Population: Jan

My Xbox has mostly been used for single-player campaigns because I always found the disparities of cross-platform multiplayer gaming, with aimbots, game trainers, and Cronus Zen users, rather appalling. Playing against marksmen levelled up beyond all human possibility, clans making their way through maps like a band of street thugs on cocaine, or kids in lobbies screaming and cussing at everything and anyone they come by, wasn’t my thing.

When untethered VR came along, I was intrigued. In fact, I was intrigued enough to try anything I could get my hands on – and suddenly I was a fan of multiplayer gaming. There was a certain attraction to going into battle armed only with your actual hands and mind, without going against aimbots or heavily modified gaming gear.

The Oculus Quest levelled the playing field for me, and suddenly I found it exciting to challenge other players and not just their gaming rigs. What better genre to do this than the mighty Battle Royale?

But BigBox had other plans in mind when the alpha and beta testing of Population: One first began. Guarded by an iron-clad NDA, it almost seemed like they didn’t want the gaming world to lay eyes on their new take on the Battle Royale format. I have to be honest here: I was mad at BigBox for the first few weeks. I was robbed of the ability to write about Population: One throughout the testing phase and that was hard for me. But after seeing all the buzz in their Discord and watching as the community helped shape the game, I grew grateful. 

How To Battle Royale

Population: One is one of the first games on the Oculus Quest platform to combine great graphics while making use of an original gesture-based control scheme. It really does feel like it’s fully utilizing the Quest.

You start each session in a lobby area, where you get an overview of some avatar options. Avatars are still somewhat limited, but you can choose from more preset characters once you’ve collected some points.

You can also build a squad directly from your friend-list. Population: One uses the Oculus Party feature to conveniently match you and your buddies up when the next round is up. You can go into battle solo if you want to be a lone wolf, but it’s going to be tough out there! 

After a squad is built and a squad leader is assigned, you can jump into combat right away. You will be thrown into a secondary lobby which is designed like a pre-game experience. A ready-room, if you will. All players and squads stay there until the roster is filled and the royale round is ready to start. There are some guns scattered throughout the pre-game minimap, so you can practice aiming or climbing while waiting to battle it out.

When the round starts, you are introduced to some contraption you may recognize from a ski resort: Skylift Pods! These will fly you out to the playing field – a beautiful little countryside compound sporting a church, a graveyard, some farms and windmills, and even some industrial, and residential areas. BigBox somehow managed to cram a darn big map onto the Oculus Quest! Guns and gear are strewn around randomly. Wisely choosing your jumpoff point can save your life and improve your chances of being the last man standing.

Queensberry Rules, Sire!

The Battle Royale concept is well-known; Players are tossed into a map, the overall size of which is gradually reduced. This tightens the playing area and forces increasing conflict. Slow players will fall off the map, and players unskilled in scavenging or killing will soon be overrun or shot. 

You will have to think quickly to be among the final group of survivors or to have any hope of being the last man standing at the end of a match. If you entered the battle as a squad, you can win as a squad. 

Sounds simple enough, right?

The Virtual Reign Is Upon Us

Not only does Population: One use a smart delivery system to bring you to your jump spot, but the real fun begins after dropping out of your pod. You can glide! Every player is clad in a wingsuit activated by spreading your actual arms to sail around the map. The earlier you start spreading those arms, the farther you can travel. 

Apart from every structure in-game being accessible by simply smashing in doors and windows, you can climb up anything that has a wall. You can use the glide ability to access higher ground when dropping out of the pod. My favourite places are the windmills because they are perfect vantage points and almost always contain a stash of guns. If you’re quick and accurate enough, you can pick off other players while they are still gliding toward their chosen landing spots. BigBox calls this the “Vertical Combat System” meaning that you are not only fighting against enemies on one level – but on all available levels of the map. 

Once standing on solid ground, you can build metal shields around, above, or below you, to protect yourself against the hailstorm of bullets you’ll inevitably face. Personally, I get bored of fortifying a position, so I move around a lot, often going into a one-handed glide and shooting at other players whenever I get the chance.

BigBox’s tagline is “Climb. Fly. Build.”, I would’ve made it “Climb. Fly. Collect.” Why? Well, you will find a lot of guns and gear as you play. Anything from handguns, submachine guns, carbines, assault and sniper rifles, even grenades will cross your path at least once per round. The reloading mechanisms are original to each weapon or gun class, so there is a bit of a learning curve before you can be considered a Population: One gunslinger. You’ll also find armour and building materials and supplies like energy drinks and bananas to replenish your lifeforce and dedicated battery-like energy chunks that juice up your stamina. 

When you’ve joined a squad (which you can do in the lobby or in-game by fist-bumping other players), you’ll be able to revive teammates with a defibrillator. Charging the defibrillator gets tricky when you are under fire because it requires steady mechanical motions.

Here’s a valuable pro-tip; If you play in a squad, assign clear roles. Look at the successful squads formed during the beta – they always move in-sync and with tasks assigned to every member. Some veteran squads act like they’ve been playing together for decades. Mad props go out to teams like “SmallBox” and “Machete Squad”! You guys rock!

To sum up: The aiming system is sound, and you can wield almost every gun single-handedly. This adds a lot of fun and versatility to gliding around while shooting people above or underneath you but could displease players expecting more realistic gunplay. I, for one, didn’t expect a simulation, so I am completely cool with that. Movement is good and fluent, graphics are good, and the map is well-designed. I strongly hope we’ll get more maps in future updates. Bring it on, BigBox!

The Problem With Kings

There are also a few problems with Population: One that the developers will have to weed out sooner or later. The graphics, while being a big pro for the game, can also pose a big no-no in some regards. The limited avatar choices are a little off stylistically. I know that the big red machine called Fortnite has its teeth in everything Battle Royale and sets standards in almost every aspect of the genre, but…this is an armed fight to the death! Not a mountain retreat work weekend for hipsters! Please BigBox, stop it with all the weird ski goggles (even if they might look kind of fitting in the initial skylift ride), down jackets, and colourful hair-dos. 

Also, the weapon skins, even if designed to indicate rarity and collectibility, could be simpler or, at least, more realistic. The colours seem off and sometimes have a somewhat weird paintball or Nerf Gun look and feel to them. I’m man enough to shoot other dudes in the face with a pink machine gun, but sometimes I wish these would just look a little more like I imagine them in real life.

Real And Royale Pains In The Butt

What I really can’t get used to are the clumsy backpack system and the quickdraw mechanics while running or flying. I found myself struggling with drawing quickly or getting stuff from my rucksack way too often. Sure, controls are somewhat limited due to Touch Controller ergonomics, but maybe there is a way to solve this more elegantly like a stowaway gesture to the back as other games have done.

There are also some minor issues with haptics that need to be addressed, so we’re hoping BigBox will also find a way to make this gesture more natural.

Quo Vadis, Population: One?

I have to admit, I am fairly impressed by Population: One. This first entry of Battle Royale into Virtual Reality is bound to secure a solid player base and do so relatively quickly.

Population: One is available on several platforms and allows for a massive crossplay experience. You will be pitted in battle against players not only on Quest and Rift systems, but also on other headsets like the HTC Vive, Valve Index, and others. 

Priced at $29.99, Population: One is totally worth the money for fans of the genre. I already had hours of fun during beta testing can vouch for its replayability. The Battle Royale concept has transitioned surprisingly well to the untethered world of the Oculus Quest, and Population: One nails most of its controls. 

Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

Right now I give Population: One a definite thumbs-up, and I wholeheartedly recommend to those of you that have longed for a worthy Battle Royale experience in Virtual Reality. For my taste, BigBox may be better off dialling down the screaming colours and weird outfits a bit, but apart from that, the game feels great. Happy hunting, and may the best Royale player wear their crown for at least one more session!

These Shields Are Made for Rockin’

As a rhythm game, AudioShield combines dance-like exercise with music and provides various tasks that you can complete for points. You’re equipped with a shield per controller and can combine the shields into one purple shield by holding them tightly together. During the game, colored orbs fly towards you, their colors indicating which of your shields should be used for blocking or punching them. How you handle the orbs will affect your overall score in the leaderboards. AudioShield also promises to get you going even further by using your very own music library to work out to all your favorite tracks. 

The first thing I noticed in the game lobby was that there were no options at all! AudioShield is designed for you to jump right into! No setup, no polish, no fuzz at all. You start with twenty preloaded songs and are presented with an exciting opportunity to choose any other song! That includes using any of your own music, as long as it’s in mp3 format. There is no tutorial, and you don’t really need one. AudioShield is very simple to get into. The lobby acts as one big music menu, everything else is sorted out later and per song.

The Mother of All Song Libraries!

Using your own music is very intuitive once you take the time to read the short and simple instructions for adding music to the game. You can browse through different sources on your Quest to choose songs stored in the built-in memory, or you can use the Quest’s browser to download songs you have stored in your cloud. AudioShield supports Google Drive, Dropbox, or direct downloads from within the browser. I tried downloading pre-uploaded music from Google Drive, and that went by without a hitch. It’s all very convenient: I connected the Quest to my Windows PC and transferred several mp3 files into the music folder. AudioShield will recognize any mp3 file automatically once it’s stored on the Quest and display them in whichever order you choose. If your mp3s come with album thumbnails, these will be displayed in the lobby as well. I have about 300 songs in my music folder, so I wanted to use the game lobby to search for specific songs. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the search bar to work properly. So I ended up having to browse through my music library. As my mp3 collection is maintained relatively well, that wasn’t a big problem, though – I just browsed by album titles or thumbnails.

Number 5 is Alive.. and It Automaps Your Songs!

Once you choose a song, AudioShield will present you with some options. Finally, some settings to fiddle around with! You get to choose from four different arena-like stages and several difficulty levels; Normal, Hard, and Expert. There are also two Fitness options named ‘Fitness’ and ‘Fitness Plus,’ which add some variety to the gameplay. Then there is the ‘Casual’ option. To be honest, I don’t know what that does. I mostly played on Normal, Hard, and Fitness. If you find out what ‘Casual’ does, please let me know in the comments!

When AudioShield loads up your song, something magical happens. It doesn’t matter if it’s one of the preloaded songs or one of your own – the song will get automapped right then and there. This takes a moment, and right after that process, you are presented with the stage. Every stage displays a starting plate for you to put your feet on and an introduction to general gameplay. You will always have time to get familiar with your surroundings before you start your song.

Orbs Are Better Than Orcs!

Once you confirm to start the song, you will get a good look at your arena, and – let’s face it – these are minimal, but beautifully made. You can choose from four different backgrounds; Stage Dive, Manifold, Horizon, or The Void. I hope additional arenas come with future updates, but four stages are enough for a start. Every arena has little gizmos for you to discover, and while I won’t spoil the surprise for you, I will tell you why I liked the Manifold stage best. Manifold displays an equalizer that is used to automap the songs to an orb track. 

The orbs themselves are animated well and are satisfying to look at, especially because they explode on contact. With every orb or orb trail you block with one of your shields, you get haptic feedback from the controllers. The higher the difficulty, the more orbs appear, and the trickier the orb patterns get. Missed orbs are indicated by red and blue flashes on the side of your field of view, and you always have a wide view of the next pattern that’s waiting for you after the one you’re clearing. The orbs always rain down on you with a slight downward angle, and you might want to check the horizon frequently to prepare for the next waves. The Fitness modes provide glowing triangles for you to duck under, thereby introducing squats to the gameplay. If you get into AudioShield, you’ll get sweaty pretty soon!

Are You Ready To Be a World Leader in “Artistic Expression”?

As AudioShield allows you to use your very own music, the leaderboards will be set up individually for every song. Your score will depend on a few things, and the system used to calculate the overall score is pretty smart. The total score is cumulative and includes both technical and “artistic” components. Depending on your continuity and rhythm, you can score higher in the technical section because that’s where consecutive hits, misses, and hit percentages are counted. The artistic expression is measured by the intensity of both your movement and your punch power. If you take this seriously as a workout, you will obviously get into the rhythm and more or less dance on your own while using the shields more as boxing gloves then shields to just block the orbs. This will earn you a higher score in terms of activity and punch power. If you are looking for near-perfect runs, you may want to keep your controllers closer to you, touching (as opposed to punching!) more orbs. This will give you a good chance of getting closer to a high hit percentage.

Leaderboards are worldwide, so chances are, someone else is playing the same song you are, and you won’t stay on top of that song’s leaderboard for long. To get a real feel for your skill level and how you can improve, I suggest you start with the bundled tracks.

Got 99 Problems, But an Orb Ain’t One!

So.. is AudioShield the best fitness experience or the best rhythm game on the Quest? It isn’t, but…

AudioShield does a lot of things right. It’s not just another clone of Beat Saber (actually, it’s older than Beat Saber!), and it stays true to its simple concept. The most prominent feature of AudioShield is the automapping of your own music, though, and that’s where it has some difficulties. To understand these, you have to take a look at the automapping process itself. AudioShield automaps the orb patterns to your songs by measuring EQ peaks, beats per minute, and dominant basslines. That’s where the orbs come from, and that’s how the patterns take shape. Varying the difficulty in a song results in changing the number of orbs and their flying patterns while maintaining the base patterns built on the beat and bass lines. 

I wanted longer songs to workout to in a more constant flow. Instead of simply merging some of my favorite tracks or using DJ mixes and importing one big mp3 file, I tried using orchestral arrangements. If the music you’re trying to auto-map isn’t very rich in beats and bass, that’ll result in you just punching away at seemingly randomly placed orbs. I experienced this with the orchestral music that I tried.

On other tracks, sometimes the beat and bass simply weren’t registering high enough on the equalizer to generate matching orb patterns.

These are points to know and act on if you are excited about the premise of using your own music. Choose the right style and songs to generate cool orb tracks to work out to – otherwise, you will be disappointed! 

Other rhythm games like OhShape and most of the games Lori Knox recently highlighted in her VR Fitness feature, use hand-mapped songs only. There are whole communities for those games that support the thirst for custom levels, but you have to find those levels on the internet or buy them as audio packs. Another option is modding your original game to be able to sideload custom songs, but Oculus might not be too happy about that and have waved around the possibility that they’d ban headsets. 

AudioShield frees you of need to sideload or mod your game enjoy custom levels despite its automapping flaws. 

This is definitely a big plus.

AudioGood or AudioBad?

The performance of AudioShield is excellent. It runs smoothly, and I experienced no hiccups whatsoever. The controllers’ tracking was always on point, and the haptic feedback provides you with just enough information to know if you hit or missed the orbs. I can see myself getting back to AudioShield quite frequently, given the ability to workout to all my favorite songs. The concept works and supports an active gaming style. If you decide to be more stationary, you might get bored of it rather quickly. Rhythm games tend to get repetitive after a while, even if the patterns of objects or blocks are varied frequently. Right now, AudioShield has no support for fitness trackers of any kind. Still, the tracker I use came in on 500 calories burned in an hour, on average. That’s the caloric equivalent of a quarterpounder cheeseburger without bacon (or a side of fries!). Not too bad for a workout. 

So.. what’s it gonna be?

I had a lot of fun with AudioShield because of its versatility, ease of use, and the ability to use my own music library. I can see myself coming back and using it frequently for custom workouts. Almost every other game forces you to either jump through modding hoops or pay for audio packs to grow your music library. At the current price of $20, AudioShield gives you a lot of music variety. Despite some issues with automapping and the inability to use YouTube as a music/video source (which you can do on the PCVR version), I give AudioShield a double thumbs up!

Let’s Take This from the Top, Shall We? YEEEEEHAW!

The lobby is nothing much. From a saloon-like environment, you get to choose multiple difficulties and whether you want to just shoot up some bandits in Arcade mode, or start out in story mode. The story mode follows a backstory introducing us to Junior and his Grandpa Bill. The latter starts telling Junior weird stories fueled by booze and a wild imagination. These are not the kind of historically accurate anecdotes you might expect in a western-themed shooter. Instead, they’re supposed to be funny and mostly unrelated pieces of slapstick garnished with too many movie references and exaggerations. To be honest, I got annoyed by Grandpa Bill very early on, because he just didn’t shut up. The old geezer blabs on and on, sprinkling in over-used movie quotes and tough guy oneliners – over and over again. The repetitive music that accompanies all this doesn’t help.

3DOF? But This is 6DOF REVIEWS!

The game is mostly played from a fixed position and feels more like being designed for 3DOF use on devices like the Oculus Go. It’s basically a wave shooter on rails without the rails, because you are tied down to one location per map.

I think my editor wanted to do me a favor when he asked me to review Guns’n’Stories: Bulletproof VR. It was supposed to be a fun and challenging arcade ‘wild-west shooter’ type of game. 

Little did we know!

It’s not just the lack of movement, but the layout of the maps itself. The story mode consists of three acts in three stages, so you get nine maps in total and an estimated playtime of maybe 90 minutes on average difficulty. The maps are designed as linear shooting galleries, where wave after wave of enemies hit you. You start out with an old-timey colt, a bottle of whiskey, and yes, Grandpa tries to stay hydrated throughout the whole game. Unfortunately, you can only shoot your enemies, not the environment itself and, sadly, not even yourself. Believe me – listening to Bill blabbing on like a drunken monkey, I tried that several times to no avail. 

Your equipment gets upgraded throughout the story, and weapons choices reach from colts to a combo of a futuristic grenade launcher and a yellow assault rifle. There is even a special move I actually liked! You can deflect bullets anytime by punching them out of thin air with your guns. That way, you will at least get a halfway decent workout for your arms, or you can take the lazy approach and just hold one of your guns in front of you like a shield. That will also do the trick. 

Guns N’ Roses looked better than this

So, you can shoot your enemies and will continue to do so in a mostly red and comic-style landscape full of canyons. The body models for your enemies feel like they repeat themselves every four goons. They consist of a fat guy wielding a pipe, a fat guy handling hefty weaponry, and two kinds of skinny guys with more or less the same features. There are lots of hats, of course – it’s the west, son. While the lobby looks polished enough at first sight and the difficulty selector gives off a Wolfenstein vibe, the environments and enemies are kind of clunky. It got weird when enemies rolled around on Segways and threw swarms of drones at me. DRONES. SEGWAYS. IN THE WILD WEST!? Are you kidding me? Sadly that was one of the few chuckles I got out of it and quickly lost its charm when replaying the same map in Arcade mode. Also, the guns were put together weirdly. Some looked really good and were fun to play, others were just so far off the setting of the game and felt as clunky as they were rendered. Unfortunately, and especially in comparison to the Rift version, the overall graphics took a massive dive.

Guns N’ Roses also sounded better than this!

I maybe was mistaken to start out with the story mode, because Grandpa quickly stepped on my nerves. But it’s no surprise that the music is mostly repetitive too. It sounds like someone hired half the house band in a square-dance place and gave them just one riff to play with. Just the one, and we all know it! It sounds like cheap electric western music and jingles up and down around McDonald’s on TexMex week every year. No, thank you. Enemies and Grandpa aren’t very distinguished with their wording. Neither is the voice-over for kill combos and everything else. If there were at least different effects or maybe rewards being announced separately from map to map. Well, there aren’t any. Nothing to hear here… moving on. 

Don’t Play It Again, Sam! Unless It’s Arcade Time!

Despite everything – there was a point I when actually had fun with Guns’n’Stories: Bulletproof VR! The arcade mode, people. That’s where it’s at. 

Enter Arcade mode! I actually had the most fun just killing some time, especially in the night-themed maps. The game runs relatively smoothly on my Quest and loads up quickly – so if you are up for a quick round of mindless shoot n scoot, just go for it. You can’t really die (in fact, you can, but the game just turns to slo-mo until you catch up for quite a while), and your guns are always powerful enough to blast your way through the waves. If you can ignore Gramps repeating himself every three minutes, this might actually work out for you! If you like continuity and backstory…not so much. The western theme is just a vehicle to get some very dusty jokes across, and these didn’t age well, so don’t take that too seriously. If you are into the olden times, look for something like Dead and Buried instead. Sure, its got zombies (as does Death Horizon: Reloaded) – but the graphics are better, and the wild west comes across just right. 

Overall? Get Outta Town, Boy!

We can’t expect AAA quality from a B-priced title, but still…I had moderately high hopes when I saw some gameplay videos of the Rift version. The Quest version significantly dropped the ball when it comes to the graphics and gameplay quality. Some changes were to be expected, but even the little gizmos in the start menu and inside the maps were cut from the final game. That’s a bit sad. 

Combined with the omnipresent, but oh-so over-exaggerated, tongue in cheek humor, the gameplay actually gets annoying. After hearing the same banter between Bill and his grandson for the third time in as many minutes while shooting an identical guy for the tenth time in the same timespan, the lack of depth actually threw me off my game. Did I mention that you, sadly, can’t shoot yourself in the game?  

To be fair and at this point, I can’t stress this enough: Guns’n’Stories: Bulletproof VR is a $9.99 title. So maybe it is to be expected that it looks, feels, and plays like a $9.99 title. I was hoping for a little more. 

OhShape falls squarely into the category of rhythm-based VR games. These usually let you follow some music and do stuff like swinging weapons from a galaxy far far away or swinging your fists while in beat. In OhShape, you have to make the right “shapes” to fit through holes in rapidly approaching virtual walls, pluck coins out of mid-air, and punch through barriers while ducking and strafing to avoid obstacles along the way. Sounds challenging? Well.. it is, and yes, there is a particular question that comes to mind – Can a virtual experience actually deliver a workout as satisfying as the real thing? 

OhLook! It’s got diamonds!

Enter the game lobby – well designed, almost minimal. I really liked the diamond-shaped buttons for the songs that you can choose from, and game options and various other things are neatly arranged in the lower area. OhShape provides a very clean look in the lobby and continues to do so in the game itself. This helps you to stay focused on the task at hand: working out!

To jump right in, you should play the guided tutorial to get familiar with your surroundings and get a general feel for the rhythm aspect of the game first. When you feel prepared enough to OhShape it up, take a good look around the lobby. The game lets you personalize your experience a great deal. You can set different speeds for the songs you wish to play and adapt the volume of both music and sound effects. There also is a very welcome no-fail option, so the game doesn’t stop and reset when you can‘t make the cut. To be honest – that happened to me often enough that I found that option useful! Playing on hard does stuff to you and your cardio that you wouldn’t believe, but we will get to that in a little while. You can choose from three difficulty levels; easy, medium, and hard. These affect the overall challenge, mostly by speeding up the cutout walls, coins, obstacles, and barriers being thrown at you. There is also a checkbox for smaller play areas. Once activated, OhShape can be played out in a fixed position without the need to strafe left and right. This is a great option for those who play in limited areas. The game really demands a lot of movement, so chances are you will knock over nearby stuff in your home when fully immersed. So be careful!

I like to get the most out of my workout and I’m lucky enough to have a large space available for play, so I didn’t use that option, but that meant I have to sidestep a lot. Not only are the coins spread further to the sides, but even in normal mode, there are three possible positions (left, center, right) for every obstacle, cutout, and barrier to be dealt with. These positions are also accompanied by floating obstacles that you will have to duck under. The game even throws some cutouts that can only be matched by squatting.

All in all, you will find a great variety of movements that you’ll have to match.

Movement? OH YEAH, lots of it!

The concept that sets OhShape apart from your run-of-the-mill rhythm-based game is, in fact, full-body movement, especially if you want to score high and really get sweating. This is achieved by the use of the virtual environment and especially enhanced by the untethered experience that the Quest provides. You will mostly gaze forward, but when coins fly to your left and right to be collected, or obstacles have to be evaded, you’ll need to look around the runway you’re standing on.

OhShape carefully tracks your hands and head, while you get into various shapes to match the cutouts flying towards you. Your hands are displayed in bright sporty gloves, so you can easily punch through the barriers right at the sweet spot and pick up coins in time. It doesn’t matter if you make fists or keep a straight hand when fulfilling hand-based tasks, so you don’t need to wear yourself out by making tight fists all the time. Your starting position is displayed as a fixed baseplate with footprints so you always have a reference to your starting position on the track.

OhShape looking OhWow!

I already mentioned that I instantly fell in love with the no-frills look of the lobby and was pleasantly surprised to find that OhShape stays true to that aesthetic in-game. While being polished enough to get its concept across, the track you are standing on isn’t as detailed as in other rhythm-games like Beat Saber or Pistol Whip. You don’t really need that, though – you won’t have enough time to look around and be amazed by animated gizmos while trying to fit through the rapidly approaching cutout walls! These really are the centerpiece of the game, and OhBoy, these will get you dancing without even noticing! 

All tasks have different colors, so you can pre-plan what to do next. This actually helps a lot when playing on hard, because you can kind of autopilot through some sections.

The cutout walls that you have to fit through are greenish, and your actual tracked shape is displayed as a shadow on these walls. That way, you can estimate if you will make the shape in time or if you have to make quick adjustments to your pose in order to fit. Obstacles (to evade with a squat or a sidestep or a squatted sidestep) are yellow. Barriers to punch through are red, and sweet spots to punch through single-handedly or with both fists, are clearly highlighted with circles. Sometimes, I got irritated when I missed a hit or crashed into an obstacle because the warning flashes are also red, but I adapted to that quickly enough. The coins with their glowing golden polygon style did remind me of Super Mario, I have to say, and I caught myself jumping up like everybody’s favorite plumber to reach some of the higher coins. A completely unnecessary exercise, and due to the game’s speed, only possible when playing on easy, but it felt good anyway.

Let’s talk music, shall we?

OhShape comes with 11 rather short songs to choose from, and you can find a few additional songs in the Extras section. I suppose there are still more to come with future updates, and they could be longer or perhaps loopable, so you’d be able to work out for longer. Playlists would be a perfect addition to plan your workouts around and to plan for specific durations. To make the most of OhShape, you can also load up some of your own music, but there’s a small hitch – OhShape won’t generate custom tracks for the songs automatically. Instead, you’ll have to install the OhShape Editor from their website at ohshapes.com on a Windows PC to match up a workout track with your music. 

The preloaded songs are exclusively made for OhShape and are mostly quite catchy. In the long run, it would help if OhShape could score some better-known artists to provide more music. Personally, I don’t think that’s relevant to the fitness aspect of the game. Still, it could help to grow the community tremendously.

Immersion is great in OhShape, and I forgot my surroundings completely while playing. The track designs for the preloaded songs are excellent and get you into the groove immediately. If you use headphones on your Quest, the music itself and audio feedback of OhShape are also greatly enhanced.

OhShape will get you OhDancing! 

You can also use readily available tracks provided by the community. These mostly consisted of popular songs pre-matched to a workout track designed by community contributors. Track intensity and choreography design quality always depend on the time spent designing the tracks, though! I especially recommend Eye of the tiger, Gangnam Style, and YMCA. Try them! Although these three songs are not personal music favorites, they fit my OhShape exercise routine perfectly. The community did an outstanding job there – thank you, guys!

On the whole, OhShape ran smoothly on my Quest – all the graphic elements are well-thought-out and make sense in their entirety.

Why is OhShape advertised as a game? 

OhShape really is more than just a game… it’s a full-fledged workout and is, therefore, an exercise experience! There are a lot of rhythm games out there that we all love and enjoy in VR, but as of yet, most developers don’t emphasize the fitness aspects of their games. Why not take a hint from the real craze around YUR Fitness, which was built only to tend to these very needs? Create a real health benefit and implement a simple statistics routine that lets the user, at least, estimate calories burned and maybe track the time spent working out!

OhShape just needs simple planning options and maybe a stopwatch to time workouts! Right now, I keep track of my OhShape workouts with a fitness tracker set to aerobics as the tracked activity, just so I can monitor the fitness benefits. 

OhSustainable or OhShort?

The songs already included in OhShape are played through in maybe an hour, on the easier levels. At first glance, it’s a relatively short game, but once you have opened up to the fitness aspect, your motivation will increase exponentially. Naturally, I didn’t like all the songs provided, so I picked some favorites. I always play three cycles of each song before I move on to the next one. I also try to avoid the easy mode and make sure to include at least one song in hard mode per cycle. That’s where OhShapes’ core strength lies. It’s an intense workout, and I fully plan to spend a lot of time playing it. Not so much as a game, but as a fitness experience.

With custom songs available to set up your own tracks, and with others provided by the community, the potential variety is unlimited, so, like Beat Saber, OhShape is well worth the money in terms of longevity. An option to allow for procedural track design would be fantastic, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be that easy to implement.

OhShape is for rhythm games, what Chance the Rapper was for hip-hop. 

Yes, I really mean that – it’s a fresh take on an already well-established genre. The concept really works and engages you not only in terms of hand-eye-coordination but through your whole body. The concept, the controls, and the combination of tasks all combine to keep you busy. 

Marketing OhShape as a fitness experience could help a lot in attracting the fitness crowd and not just gamers on the hunt for leaderboard domination. In OhShape, I find that I compete with myself as I do in most serious workouts, so, yes, a global leaderboard is nice to have – but a statistics summary would be very welcome! Focusing on the workout aspects might need some minor changes in the game options which could give OhShape more depth and versatility without sacrificing any of the gaming aspects.

Come on, Odder Lab.. take a leap!

Summing It OhUp!

OhShape is a well-designed rhythm game that comes the closest yet to being a serious fitness experience in VR. If you are not afraid of breaking a sweat while moving all over the place and are looking to use custom songs in your workout routines, your $19.99 will be well spent. Despite some minor flaws, I give it a double thumbs-up!