silk Sonic (feat. Bruno Mars, Anderson .Paak)
• “Manuals” – Starcadian
• “Supersymmetry” – Starcadian

Synth Riders sets this party off right with Bruno Mars’ chart-topping hits “24K Magic” and “Runaway Baby”, before you “Skate” back to the 70s with Silk Sonic, the Grammy award-winning collaboration between Bruno Mars & Anderson .Paak. Then go back to the future with Starcadian in “Manuals” and “Supersymmetry”, with his unique blend of Synthwave meets Disco – in Space.

In a first for Synth Riders, the level creation team worked closely with dancer Phil “SACBxY” Tayag to choreograph this pack. As a choreographer for Bruno Mars and former founding member of the Jabbawockeez his insights should make this pack unique!  As an added bonus, players can dance along with the exclusive “SACBxY” choreography for “Manuals”, featured in the new gameplay trailer shown here.

To celebrate the launch of this pack, the Synth Riders team is adding “Liquid Disco” – a futuristic nightclub with a dancefloor that reacts to every song you can play in Synth Riders, as featured in the trailer and available to all players for free – available for both regular & spin modes.

With the addition of “Groovin’ Essentials”, Synth Riders’ soundtrack has surpassed 100 songs, with more than half of those included free with the game and 45 as optional DLC.  Meta Quest owners who haven’t yet played the game can try it out for free in the demo available on App Lab, featuring 5 songs with all modifiers.

“Bringing together Bruno Mars, Silk Sonic and Starcadian for this pack is a highlight for us – musically different, yet all sharing common influences from funk and groove.  “Groovin’ Essentials” expresses both Synth Riders’ retro-future outlook and our dance-at-the-heart gameplay.” says Abraham Aguero – Creative Director at Kluge Interactive.

“Groovin’ Essentials” launches today, December 15th on Meta Quest, Steam, PlayStation VR and Viveport. All five tracks can be purchased individually for $1.99, or together as a bundle for $7.99 with a 20% discount.

What’s your favorite music game on Quest? Let us know in the comments!

For some odd reason, some of the marketing for the app calls it a ‘game’, even though it’s decidedly not a game. We’ve seen this happen before with Lost Recipes, for example. It seems that marketing departments feel that ‘games’ sell better than ‘apps’, but we at 6DOF Reviews consider that misleading at best, and perhaps even disingenuous. The fact of the matter is that Virtuoso is a music-making app – it’s a lot of fun, but just because something is fun, doesn’t make it a game. Alright, time to get off the soapbox…

Fast Travel Games has today announced that Virtuoso, a virtual music creation sandbox that lets anyone bring melodic creations to life in VR, will make its debut on Meta Quest, Rift and SteamVR on March 10, 2022. Created by the studio Really Interactive, Virtuoso brings an immersive musical stage into your headset. The Virtuoso demo tape… or rather, announcement trailer… features the track “Parade” by Scandinavian dance music duo Tungevaag & Rabaan recreated in-game:

From their press release:

Explore the unique instruments and effects of Virtuoso to find your personal sound and bring out your inner musician. With instruments that have been specifically tailored and tuned for virtual reality, as well as an interactive tutorial, you’ll go from music class dropout to worldwide pop star in no time. Use the Looper tool to become a one-person band, creating dance floor ready jams on the fly. Save and share your creations with friends and gain inspiration from other members of the Virtuoso community.

“Virtuoso is a new take on playing and creating music that is both accessible for complete beginners and amazingly powerful in the hands of experienced musicians,” said Jonatan Crafoord, Creative Director and Co-Founder of Really Interactive. “The instruments are built from the ground-up for expressing yourself musically in VR, while the tools and interactive tutorial help you stay on beat and in tune. We can’t wait to hear the music that the Virtuoso community will create in it!”

Key Features of Virtuoso include:

• Create music in real-time using the Looper and easily share it for all to hear! Even if you’ve never touched an instrument before, features like Tempo Sync and preset scales help you stay in time and on pitch.
• The six instruments of Virtuoso have been created specifically for VR. Set up your own custom drum kit with the Empads and tickle the keys of the three-dimensional Oorgan. You can also add vocals with lush reverb using the virtual microphone!
• The interactive tutorial along with intuitive instruments and tools means that everyone, from professional producers to casual music lovers, can become Virtuosos!

When it arrives in March, Virtuoso will be the first third-party title published by Fast Travel Games’ recently-launched publishing arm.

For more information on Virtuoso and Really Interactive, you can visit virtuoso-vr.com and www.really-interactive.se and follow the app on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. 

About Fast Travel Games

Fast Travel Games is a VR exclusive games developer and publisher based in Stockholm, founded by industry-leading veterans and behind critically acclaimed VR titles such as Apex Construct, The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets and Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife.

About Really Interactive 

Really Interactive is a Stockholm-based creative studio focused on developing VR game titles, interactive entertainment, and real-time applications.

Vertigo Games, the game developers, have announced that their exclusive new song was specially tailored for Unplugged. Hopefully, this means that the air-guitaring gameplay was taken into consideration when the song was written. Either way, an exclusive Steel Panther song is no small feat.

Unplugged is going to be released on PC VR on December 2. The new song will come as a free update to both PC VR and Meta Quest.

It is nice to see that the members of the legendary Steel Panther are showing their support to Unplugged with Eyes of the Panther and an exclusive song. Hopefully, the game will have even more surprises like this in the future.

What do you think about Unplugged’s new song? Are you excited to play it? Let us know in the comment section!

But Unplugged, much like a honey badger, doesn’t care.

What, Pray Tell, Is EDM?

Unplugged will undoubtedly come as a massive relief to the legions of rock fans who have felt ignored by the predominance of EDM and Pop tracks in games like Beat Saber or Synth Riders. Relax, brother. Here, you’re among friends. The game comes with 23 tracks, featuring bands like The Clash, Dandy Warhols, Garbage, Jet, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ozzy Osbourne, Rush, T.Rex, Tenacious D, Weezer, and others. Chances are you already like some of these tracks and might have already air-guitared to them.

The lesser side of the presentation is your in-game ‘mentor,’ played with live video by Steel Panther’s “inimitable” frontman Satchel. Everything he says is, at best, idiotic, and at worst, somewhat creepy. Just like that, Unplugged made me less keen on having my son try it out and confident that I will never, ever, look up Steel Panther.

So let’s get on with it, shall we? Does Unplugged work?

Beam Me Up, Scotty!

Out with the big spoiler: despite some caveats, the hand tracking works. It works better than you might think it would, especially if you haven’t been playing around with Hand Physics Lab on Sidequest or App Lab. It rarely fails if you cater to its limitations, and it’s precise enough to tell how many and which fingers you’re holding against your virtual guitar neck. The game also tracks your other hand that’s doing the strumming, and yes, it has lefty options, so don’t..fret.

Unplugged‘s hand tracking does, however, come at a cost.

For Unplugged to work as it does, it requires you to pretty much stay in the same spot during a whole performance. At the beginning of a round, before you pick up your guitar pick to start the song, you can grab the guitar by both the tremolo bar and the neck to move it about to where you want to place it. Once there, however, you’re pretty much stuck to those spatial coordinates for the duration of any song. You can twist the neck about, but the guitar will pivot on its center rather than follow you around anywhere. For an activity geared towards wild abandon, it feels like a restriction. You also have to keep in mind that the headset needs to see your strumming hand as well. Raising the neck to eye level, a la Slash, for example, resulted in the game missing my strums.

Playing That Tune

Unplugged likes to switch it up, and the higher you go in difficulty, the more dextrous you’ll have to be. On easy levels, you’re mostly moving your hand across the different sections of the neck. As the levels advance, the shapes your neck hand has to make become more complex, and you also have less time to change between forms. It can be pretty challenging and quite addictive and, once you’ve grown confident enough to notice them, the combo rewards feel well earned.

As you progress, you unlock more gear, and Vertigo Games recently announced new partnerships with EMG Pickups, Gruv Gear, Marshall Amplification, Orange Amps, PRS Guitars, and Schecter Guitars.

The path ahead, it seems, is lush.

With the right music on, maybe a set of earbuds for better sound, and the right difficulty level for you, Unplugged can be a blast. Running up combos signals feels good, and the particle effects around the neck help pump that up. The ‘solo’ boxes that come during some tracks are a welcome and fun relief, letting you wiggle your fingers freely within a neck section for some extra zing.

What I Hate About You

For all the fun Unplugged can be, it sins on two main fronts, and for me, they’re not insignificant; agency and balance.

By not incorporating any negative sonic feedback into the game when you miss a note, Unplugged robs you of player agency. If messing up doesn’t impact the music in any negative way, then I’m not really playing, am I? Sure, when you miss, you see a red ‘missed’ text fly off the neck and some red skulls floating and disappearing like you’ve upset the combo counter, but the music, much like the badger mentioned above, doesn’t seem to care one bit. It marches on, unsullied by your incompetence.

If I were Satchel, I’d make up some joke that ended with a groupie saying, “Are you sure you’re in there? I can’t feel anything.”

If you’re a leaderboard player, Unplugged‘s other problem is that the scoring system, as it stands, is ridiculous. At the end of every song, there’s a crowd engagement section where you can get points for just flailing your hands around or making horns. You can get as many points for this as your entire run through a song might’ve scored. It renders the leaderboards meaningless and, for me, at least, unexciting.

This Judge Ain’t No Jury

Unplugged does many things right, has a great track-list, and the partnerships Vertigo Games are making indicate that they’re serious about its continued development. Unfortunately, Satchel’s part renders it somewhat delinquent, and a couple of design choices hold it back from achieving greatness. We only hope that future updates include adding negative audio feedback for missed notes/chords and fixing the leaderboards.

In this first-person adventure, you play Allegro, who, guided by his sister, Allegra, embarks on an adventure in an ancient mystical land. An intriguing opening tutorial talks of an invading army destroying a planet’s ecosystem and upsetting a delicate magical balance.

The production is slick and polished, and between this and the trailers, the expectation of quality is set long before your first teleported step is taken.

King of the swingers

Ionia splits its game time between exploration, puzzles, and the occasional theme-park ride style intermission. A fourth unignorable element is an ongoing exposition, which is usually delivered during gameplay breaks by Allegra but occasionally by another unseen narrator.

Ground-based movement is achieved through teleportation, with options for full-motion available in the settings for those with a strong stomach. Whatever you choose, you’ll also spend a good amount of time moving vertically by ascending bright yellow vines or ladders made of wood or bricks… or mushrooms.

Climbing is achieved by gripping onto things with the controllers and pulling yourself upwards; it’s always a ‘smooth’ movement-action but can be paired with teleporting when necessary.

The puzzles are where the game offers the most player agency and are usually solved by carrying items to a location or, in keeping with the rhythmical world theme, by interacting with a fantastical musical instrument.

The Jungle VIP

The audiovisual side of things is where Ionia excels – but also where the self-described ‘for all ages’ part of its marketing blurb is most prevalent. The dilapidated forest world is brought to life with an earthy consistency and depth. The landscapes are full of bizarre, imaginative, doe-eyed creatures. The voice acting, too, is of a high standard and the, sometimes convoluted, dialogue is delivered with a lot of enthusiasm.

As you woAs you would hope with a game set in a universe born of music, the orchestral folk tunes are beautifully realised, if sometimes a little forgettable. They are all nicely woven into the background noises of the game world and entirely in keeping with the natural vibe of the game.

Reached the top and had to stop

Ionia fundamentally fails at providing a fun, challenging, or entertaining experience on just about every level. Its high production values cannot mask a game that offers little gameplay, and it bungles the delivery of its world-building and lore to the extent that, at its end, you feel like you’re being beaten over the head by Deus Ex Machina.

Beginning with the tutorial, continued with Allegra’s endless prattling and bizarre hallucinogenic history lessons along the way, and right into the bafflingly trite conclusion, Ionia is desperate to tell you about its world – but seems almost as desperate to not let you explore it.

On the technical level, the teleportation implementation causes frustration by seeming to have a cooldown period. It’s only a second or so, but it means you can’t hop through the game at any pace.

A much bigger problem is how little the game actually lets you explore. Trying to teleport to an area of a level that is deemed impossible to reach will see your reticle and guide arc turn red. This happens with such regularity that I’m sure I saw more of this colour in my time with the game than I did anything else. 

This total lack of freedom is compounded during the moments when you’re forced to listen to Allegra’s exposition. For the entirety of the sequence, you will be routed in place. Then, with rage-inducing audacity, her dialogue will tell you to get a move on and follow her – while all the while, the red icons of incapacity keep you rooted to the spot.

When you can move about, you’ll find yourself funnelled through a very narrow playable area. This isn’t unusual in VR games, but most are far better at hiding it than Ionia. The almost universally loved Half-Life: Alyx features similar gameplay ‘corridors’, but the restrictions of an apartment building or train carriage are far less jarring than a knee-high pile of rocks or some insubstantial vegetation.

Climbing, too, is a completely guided experience, but it also offers a complete absence of weight or tactility. Moving hand over hand along a single bright yellow vine, you are struck by a jarring lack of physics. There is a muted audio cue to indicate when you have gripped a climbable surface or item, but no haptic feedback at all. All the time, you’re listening carefully to ensure you don’t plummet (miraculously unharmed) to the floor below. When you reach the end, invariably, a puzzle awaits.

These are, without exception, insultingly easy. Most involve playing specific notes on an instrument, the solution to which will be written in plain view somewhere nearby.

There is a single section, about halfway through, where the nucleus of a good game can be seen: A room-sized puzzle that put me in mind of Tomb Raider. Runes to be placed, arcane symbols to be aligned, secret doorways to be revealed – but sadly, this is but a brief interlude in the verbose world building and on rails gameplay that mars the rest of the experience.

And that’s what’s botherin’ me

From start to finish, Ionia will take you 90 minutes. Trust me when I tell you this is a blessing in disguise. Any longer spent imprisoned in this world of invisible walls with only Allegra’s simpering voice would have been unbearable.

Interestingly, at some point, the words “VR series” have been added to a few of the game’s marketing images, so perhaps there are more $10, 90-minute episodes to come? Who knows? Can they make us care?

I’m tired of monkeying around

Despite appearing to have been made with good intentions and high production values, Rhythm of the Universe: IONIA is a strong example of so much that a VR game shouldn’t be.

Its graphics and sound design are very polished, and the world-building, though muddled, has strengths. But interactions from the player feel pointless, a segue between story elements that the developers are interested in, rather than the true core of a game.

The whole experience is burdened by an apparent need to deliver as much backstory and lore as possible, and, as a result, it’s often disjointed and confusing. Worse still, despite so much time given to this aspect, come the denouement we’re introduced to some pretty fundamental new concepts that, until that moment, have somehow gone entirely unmentioned.

In its defence, ‘for all ages’ is often another way of saying ‘Y’know? For kids!’ and Ionia may serve as a decent gateway VR experience for younger players. However, I’m not in that audience, so I can’t tell you if Allegra’s Children ‘s-TV-Presenter delivery would be as annoying for them as it was for me. I don’t know if linear sequences during which you’re transported through the world on some beast or device would offer them as little entertainment as it did me.

Certainly, Robert (son of the late Steve) Irwin’s flat-screen video message that appears just before the credits (yes, really) sounds like it’s addressed to a group of 4th graders on a field trip, so this might be the game’s actual audience. But, if that is the case, the developers and publishers need to be far more honest about it upfront. 

Book-ended by this bizarre message and the game’s own trailer that serves as an intro-movie (also presented ‘theatre style’), it’s easy to see Rhythm of the Universe – Ionia as a distraction at the zoo or theme park. It’s just as easy to imagine it lying forgotten and unused.

I think it’s important to clarify from the start that this doesn’t actually appear to be the case. Instead, Beat Arena seems to be channelling ‘Rock Band‘ by offering four different instruments to play, promising that it will make you “feel like a rockstar”.

Imagine how great it would be to don your Quest headset and meet up with your friends for a virtual concert as the VRctic Monkeys or the Preten-W.A.? Well, Konami imagined this too! Then, they made this pitiful excuse for a band simulator instead.

If I weren’t heavily sedated

It doesn’t take very long for Beat Arena to inflict its awful design upon the player. Its menus and screens are cumbersome and user-unfriendly. As if navigating these labyrinthine interfaces wasn’t confusing enough, the game insists you hold all buttons for a couple of seconds to activate them with your virtual hand. A virtual hand, I might add, that initially looks like it belongs to a six-year-old girl.

Eventually, finding your way to the tutorial, you can finally get on stage to play some music. As stated above, there are four instruments available. Taking each instrument in turn, I started where most people would; the Lead Guitar. 

For guitar, you use the buttons on the controller in your non-dominant hand to select one of three notes or combine them into a chord. Strumming uses motion-sensing controls on the other controller. It is so frustratingly inconsistent that it gave me Wii-TSD: recurring flashbacks of the crow-barred waggle-controls that tainted Nintendo’s 7th generation console.

Playing the Bass Guitar is less frustrating, as the strumming here is replaced by the trigger and grip buttons. Not only does this remove the nightmarish motion controls, but it is actually an excellent approximation of how one might pluck at the strings of the instrument in real life. On the downside, the bass is both the least sexy instrument in the world and the most boring instrument to play in this already tedious game.

At first, the Keyboard feels like it could be entertaining, and it’s probably the best sound match for most of the music on offer. The keys are divided into broad groups slapped in time to the beats that fly towards you. The speed initially appears to offer a welcome challenge, but with only a handful of ‘notes’ and no further nuance, the instrument quickly reveals itself as far too basic to be fun for long.

Finally, we come to the drums and the only instrument that is consistently any fun to perform on. You’re given a complete 8-piece kit, with each drum or cymbal being a different colour and shape. These are matched by the notes rolling towards you, which must be struck when they overlay their respective drums. Unfortunately, the problems begin again when things get hectic on the more difficult (and potentially more enjoyable tracks). Lower drums are positioned in a place that is far too easy to accidentally hit, and you might not even realise that you’re doing so, thanks to the poorly implemented haptics that fail to convey strikes or misses accurately.

Finally, as you wrestle with all these barriers to enjoyment, you also have your bandmates to consider. In single-player, you are joined on stage for each performance by two AI companions who play the other instruments required for the song. As you play, you are supposed to build a rapport with them through emojis selected via the thumbsticks or turning towards them when they teleport (yes, teleport) closer to you. As with everything else in Beat Arena, there is so little feedback to your actions, whether positive or negative, that the whole exercise is more of an annoyance than a fun diversion.

A Preserved Moose on Stage

When it comes to Beat Arena’s graphics, I suspect that, as a middle-aged Englishman, I’m not the target audience for the intensely JRPG avatars featured in the game. The neon pinks and blues that make up the majority of the game’s palette are striking, but the design of the stages, characters, and backgrounds are on a par with a five-year-old mobile phone game.

Interestingly, Beat Arena includes music from Konami’s library of classic arcade games. Knowing this, I was excited to see how they had arranged the soundtracks for titles like Gradius, Lifeforce, or Scramble for this gameplay format. Sadly, Konami’s idea of what constitutes their Classic Arcade Games is very different to my own. Instead of Salamander, Thundercross, and TwinBee, they delivered ‘BeatMania’, ‘BeatMania Complete Mix’, and ‘BeatMania 7thMix – Keepin’ Evolution’.

And no, I didn’t make that last one up.

As for the music itself, I’ll give the performances the benefit of the doubt, as more than the usual amount of subjectivity applies to rhythm and dance. Regardless of taste, however, the mechanics, overlays, and interactions the songs are tied to often don’t make sense. You particularly feel it while wading through the tutorial and early levels when there’s not enough going on to distract you from their failings.

Are the avatar designs a matter of taste too? They’re lazy, unoriginal, expressionless, and dull. Regardless of origin, the designs embody an aesthetic seemingly chosen to reinforce a stereotype held by a sub-sector of the western audience. 

That’s just nitpicking, isn’t it?

As for game structure, there’s a campaign consisting of up to fifty performances. A branching campaign design allows you to work your way through while mostly avoiding your least favourite instrument. 

In case you missed what I just said – I’m saying that the best thing about Beat Arena is that it allows you to skip an entire quarter of its content. Assuming you haven’t committed to writing a review of this game but somehow muster the enthusiasm to finish it, you will have wasted around three hours of your life.

In lieu of actually delivering a virtual reality band experience that could have been a saving grace for Beat Arena, Konami brings what it’s calling an ‘asynchronous solution’. What this means is that you get to strum your poorly-mapped guitar along to songs you don’t know in the presence of ugly, woefully animated avatars. You do so by selecting a recording of their performance from a horribly designed menu.

The mind-boggling thing is, as hugely unsatisfying as the experience of ‘asynchronous multiplayer’ is, there are, in fact, quite a lot of people playing this game. I have no idea why anyone would do this to themselves, but I’m tempted to assume that Konami have recruited an army of BeatMania fanatics to populate its virtual spaces with near-identical avatars delivering barely competent performances.

None more black

It’s not often I find myself without anything good to say about a game at all, but I’m really struggling when it comes to Beat Arena. Rhythm games have been around nearly a quarter of a century. They include some of the best games ever made. So when a company with the financial resources and sector experience of Konami releases one as objectionably bad as Beat Arena, there really is no excuse. At $30, Beat Arena is an abysmally low-end game selling at an ambitiously high-end price.

Attack Of The 50 Foot Anime

When you first jump into the game, you’re greeted by a giant floating image of Miss Hatsune herself. You find yourself in some sort of futuristic room with a pretty static (yet huge) image of the turquoise-haired starlet looming large before you. From here, you can navigate around. There’s an option for a tutorial, a concert mode, leaderboards, and of course, the actual gameplay. Always one to come prepared, I dipped into the tutorial first.

The tutorial is pretty straightforward. If you’ve played any of these types of games previously, it’s not entirely necessary. There are speakers which produce musical notes; you have to use your fairy wands (because Japanese pop star, so natch) to hit the notes as they come flying at you. No timed trigger pulls or real directional pitfalls to contend with. The end. Simple enough.

That out of the way, I wanted to get into the meat of the game. When you’re ready to play, you’ll find 10 unlocked songs available for you to conquer. You can also choose from two difficulties: normal and hard. Hatsune Miku VR allows you to choose between two costumes of Hatsune to wear and two different style wands. One set looks like a typical fairy wand, replete with a star on top – the other looks like spring onions. I went with the onions because nothing quite shouts Pop Star like green onions.

Assuming there was some difficulty curve along the 10 unlocked stages available, I started at 1. Well, you know what they say about making assumptions, right?

“Were You Listening To Me, Neo?”

“Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?” Okay, Morpheus, you got me. When stage 1 opens up, a 3D 16-year-old anime-style school girl prances out onto the virtual stage in her schoolgirl uniform. She immediately turns her back to you, and the “performance” begins with a bit of light hip-and-rump shaking. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I should be playing a game or throwing dollar bills at her. But, I didn’t have long to wonder because soon, the colorful speakers floating in the air behind her started to pump out colorful music notes. The notes needed my attention, begone jailbait!

The mechanics here are straightforward. You just hold out your wand and touch every note that comes your way. Every note you manage to touch contributes to your “fever” bar (cowbell not included). Fill up your fever bar, and you can initiate a type of bonus round. The old stage will disappear, and then you’ll be transported to a dark stage where Hatsune will dance and sing on a light-up dance floor. It’s very Saturday Night Fever. If you miss a note in normal mode, you will lose your progress on your fever meter. But in this stage, missing some musical notes doesn’t matter, and each note and combo successfully hit gives you more points than usual.

I slogged through as best I could, finding my annoyance with Hatsune growing with every note. I found myself growling over and over, “Could you just….move! You make a better door than a window, Hatsune! OMG! Get. Out. Of. The. Way!”.

I did not want to be on Hatsune’s stage. Why did she have to be right in front of you? Couldn’t they have put her off to the side somewhere? Here she was, winking, prancing and twirling and flipping her hair coquettishly all over the place and obscuring the notes so that I couldn’t even see some of them until it was too late. Sayonara high score and combo streak! “Shhh,” Hatsune seemed to say. “Your high score be damned, mortal. WATCH MEEEEEEE!”

Despite doing my best to ignore Hatsune’s incessant struts, my eyes would inevitably catch her movements just long enough to break my focus. It’s beyond annoying, and it will plague you the entire game. In a later stage that was actually a lot more challenging than the first one, she ruined an over 400-note streak I had by blocking my view. Then, I kid you not, she blew a kiss over her shoulder and winked at me. If you could give the middle finger in VR in this game, I would have. Instead, I was just left impotently flipping off my living room.

At the end of each round, you’ll wait for your result with Hatsune. You’ll see a listing of your notes, combos, score, and you’ll get a grade. The highest I ever got was an “SS”; the lowest was a “C.” Get a good enough score, and you’ll hear the crowd cheer and clap. Give a mediocre to poor performance, and you’ll get booed. On some levels, even a “B” will get you booed. The crowd is fickle, Hatsune, but we can’t let them destroy our spirit!

New Quest, Who Dis?

After the perplexing and underwhelming first round, I needed answers. Who the heck was this Hatsune Miku? Was I supposed to know her? Was she really world-famous like the game description said? Was her popularity supposed to be the main draw in what was shaping up to be a decidedly mediocre game? So, I did some digging. Turns out our heroine (or more aptly, villain) has her very own Wiki page!

Here’s the dirt. Apparently, Hatsune Miku is a “Vocaloid software voicebank developed by Crypton Future Media” way back in 2007. Hatsune gets her voice from Saki Furita, a Japanese voice actress the developers used as a model.

Now here’s where things get bonkers. In Japan, Hatsune has been marketed as a “virtual idol.” She’s even been used to hold actual concerts where she appears on stage in all her animated projection glory. When translated, her name means “the first sound of the future.” She’s apparently so big in Japan that she has appeared in multiple anime shows and movies, on the sides of official race cars, and in other video games. According to Crypton, she had over 100,000 original songs to her name by 2011.

Not impressed yet? Well, she was even announced as a performer for Coachella 2020. But, the pandemic ruined Hatsune’s electric dreams there when Coachella was canceled. Here’s to hoping Lil Sebastian can headline next year.

Worst Concert Ever!

Curiosity satisfied, I dove back into the game. I was hoping I might enjoy it more the further in I got. That didn’t happen. I tried every level, on both difficulty settings, some multiple times. To be blunt, Hatsune Miku VR is just incredibly lackluster. The backgrounds and backdrops are pretty bland. They’re poorly rendered, and there’s no real “wow” factor to any of them. They’re just not that interesting to look at. Even Hatsune herself isn’t that well “finished.” Once the initial novelty of having her there wears off, and you have the chance to really “look” at her, there are some glaring holes and glitches in her rendering. This is especially true if you go into concert mode and fiddle around with your placement on the stage to look at her from different angles.

Then there’s the disappointment that is actual gameplay. As far as I can tell, there’s no real purpose to the notes being different colors other than to make the overall game more colorful. You don’t seem to get any more points for gold notes than green ones, for example. The game feels very repetitious quite early on, especially since the notes seem weirdly “timed” with the music. Very rarely did anything seem to actually sync. There were several instances where I thought a song was over, only to have it start up again. The erratic, unpredictable music makes the game as a whole feel erratic and unpredictable. While you could look at that as a way in which the game is naturally more challenging than maybe some others in the genre, I just found it flat out irksome.

As I mentioned earlier, progress in Hatsune Miku VR isn’t linear, either. There is no rise in difficulty; it’s all just…there. Stage 1 was easier than most. But stage 10, which you might naturally think was the big finale, was incredibly short and simple. I actually found stages 5 and 7 more difficult.

Even though Hatsune Miku VR touts itself as a dance game, other than my arms, I felt much more stationary in this game than in others. Yes, there were times when my arms were moving in a flurry, and I swore only an octopus would be able to hit all those notes. But, other than your arms, you’re pretty much just standing there. The hard mode does introduce bombs, which can shatter your streak if you don’t dodge them. At my most “active,” I felt as though I were doing some kind of ribbon exercise in gymnastics, but without all the leaping around. In comparison, in titles like Beat Saber and Audio Trip, I could feel my heart pumping and knew I was getting in a bit of exercise. In Hatsune Miku VR, I just felt my blood pressure rising because little miss “Look At Meeeee” wouldn’t get the hell out of the way.

One thing that makes Hatsune Miku VR a bit different is that you can’t fail out of a stage. I tried. I stood there purposely with my hands behind my back the entire time and nadda. I even managed to score a few points somehow, go figure.

Sadly though, I really can’t say much that’s positive about Hatsune Miku VR. It’s not innovative. It’s not beautiful. There’s no real sense of progression, and even though the music changes, it somehow still ends up feeling cloyingly repetitious. Poor Lil Hatsune herself ends up feeling more like an annoying fly rather than a technological marvel.

Unless you’re a hardcore anime fan or Hatsune Miku fan, in particular, I can’t recommend this game. It’s so generally “blah” that I don’t really feel the need to revisit it in the future. Sure, I could go back and try to top my scores. I simply… don’t want to. This is odd for me because I usually border on obsessive when it comes to getting that highest rank possible. But I didn’t find this game fun, and there are too many other options for Quest games that ARE fun. This game functions, there are no insane bugs or weird glitches, and that’s about the most I can say it has going for it.

At just under 25 bucks, it’s simply not worth it. Nor are the various DLC packs, which will charge you another $11.99 for 5 additional songs. The only exception here I can see is that maybe Hatsune Miku VR is a game for kids who are into anime or want to play a dance/music game that’s more relaxed. If they’ve tried other games and got frustrated with failing out as the content got more demanding, Hatsune Miku VR could be an option for them, as failing out is simply impossible.

The real shame is, the concept could have been great. Watching a top performer do their thing while you do yours in a VR world which provides limitless possibilities could be beyond cool. But that isn’t what happens here, not even close. Save your money. This is one concert you won’t mind missing. Sorry, Hatsune. Good luck with your career..at least you never age.

JOURNALISM AS PERFORMED BY BEES

You begin the game as the newest recruit to Space Channel 5 and are taken under the wing of a veteran reporter, Ulala, who shows you the ropes of dance-based journalism. No sooner has she started putting you through a series of basic moves when you are interrupted by Breaking News! Aliens have invaded the planet and are holding people hostage! Only you and your intrepid co-reporter can get to the bottom of this by “investigating the only way we know how!” – Cue dance break.

This storyline will see you face four levels of increasingly nonchalant shuffling as you try to stop the evil(ish) Morolians from stealing all of Earths “Groove Moxy”. You’ll also find yourself inadvertently rescuing a previously unmentioned space princess. Cool.

Along the way, you will meet new characters whose appearance, dialogue and relevance to the main plot will leave you scratching your head in confusion. But don’t worry about any of that, you’re here to dance!

DANCE LIKE (YOU HOPE) NO ONE IS WATCHING

In the simplest of terms, Space Channel 5 has not come to revolutionise the way you view dance rhythm games in VR. In fact, Space Channel 5 has not come to revolutionise anything at all. The evil space meanies will perform a series of moves in sequence, which you will then have to mirror back in time with the beat. This core loop will make up 100% of your game time. The excellent Dance Central has you cutting shapes and busting moves which actually have roots in modern street dance. Space Channel 5, however, will have you feeling like you’re doing the dance equivalent of karaoke to John Travolta’s seminal routine in Saturday Night Fever. The challenge doesn’t come in the form of carrying out particularly difficult moves but in the ability to memorise and repeat increasingly complicated strings of simple ones.

The actual dancing itself has more in common with another outstanding rhythm game, OhShape, than it does with more traditional dance games. The actions required to perform a successful move just involve hitting a pose in time, with no noticeable scoring on how well you follow the form of the movement. As long as you are in the appropriate finishing position when the beat hits, you get the points. While this is fine for OhShape, it’s lamentable that Space Channel 5 lacks any sense that you’re actually dancing.  

WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

Once you start the game, you are issued with your first “costume”, complete with full-body IK, and it is apparent early on that I (a 40-year-old man) am not the target audience for this game. The arms, at full extension, feel like they stop just passed the wrist, and the IK comes complete with breasts that seem to grow directly out of your chin. I’m aware that the game targets a much younger, and therefore physically smaller audience. Still, for anyone above 4’5,” this all creates a strange disconnect with your character.

Graphically, Space Channel 5 is bright and vibrant but lacks any level of depth or polish that one might expect from a VR game in 2020. The character animations are appallingly stilted for a game which centres itself around rhythm. The dancers demonstrate all the fluidity and grace of a toddler whos lower half is made of Lego. In fact, the dance animations all look worse than the Dreamcast original and remind me of the animations from the earliest version of The Sims.

This lack of visual refinement is made even starker as the characters offer no connection to the world in which they reside. No shadows or textures of any sort exist to ground them. As a result, all the dancers just seem to float at floor level. They look like they have been copy/pasted in place as part of some rushed college animation project rather than as part of a polished Quest title. 

BOOM, BOOM, LIGHTLY SHAKE THE ROOM

The sound in Space Channel 5 is the comparative highlight of the game, although that’s really not saying much. The music is the type of aimlessly catchy computer game music from the late 90’s that while not offensive, is really not good enough to carry a rhythm game. If you had any thoughts of finding a favourite song to jam out to, you might want to put that notion aside quickly.

Each level consists of a single track that changes tempo according to which part of the level you reach, but there is nothing as refined as a song select. The sound effects are a bog-standard, low effort affair. They seem to have been recycled directly from the original for the sake of nostalgia. Outside of a few little chimes and tinkles that tell you that you’ve completed the moves correctly, there’s really not much else going on. The menu music sounds like you’re trapped in some kind of hellish theme park hotel elevator. The menu sounds are the sort of thing you’d expect to hear coming out a futuristic Japanese toilet. The same can be said for the voice acting.

IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM

When it comes to content, Space Channel 5 is just as maddeningly empty as it is in every other metric. There is the Story Mode, which consists of four levels that I completed on the first run in 30 minutes. Once completed, these can then be selected individually should you be masochistic enough to wish to play them again.

There is also an Arcade Mode; however, this just appears to be the same four levels without the ability to lose. There is even an alternate arcade mode which features identical gameplay but is presented by a Japanese speaking host and what appears to be a group of dancing Oompa Loompa’s. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) this is just a single level.

There is also a Trial Dance mode which consists of the “100 Dance Battle”. Quell that rising excitement. This mode is essentially just ten levels, each of which introduces an even more annoying pose to perform on repeat for two minutes. Whilst “100 Dance Battle” sounds promising, I was able to beat it in twelve minutes, and two of those minutes were spent screaming into the void. Thankfully, I finished this mode just before I lost the will to live.

Other content-stretching features include a dressing room (that allows you to select from thirteen different pre-made outfits), a “Friend-o-pedia” (which gives you short and pointless biographies of all the various background characters), and a calorie counter. Other than that, there’s nothing. No difficulty settings, no variant game modes, no ability to skip through the endless dialogue. Nothing. I was able to complete everything that this game offers twice in just over ninety minutes!

SECOND OPINION

Despite being a BIG fan of rhythm games in VR, I really got the feeling that I am not the intended target market for this game. In the spirit of fairness, I handed my Quest to my daughter and two of her friends to gain a different viewpoint. For reference, the girls are all slightly under the recommended age for VR. As they had no previous VR experience, I let them play Beat Saber and Dance Central first and then had them play Space Channel 5. 

At the end of the round, I asked the girls if they wanted to play Space Channel 5 again. Two out of three said, and I quote, “No, that was silly.” One of the group, however, enthusiastically decried (and again, I quote) “9 out of 10! Best game ever!” and demanded another turn. The first two just wanted to play some more Beat Saber…

So, based on this highly scientific audience segmentation exercise, the gameplay score gains one additional point. If you happen to be buying the game for a younger child, there is at least some [based on the rigorous science, I’d say it’s a 33.33% – Ed.] chance that it won’t be a complete waste of time.

OUTRO

Space Channel 5: Kinda Funky News Flash! feels out of place in the Quest library. It contributes very little to an already crowded genre and yet manages to somehow underachieve in every conceivable way. From lazy graphics to boring dance moves and an aggravating plotline, Space Channel 5 manages to stand out only by just how bad it is. Unless you happen to be a massive fan of the original game who is willing to shell out £19 on nostalgia alone, then I would stay well clear of this one. With an array of incredible rhythm games out there, you’d be much better off playing Dance Central or Synth Riders if you really want to feel like a real groove master.                                                              

As per their roadmap, seen below, they first added multiplayer (something that Beat Games promised for Beat Saber ages ago, but have not gotten around to doing…), then added lots of new tracks, and then added 90 and 360-degree levels to every song – and now, with their latest DLC, Cyberpunk Essentials, they’re adding ten new EDM songs to the game from artists such as Tokyo Machine, Pegboard Nerds, RIOT, MUZZ, and Au5.

Half of the tracks are available for free, and are included in Synth Rider’s latest update, and the other half of the Cyberpunk Essentials pack can be purchased as a DLC for $8.99 (bundled) or $1.99 per track if you prefer to buy them separately.

Here’s the full track list:

5 Free Tracks:

• “Voidwalkers” – Au5
• “I’ll Fight Back” – Sullivan King
• “Calling Out” – MUZZ (feat. Skyelle & KG)
• “Showdown” – F.O.O.L
• “Revenger” – F.O.O.L

5 DLC Tracks:

• “Take That” – RIOT
• “Eden” – Au5 & Danyka Nadeau
• “TURBO” – Tokyo Machine
• “MOSHI” Pegboard Nerds & Tokyo Machine
• “New Game” – Nitro Fun

You can see a trailer for this DLC right here – and if you watch to the end, you’ll see a teaser for the next pack! It’s clearly chip-tune themed and it’s called !INVADERS

With the addition of “Cyberpunk Essentials”, the Synth Riders music library now features 55 songs (45 free and 10 paid), with a possibility to extend the collection thanks to the official custom song support. Each track is mapped with 5 difficulties and can be experienced in 90, 180, 360, and elevating 360+ spins. This pack also supports the “Play Together” feature for Multiplayer – and we think it’s VERY cool that when the host player owns any paid songs, everyone in the room gets to play them for free.

We remain quite impressed with Synth Riders, and with Kluge’s continued commitment to improving the game and acting on community feedback. What do you think of the improvements they’ve been making to the game? And do you have any suggestions we should pass on to Kluge? Let us know in the comments!

I received a 60-day free trial to evaluate Supernatural, after which Within would charge my credit card $19.00 per month or I could buy an annual subscription for $179.00. Considering that the most expensive purchase price for a fitness game available on the oculus quest up to this point was $29.99, I had pretty high expectations.

When I embarked on my evaluation, to gauge the value of Supernatural, I decided to use a two-pronged approach: for the first 30 days, Supernatural would be the only app I would use for my fitness in VR. I would have to try at least 30 unique workouts. Exclusively using Supernatural as my workout for a month would allow me to judge its effectiveness, apart from the other apps in the VR space.  

After the first 30 days, I allowed myself to choose the other fitness games on the Oculus Quest and would turn to or incorporate Supernatural into my workouts as much or as little as I wanted, but no less than once per week. I was hoping to evaluate Supernatural’s value for an average user. How would I feel about Supernatural when it wasn’t my only option, but just one of the many VR fitness options available? Because Supernatural‘s asking price is so much higher than its competitors, it is fair to assess Supernatural‘s value relative to other, less expensive fitness applications already available without a subscription. After all, a higher price suggests higher quality.

The Basics

Every day, a new workout waits for you in your lobby. You can either choose the new playlist or repeat a workout from the past. At the moment, you can filter the workouts by the trainer, by length, or intensity, but not by the genre (though this functionality will be in future releases). 

Before you begin each workout, you are greeted by the trainer who will demonstrate a very quick set of “warm-up” exercises (two or three squats or arm movements), and then the workout playlist will begin. Each workout is associated with only one trainer. The first song will always be a low-intensity warm-up song. 

I covered the basics in my earlier first impressions review, but the basic routine goes like this: In each hand, you have a bat:  one black and one white.  As each song plays, black and white balloons come towards you from “portals” which change positions every so often, so that you’ll rotate in a circle to hit them. Each balloon has a little transparent cone attached, which indicates the direction you’re supposed to hit the balloon. If you hit the balloon at the right angle, the balloon explodes, and you hear a little swish. Your controller will vibrate. 

If you hit the balloon at the wrong angle, you will hear a bouncing rubber ball sound (like a kickball), and the balloon will go flying off in some direction. Some balloons have arrow trails pointing to the right or left. If you see those, you’re supposed to swing with a full followthrough and turn in the direction of the arrows. If the balloons have comet tails, you’re supposed to exaggerate your swing and follow the tails with your bat. 

Frequently, golden triangles will also shoot out of the portals. If the triangles lean in one direction, you’re supposed to lunge within the triangle. If the triangle is equilateral(?), you’re just supposed to squat. You cannot disable the squats or lunges. 

A workout may have a High, Medium, or Low-Intensity indicator on its tile in the main menu, but you cannot choose the difficulty or intensity of a workout beyond that. The amount and speed of the balloons are supposed to scale down or up to your skill level.   While you can skip the warm-up and cool down, you cannot skip around/re-order the songs within the playlist itself. 

As you play through each song in the workout, you continuously hear a canned recording of the trainer talking over the music in a normal speaking voice. Some of the phrases may directly relate to the song or workout playlist, but most of the dialog is generic. If you play several workouts by the same trainer, you will often hear repeated phrases. Whether you miss all your targets or hit every single one, the voice over is precisely the same. You can lower the trainer’s voiceover volume by half, but you cannot mute the trainer or entirely or turn it off. 

At the end of each song, you will see your score. Supernatural calculates your score by combining your accuracy and “power” of your follow-through. After the final song, a video of the trainer re-appears for a “cool-down”: a minute to about a minute-and-a-half, where he or she will demonstrate one or two basic stretches. One lazy design choice: During the warm-up and cool-down videos with the trainers, your controllers still look like bats, even though you’re not supposed to hit anything. Why? For what purpose? 

After your “cool-down” is complete,  you receive your workout’s score and return to Supernatural’s main menu. Supernatural’s companion app will display any workout you perform along with your score. Still, you won’t be able to compare your current score in any given workout to a previous score within the application. 

In the main menu, you will see a running total of your workout score for the week, along with the scores of any other users you follow on Supernatural’s companion app.

The Lack of Basics

Aside from the backdrops, which remind me of the aesthetic in Guided Tai Chi, and the 1-minute warm-up/cool-down videos, the actual workout experience is nearly identical to Beat Saber, with a few variations, which was kind of disappointing to begin with, but Supernatural is so locked down, with virtually no ability to customize your experience, that justifying a subscription price became very difficult. 

Lackluster Results

After a month of exclusively and earnestly playing Supernatural, did I lose any weight? Did I gain any muscle? Did I lose any inches? Nope. According to my little measuring tape and my fancy-schmancy smart scale, I stayed exactly the same in pretty much every metric. 

I’ll admit, I honestly thought that I would burn more calories in Supernatural than I did in Beat Saber or Box VR. But the truth was in the numbers: the calorie burn rate was, on average, equal with both apps.

Here are some workout results from various other apps, with the final two being from Supernatural, so you can compare.

The reason I probably felt like I was working harder was probably that I didn’t get a break between each song. According to my fitness tracker, Supernatural’s calorie burn rate falls squarely in the center of other available fitness applications on the Oculus Quest. It beats out Guided Tai Chi(duh), burns the same amount of calories as with Beat Saber, Box VR, Synth Riders, or Dance Central, but comes nowhere close the number of calories I burn when I play Pistol Whip, Thrill of the Fight, or Ohshape. 

To be honest the workout was….fine. It was a decent cardio workout. But it was the SAME workout you could get with Beat Saber for a fraction of the price, so long as you lock your wrists and don’t mind EDM. If you do mind EDM, you can use BMBF to add your own custom songs to Beat Saber.

Canned Playlists Only – No Singles Allowed

“But, they’re giving you new music every day!” This just wasn’t the case. When the Supernatural App turns one year old, they will have 365 recorded playlists: one “new” playlist per day. So far, each song has been repeated at least once and usually more than once. In just the first month alone, where all of the content should have been new, there were at least 90 repeated songs, where the choreography was identical. 

I will say this upfront: I don’t mind paying a subscription fee for access to unlimited music…or games. I can imagine a world where I would happily pay $20.00 for access to all the games on the Oculus Quest (OculusPrime???): as far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m downloading more than one game or one album’s worth of new content per month, the subscription has paid for itself, since it would cost me the same to buy the same amount of content. But I already have one music subscription, and that’s not what you’re getting when you subscribe to Supernatural.

Even though you’re paying almost double the price of a digital unlimited music subscription, you can’t even choose to play just one song by itself in Supernatural. You also can’t create your playlists with the songs that have already been choreographed.  

When I first opened the Supernatural platform, I wanted to choose one song I liked and play through it (there weren’t too many). I would have preferred to pick through a list of songs and create my playlists and workouts around music that suited my tastes. Of the 60 workout playlists I had access to, there were only five playlists where I enjoyed each song.

I wanted the ability to not listen to music I didn’t like. Even the free version of Pandora allows you to skip five songs per hour. While playing Supernatural, if I chose to roll the dice with the daily workout, which I had to do if I didn’t want to repeat a workout, I had to listen to a lot of music I didn’t enjoy, which just made me hate my workout that day and turned me off from the entire platform. 

Developer Within’s key justification for the subscription pricing model is its extensive (and very complicated) music licensing agreement. Without having seen their contract, I can’t comment on how good/ bad/restrictive or permissive this agreement is. Supernatural’s creators have made it clear that the ability to play a song individually is not going to be a feature of this particular application. As someone sensitive to the complicated world of entertainment law and digital music licensing, I’m sympathetic. But as a consumer, frankly, I don’t care.

Supernatural has been placing a lot of emphasis on the fact that Beat Saber and BoxVR do not have popular music, where Supernatural does. But, if you’re looking for fully licensed pop-music, you don’t have to look further than Dance Central, which provides a full-body workout. Dance Central may not feel as intense but moves your entire body and offers an equivalent total body workout and calorie burn. 

Out of the box, Dance Central comes with 30 popular songs (many of which were also in Supernatural workouts – like Kendrick Lamar’s Humble, Bad Romance By Lady Gaga, Attention by Charlie Puth and New Rules by Dua Lipa). Additional tracks, fully choreographed, are available in Dance Central for $1.99 each.

Ohshape!, Synth Riders, Audio Trip, Audio Shield, and Racket: NX all OFFICIALLY allow users to import custom songs and maps, giving each of those games an almost infinite selection of possibilities. It’s also not exactly a secret that you can import custom songs and maps into Beat Saber using BMBF. You can even use an AI program available for free at beatsage.com to create Beat Saber levels with your own music.

No Save. No Restart.

Restarting a single song seems like such a simple feature that you don’t fully appreciate until you don’t have it. However, if you want to want to restart a song, regardless of whether you’re in the first song or the last song of your workout, you can’t. You can only exit and restart the entire workout from the top. Being able to hit “Restart Song” in literally every other music and rhythm game available on the Oculus Quest is a feature I will now forever look upon with new appreciation. In Supernatural, the absence of such an essential element was glaring. 

You also can’t save your progress mid-workout and come back to it later. I would have appreciated the ability to exit out of Supernatural and go back to a workout after I dealt with some real-world interruptions, but that option isn’t available. 

While I was reviewing Supernatural, I was observing the shelter-in-place-order in my state. I didn’t always have my workout spaces to myself, and occasionally I had to take off my headset to do some reasonably standard adulting. 

Sometimes, the app would take FOREVER to load the next song, and I would be stuck staring at a black screen with what I’ve affectionately nicknamed the “yellow bar of death.” I wanted just to exit Supernatural and come back later. But I couldn’t do that. If I left the workout, I’d have to start it all over again. 

I’m going to tell you a secret about exercise: the benefits of daily workouts are cumulative. If you do 10 minutes of working out in the morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon, and 10 minutes at night, you’ll get the same benefits as you would have working out for 30 minutes straight. My point? If I made it three songs into a workout, I didn’t need to start the workout from the top.   

Saving in the middle of a playlist isn’t available in other music and rhythm games, but those games don’t need it because I can play individual songs. I’m also not expected to pay hundreds of dollars per year for access to those games.   

Squats and Lunges… Whether You Can Do Them or Not.

When I first purchased the Oculus Quest, in addition to seeing its potential for the fitness industry, I also saw VR as a great alternative for people with limited mobility to get some cardio exercise. If you’re disabled or injured at all, there is just no way to play Supernatural safely. For me, there were other reasons why I wanted to disable the squat and lunge triangles: I hated the way they were incorporated.

If executed properly, squats and lunges can be a great lower body workout. You do not need to perform these at high speed, and are far more effective as a muscle-building exercise when you take your time. If done incorrectly, you are more likely to injure your back or knees. 

Even though I know better, though I know the proper form, I caught myself bending my spine to get within the perimeter of the triangles, rather than using my hips and thighs to do a proper lunge or squat. I found the way the choreography often directed me to change directions or reach right before performing multiple rapid sets of squats or lunges made it difficult to place my feet at the proper width and position within the time provided. I imagine that a fitness novice would probably have a tough time keeping up. 

Another factor I don’t think the choreographer considered was the sheer weight of the headset. When you have an Oculus Quest headset on, the weight causes your head to lean slightly forward.  Now, I have a battery pack tied to the back of my headset to counterbalance the weight, but even so, my head always tilts forward slightly.  Proper form for squats and lunges requires you to keep your head level and your chest up, which is already difficult when your arms are flailing in every direction, trying to hit virtual balloons. If you don’t have proper upper body form when you squat, the result is usually lower back pain. If your knees go out past your toes when you bend, you will lose your balance and risk putting too much pressure on your knees. Unsurprisingly, I had both lower back pain and knee pain for several days during my trial of the Supernatural app. 

To be fair: During the videos at the beginning of several workouts and in the canned voice-overs, the trainers are constantly reminding you to use proper form, but the speed of the game makes this hard to implement consciously. 

Every other fitness app that has obstacles for you to dodge also allows you to disable those obstacles from the settings or options menu.  

360 Arena… Whether You Want it or Not

I don’t have a ton of space in my apartment and there were a few days when I had to work out in an area that was about 8’x5’. For every other fitness game on the Oculus Quest, except for Thrill of the Fight, I’ve never had a problem working out in that space. But while using Supernatural, I ended up traveling a lot because of the constant “Turn-lunge, Turn-Lunge.” I hit the walls with my controller/knuckles or came up against my guardian more than any other app on the entire platform. Once, I slammed my hand on the corner of a chest of drawers and screamed like someone was trying to murder me. 

Regardless of whatever difficulties creating a reduced rotation mode would create for the developers, as a consumer, this felt like a huge miss. I can see the benefit of turning to your right or left, and I know that there are people who want to utilize the full capability of untethered VR. Giving me the option of changing the rotation to 180 or 90 probably would open Supernatural to tethered VR headsets like the Oculus Rift or PSVR and would broaden Supernatural’s appeal.  There is no physical advantage 360 motion offers that 180 motion doesn’t. 

Opposite of Personalized

I’ve talked about how you can’t disable or enable features and how you can’t make custom playlists. I think the reason this bothered me is that I immediately wanted to do all those things. 

I wanted to design my workouts with songs I liked, pick my backdrops for each song, change the colors of the bats and the targets, and turn the trainer’s voiceovers off completely. I wanted to choose a warm-up and cool-down videos with the trainer I liked the best, regardless of which workout I decided to play. I also wanted to make the directional cones more opaque so that I could see them better. 

I wanted a list of songs AND a list of premade workouts, if that’s how I wanted to go that day. Supernatural recently implemented a change that would allow you to see an indicator of how many songs remain in your workout. Still, you don’t have the option of a countdown timer, which is one feature that I find insanely useful when I am on a time crunch and is a feature I appreciate in BoxVR and Guided Tai Chi. 

You can’t customize any of those things in Supernatural.

The only personalization available is on the main menu page. You can bookmark any workout as a favorite so you can jump right to it. Since they’re planning to have 365 workouts by next April, I imagine the “Favorites” feature is going to come in handy for subscribers. 

Supernatural‘s creators appear to want it both ways: they want to make an app with broad appeal, but they’re actively preventing users from adjusting the application to suit their individual personalities and limitations. With no options to make Supernatural feel like my own, it just feels generic. 

Where’s The Party?

I talked about the lack of any sort of multiplayer mode when I did the first look at Supernatural back in late April. At the time, I complained that Supernatural would require additional household users to each pay for their own individual accounts, even when sharing the same headset. The creators of Supernatural have since stated that they are working on supporting multiple user accounts for one headset without having to buy additional subscriptions. After experiencing Supernatural for a full two months, I think some kind of online multiplayer or interactive party mode would have gone a long way towards adding in some of the competitive elements I felt were missing. 

There is a weekly leaderboard on the main screen, where you can see the compiled scores of other users you follow in the companion app, but that’s as social as the VR aspect of Supernatural gets. There don’t appear to be any plans to add a multiplayer mode to the Supernatural platform.

I Still Don’t get the Companion App

After my first impression review, I felt that maybe I hadn’t given Supernatural’s companion app a fair shake. I didn’t see much point to it after I synced my phone to my headset, which I think also served as a way to sync my fitness tracker’s data with the headset, though Supernatural doesn’t support my Fitbit and I had to track my workout using Fitbit’s platform.

So, I redoubled my efforts to “get it”. 

I followed as many users as I could within Supernatural‘s companion app. I checked in on the companion app as often as I remembered, occasionally giving a thumbs-up to stranger’s workouts. Since I didn’t actually know any of the people I followed, the social aspect of Supernatural’s companion app fell a bit flat. 

The only function Supernatural‘s companion app served was to remind me which workouts I performed and what my score was. If I performed the same workout multiple times, the app did not track my progress or compare my new score for that workout to previous times I tried that workout.

Since I was trying to avoid repetition during my evaluation, Supernatural‘s companion app helped me keep track of which workouts I performed. If I hadn’t been reviewing the game, once I synced my headset, I probably would have forgotten about the companion app entirely, since it’s not otherwise even mentioned and all of my fitness data is available on my Fitbit’s app. 

Removed Gamification. Removed the Fun.

Only a week into my 60-day trial, I internally started to make excuses for why I didn’t need to work out that day in Supernatural. I found myself getting bored during my workouts and wondering how many songs were left before I could stop and get out of this damn headset. As soon as I hit the 30-day mark and was “allowed” to play other games, I almost always chose another game over Supernatural every morning, going back to Supernatural only a few times per week.

Why wasn’t I having fun? Why was I subconsciously trying to make excuses to myself to get out of playing every day…even though working out with Supernatural was ACTUALLY MY JOB? Why was I getting bored in the middle of workouts? 

As a reviewer, my job isn’t just to look at a game and say “hey, this is fun,”  or “hey, this is not fun,” but to give you a solid justification for my perspective. I agonized about understanding why Supernatural wasn’t fun. What made me look forward to playing Beat Saber, Ohshape!, Dance Central, Pistol Whip, and even BoxVR, where I had to essentially guilt/force myself to play Supernatural after the first few days? 

When I used other fitness games to workout, I usually had to force myself to stop playing so I wouldn’t be late to class/work. Why was this different? It just didn’t make sense …but I knew it was true. 

Ultimately, I figured it out. 

To market themselves as a fitness application, the creators of Supernatural deliberately excluded gamification elements. Where ordinary games have levels/campaigns you play through to gradually build yourself through practice, Supernatural has one intelligent response system called “dynamic difficulty,” where the balloons appear less frequently as you start to miss. You can’t “die”, but you also can’t practice just one song to improve. You can’t play just one song at all. And you’re not supposed to want to.  

The feedback you receive from a traditional game is instant so you can immediately gauge how your actions impact your results. If your behavior wasn’t successful, you die or earn fewer points. You immediately learned how your behavior impacted your performance and you can adjust the next time you play. 

Game developers are geniuses when it comes to tweaking what’s referred to as a “feedback loop.” If a game is too simple, you’ll eventually lose interest because there is nothing to learn and your improvement is capped at perfection. If a game is too difficult, you’ll eventually lose interest because constantly losing is just depressing.

In Supernatural, the motivation to play is supposed to be intrinsic to you. You are “playing” because you want to get fit, or because not playing would mean wasting 20 bucks per month,  which is enough motivation for some people but isn’t enough for me, at least not when I could get a nearly identical workout elsewhere for a MUCH lower price and the physical results are identical to those achieved using those other, much less expensive applications. 

There is nothing in Supernatural for me to defeat, nothing to build towards, no achievements, and no real challenge. Frankly, Supernatural feels more like a participation trophy. The app is simply not built to challenge you.

“But you have the trainers to give you advice and feedback!” Do you? The trainer’s voice-overs are static recordings and do not change. There is no branching logic to control what you hear from the trainers, so they’re just talking at you. 

If you’re not following through in the proper form, you’re not getting advice personalized to your experience designed to help you improve. If you’re a fitness novice, the only way you’d know you’d done something wrong, is if you felt that bad kind of pain. 

If I went to a personal trainer, with the sole purpose of getting fit, and he gave me one game to play with a limited set of rules over, and over, and over again, set to different music, played a tape of his voice over the music, and didn’t correct my form, I’d probably ask for my money back… even if it was a decent workout. 

The only element of Supernatural that gives you any kind of feedback is the score display you see at the end. You get a score based on your accuracy and your “power,” but that score isn’t really helpful as a metric. 

The score tells you how you did overall, but that doesn’t help you improve the next time you play, since you are unlikely to repeat that workout again. You don’t really know how your individual movements affected your score. You only know your final result.  You’re unlikely to want to “practice” any one particular workout; after all, there is a new workout every day. 

With any other app on the Oculus Quest, the fact that I wouldn’t want to play every day is not a reason to forgo buying an app or game completely. After all, who wants to play the same game every day? You buy a game and play it every once and awhile. I don’t pay a substantial monthly fee for any other game though, so not playing every day doesn’t feel like lighting a twenty-dollar bill on fire.

The Underutilized Coaches

Like many, when I first entered into Supernatural, the gorgeous backdrops filled me with joy. When Leanne Pendante appeared to walk me through calibration and the proper form for a squat and lunge, I immediately saw the potential for what Supernatural had conceptualized: an app that offered personalized trainer feedback could be a runaway hit and offer something no other platform did. Once I saw what the trainers’ involvement was on a daily basis, I was really disappointed. 

My biggest issue with the trainers here is where they could have been useful. The warm-up and cool-down videos were far too short to be effective and added no real value. To me, it felt like the trainer videos were there just so Supernatural could point to them and say, “We have trainers! We are just like Peloton!” 

Those interludes before and after Supernatural’s music workouts could have been utilized so much better. The trainers could have provided a meaningful bodyweight strength workout to supplement the cardio.

The trainers could have provided meaningful sets of stretches targeting each muscle group, with a duration sufficient to help you maintain and increase flexibility for your entire body, during the cool down instead of a meaningless 30-second demonstration, which is incapable of preventing injury or soreness. Before and after you work out, you need to give each part of your body a full stretch. This can take 5 or even up to 10 minutes, but it’s worth it, especially when you’re doing strenuous exercise. 

There were some cool-downs that were completely tone-deaf to how the Oculus Quest is actually built and used. A few different trainers told me to bend at the waist and hang my head down. They would demonstrate this. Were they serious? Hang my head down? With a top-heavy $500 piece of equipment attached to my head by a flimsy strap? If I obeyed, the headset would slip off and break. If I just stood there, I was wasting my time. If I half-listened and bent at the waist, but angled my head so I could still see the trainer and keep my headset from slipping off, I’d be risking a neck injury.  

During the actual playlists, I can see what Supernatural was trying to do with those voiceovers: motivate you like a spin class instructor shouting over the music as they pedal alongside you, screaming at you to “GET UP THAT HILL!” This is not what Supernatural’s trainer voice-overs feel like. The voiceovers just feel like a recording of someone talking over the music, constantly breaking your concentration, and mostly just served to undercut the advantage of Supernatural‘s music license. 

The trainers could have been visually present, in front of you or next to you with you during the workout, showing you the proper form, and helping you get the most out of your cardio workout – in a manner similar to Audio Trip’s Dancer, the characters in Dance Central or Guided Tai Chi’s transparent masters. At least then they would be doing something other than ruining your concentration.

A Subscription Model Which Alienates Casual Users

My overall impression of the Supernatural app as a workout application or as a game is that the platform was simply mediocre: not great, but not terrible either. 

I’ll be honest: if Supernatural was a standalone app that came with 30 songs and a few playlists, and cost somewhere around the $30.00 range (or maybe a little more for the music licensing), would I buy it? Yes. I would. I’d buy it because it would add a little variety to my workout. I might not use it all that often in its current state, because I really didn’t like the lack of personalization or that I had to commit to an entire playlist when I didn’t care for so many of the songs.

For me, Supernatural would be an alternative to BoxVR: a game I turn to when I really don’t want to think or need to enjoy my workout and just wanted to go on autopilot. I would be a casual user. If I was allowed to create my own playlists, I’d probably have a mishmash of genres and intensities thrown together and have a bunch of 10-minute playlists I’d just incorporate into a larger workout regime composed of several games I already play which keeps me from getting bored. I probably wouldn’t use the warm-ups and cool-downs at all, since they were so ineffective.  The limitations of Supernatural would bother me, a little, but I doubt I would have found them nearly as offensive if Supernatural were just a one time purchase.

There just isn’t any room in Supernatural’s current pricing model for someone like me: someone who thought the app was okay, but didn’t intend to use it all that often.

I suspect that the $19.00 monthly subscription fee was introduced with the premiere of Supernatural specifically to invite the idea that Supernatural was a premium application, deliberately induce a sticker shock, and make $179.00 for the year seem like a bargain by comparison. 

The problem with a yearly subscription is that you pay upfront. You could decide to cancel your monthly subscription after 6 months (only paying $105 to own no content). You don’t get a refund if you choose to cancel your yearly plan. 

There is no world where I would consider such a high monthly or yearly fee for an application I intended to use for, at most, two or three days out of the week for about 10 minutes at a time. That would be an obscene waste of money. For the price Within is asking, I’d have to be pretty damn certain I would use Supernatural every day, which I wouldn’t, because ultimately, it doesn’t give me what I need from a workout. There is just no room for a casual user in the current pricing model.  

Currently, Supernatural is 7x as expensive as its closest competitor per year. If you subscribe for 2 years is actually 14x as expensive. After paying more for Supernatural than any other non-enterprise application on the quest, you don’t actually own any part of the platform. If you stop paying at any point for Supernatural, you will be locked out of recorded, static content you should have the option to buy. You could put $200, $400, or $600 into Within’s pockets, and in the end, you own nothing. You walk away with nothing but results you could have achieved with other apps on the Oculus Quest,  for a lot less money.

I have a couple of solutions to Within’s pricing model issue that would be practical, profitable, and satisfy a larger user base: Within could create a downloadable base version of Supernatural for casual users who previously chose not to subscribe. This downloadable version could contain a limited number of their already existing pre-recorded playlists and this version of Supernatural would exist outside of their subscription application. Each month, additional DLC packs of previously choreographed music would be available for $30 per month, or users could purchase the individual playlists.  

For current subscribers who feel new daily content adds sufficient value, the subscription model would still be available. 

Would Supernatural lose subscribers? Maybe. But that is my point: if more users would jump ship because they can now purchase what you’re forcing them to rent, your model is probably the wrong one to start with.

How to Make Supernatural Worth the Asking Price

I gave Supernatural’s workouts as much effort as I could since I believe they deserved a chance to win me over as a customer (almost always scoring from platinum to triple platinum). I can tell you that I found their workouts to be far too easy and nowhere near physically challenging enough for me. 

To be worth a subscription fee like the one they are charging, Supernatural needs to stop relying on their music license as a justification. Music is not the real draw of their application. After the first 100 workouts, honestly, how much more variety do you think you’re going to need? The pretty backdrops will not be the draw of their fitness application, even if they are stunning (they are). A Beat Saber clone workout alienates more potential customers than it entices. 

For me to want to fork over a $19.00 per month subscription fee or a $179.00 annual fee, I would need so much more out of Supernatural than they’re offering. Instead of relying on music, Supernatural should embrace different forms of gameplay and embrace their coaches. 

Recently, Supernatural uploaded one meditation session. This was after my 60-day evaluation completed, but I think that was a step in the right direction.

Supernatural should offer a full fitness experience that doesn’t just calibrate to your body but also continuously assesses your fitness level, flexibility, and capabilities and then build an entire program around your goals. As you become accustomed to the program, the workouts need to become more challenging and the workout itself needs to change, because, in real life, that’s how you get where you need to go when it comes to fitness. Also, doing the same style workout every day is just…boring. Supernatural should also offer fitness advice beyond cardio and the slight muscular workout currently on offer. After all, cardio is only one element of fitness.

Of course, first, Supernatural needs to add in the very basic functionality to their existing workouts which is currently absent:

• Ability to choose to play an individual song.
• Ability to create custom playlists.
• Ability to customize the lobby background, possibly from a gallery
• Ability to choose workout and song backgrounds, possibly from a gallery.
• Ability to choose a background other than outdoors, if you find the backgrounds distracting.
• Ability to choose any trainer for any workout or individual song.
• Ability to customize the targets, in particular, make the directional indicators more opaque.
• Ability to choose the color of bats and targets.
• Ability to mute trainer voice-overs
• Branching logic to trainer voice-overs based on performance, so that the trainers’ comments give meaningful feedback to the user to help them improve.
• Ability to rearrange songs within any given playlist.
• Ability to skip or repeat songs within a workout.
• Ability to restart a song without having to restart a whole workout.
• Ability to save a workout currently in progress.
• Ability to see past scores for a workout or song with the VR app, so the user has a way to assess their improvement.
• Ability to enable real-time scoring, so users can adjust their performance based on feedback
• Ability to manually change the intensity of any workout or song.
• Ability to adjust the difficulty of any given workout or song
• Ability to download songs and workouts local headset to reduce latency
• An offline mode if users are unable to connect to the internet, or if the user’s connection is slow.
• Ability to disable the squats and lunges.
• Ability to change the arena from 360-degree mode to 180 or 90-degree mode if you’re working out in a small space.
• Online multiplayer capabilities.
• Local multiplayer mode for multiple users to switch off during personal challenges.
• Additional support for popular fitness trackers.
• Additional fitness capability and support outside of VR.

Now, I understand that I basically just called for a total re-development of their platform if Supernatural wants to be worth their asking price. But, if Supernatural wants people to buy in, they should do more than provide one gameplay type workout that is nearly identical to a game available elsewhere for much less. Frankly, for Supernatural to be worth what they’re asking, the gameplay would need to be more entertaining and unique, and the results from using it would have to be better than the ones I can get for a one-time purchase $30 from several other available games.

However, I think that the current design model and a guarantee of new daily content makes actually improving this platform incredibly difficult since the developers and choreographer would have to develop new content while also making these necessary updates to all of the currently available workouts, which will become more difficult as time goes on and their library expands.

Conclusion

Supernatural is a fitness app with an identity crisis. The stunning natural backdrops, which is an aesthetic almost identical to Guided Tai Chi, imply relaxation but the intense, club-style music attempts to fuel your adrenaline which seems out of place with the soothing surroundings. The trainers attempt to motivate you, but non-intelligent feedback and lack of progression are dishearteningly unmotivating. Supernatural’s daily updated content implies that you will never be bored with their platform, but with the static gameplay, I struggled to see how I would progress as an athlete over time using this platform and quickly got bored with it. Because the developers are putting out new content daily, it’s also almost impossible to make improvements to past workouts.

Supernatural wants to be a fitness platform and not a game but made a game its primary workout. Supernatural wanted a game to be its primary workout but removed the elements that make a game fun enough to return to day after day.

Supernatural’s current model also presents a unique problem: As their push for new content grows, any improvements to the Supernatural platform will be harder to implement. An example: one feature I would like to see is the ability to choose the level of difficulty or intensity in any workout playlist. If I’m a beginner, I wouldn’t want to be locked out of workouts that were too difficult. I would want the difficulty level static so I could practice and improve. With a limited set of songs, making a change like that would take time, but wouldn’t be insurmountable. As Supernatural’s library grows, the ability to roll out such adjustments to their platform becomes more difficult. 

So, is Supernatural worth the subscription fee? Rather than equivocate, remain neutral, and encourage you to try it for yourself, I’m just going to flat out say “no.” 

When evaluating Supernatural based on entertainment value and tangible benefits vs. the cost of a subscription, at the end of my trial period, I was left disappointed and unconvinced that Supernatural had anything more than minimal added value, especially when stacked up against other fitness applications available on the Oculus Quest. 

As a virtual reality workout, Supernatural does not provide any activity that you cannot get from other applications (or games) available for purchase on the Oculus Quest.  

If you really need to pay money every month just have the motivation to workout, I suggest investing in one game for $19.99 per month as a reward or as an incentive. At least then, you’ll also own something.