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. 

A few years ago, a well-meaning friend gave my husband and me a $50 gift card to a Topgolf driving range as a Christmas present. I love golf and often spend time at driving ranges, pitch-n-putts, and every once in a while, I’ll shell out the not-so-cheap greens fees to play on a real course. I was looking forward to going to the high-end Topgolf near us. As much as we wanted to go, after doing a little research, we realized a night out at Topgolf would cost us a lot more than $50 and knew we should wait until we had a little more disposable cash to throw around.

If you’ve never heard of it, Topgolf runs a franchise of different high end, multi-level driving ranges, and sports simulators. They’re paired with luxury style lounges that serve food and drinks and provide more of a group nightlife activity than sports outing. So when I heard that Topgolf created a VR mini-golf game for the Oculus Quest, I was first in line to review it…and I wasn’t disappointed.

Game Play

The world Pro Putt creates is simple in design. The sky above you and all of your surroundings are low polygon cartoonish designs. The scenery around you is playful and unrealistic, and that appears to be a very conscious design choice. However, when you zero in on the detail, you can tell that the putting greens and the grass surrounding the holes are substantially more sophisticated. They’re also topographically as complex as any real mini-golf course I’ve seen.  

Tutorial and features

The first time you open Pro Putt, you are walked through a simple tutorial to get you familiar with the controls. The tutorial is well designed and walks you through proper putting form. I appreciated the much-needed refresher. You are informed that you only are going to need one controller and to put the controller for your non-dominant hand away, which is good since it would be weird to use two controllers. You’re introduced and encouraged to practice other key features available to you. There’s a “giant mode,” which allows you to look at the course from high above as though you were…a giant. If you press the grip button at any point, your view will switch to a topographical layout of the putting green. The topographical layout will allow you to view you the slants, hills, and valleys of the particular green you’re on. I found this particular view very helpful in gauging how much force I needed for my swing. 

The tutorial also informs you that when the ball is transparent, you can practice-swing through the ball until you hit the trigger button, which will make the ball live. The tutorial also walks you through a guiding feature that I wish existed in real life: if you have a direct path to the hole, you will see it as a yellow trail with arrows. 

Campaign

The objective of Campaign mode is to work your way around the three courses in beginner mode and then in pro mode. To progress from hole to hole, you have to score at or below par on that hole. If you go over the recommended number of strokes for a particular hole, you repeat that hole until you score at or below par. Only after you successfully play through an entire course are you allowed to unlock the next course, each successively harder than the last. Once you’ve unlocked a course, you can play it any time by selecting the “Play a Round” option in the main menu, without having to worry about your score. Once you play through the first three courses in campaign mode, you will unlock the Pro versions of these courses. The most notable difference in the Pro versions is that while pressing the grip button will still show you the topographical layout of the putting green, you will no longer be given a direct-path indicator to follow.

I really enjoyed the campaign mode in Pro Putt. As I played through the campaign mode, I heavily utilized the grip button to see the lay of the putting green. Again, I wish something like that existed in real life.  

I also liked the unlockable features throughout the campaign mode, like custom golf balls that would pop up as treasure boxes for you to open as you achieved new milestones. The treasure boxes were a playful touch that completely charmed me. 

Playing in campaign mode on these golf courses reminded me of playing rounds of golf on Wii Sports. I will say this was better simply because I wasn’t staring at a flat-screen and felt far more immersed. While the weight of the controller isn’t anywhere near the heft of a real putter, I found myself looking down and walking around the ball and studying the course as if it were the real thing. Even with the low polygon graphics, I still felt that somewhat relaxed feeling I get just by being outside. 

The mechanics of the three golf courses are a little unrealistic, but not terrible. In real life, I have gotten an eagle exactly once in my lifetime on a golf course. I will remember that day forever, possibly due to the slack jaws of the men in my party. So far in Pro Putt, I’ve got an eagle (and even a few hole-in-ones!) on several holes in the beginner and pro versions, which I can’t imagine ever happening again in real life. My real-life mini-golf game might improve slightly from my practice in Pro Putt. The game mechanics are just realistic enough to encourage you to keep your head down, keep your eye on the ball, and swing using your body, rather than only your wrists. There is definitely a little aim assist (at least in the beginner modes) happening, and frankly, my fragile little ego is okay with that for now. 

Multiplayer

In multiplayer mode, you can choose from any of the available courses, whether or not you’ve unlocked them in campaign mode. You can choose to have a private match where you can invite someone from your friend’s list to play with, play against a random opponent, or play against a bot. The gameplay for all three is exactly the same, though you can’t socialize with a bot, and, with a bot, you can choose their skill level. If you decide to wait for a random person, you are transported to the practice green and can practice your aim while you wait to be paired. 

Once you’re paired, your opponent is an invisible person, identified only by a baseball cap and their putter. You can’t choose your hat, but I didn’t mind that. 

When in multiplayer, whoever putts their ball into the hole first wins the hole, regardless of how many shots it took. Once someone wins a hole (or when both players tie), you just move on to the next one. I wish this was how it worked in real life. I think back to those rounds of mini-golf, patiently waiting for the last person to finally sink their six-over-par ball…All while the next group of people loudly cough at the start waiting for us to finish up so they could finally play.

If there was one thing I wished Pro Putt had, it would be a local party mode. While passing a headset back and forth might be a little annoying, it would be really nice to play a round of mini-golf with my husband; especially now while lockdown orders are still in place in our state, and we’re not willing to go out and risk playing the real thing.

Putt Lounge

The Putt Lounge is set outdoors, under a starry night sky. A Low polygon fire dances next to you, and you hear low voices and chill music in the background. Behind you are a set of stairs and a set of low virtual couches. In front of you is a sort of driving range (putting range?) with goals painted on the green, set up for whichever one of the four mini-games you’ve chosen to play. There are four mini-games available in the Putt Lounge: Topgolf, Top Pressure, Quick Nine, and Quick Nine Pro. These mini-games are fast, challenging, and a lot of fun. They’re tough without being discouragingly difficult. I could have played for hours, and I will probably go back to these again and again. The only thing I found strange was that these mini-games, in a lounge that looked designed for socializing, had no multiplayer option.

Especially during this pandemic, I would love to challenge my husband to one of these quick matches as a part of a stay at home date. Even during normal circumstances, this would have been an excellent addition to a random game night with friends. 

I might not have time for an entire round of golf with a friend over the internet during normal conditions, but mini-games in the putt lounge would have been a nice, quick way to socialize. I will also quickly note that the game mechanics in the putt lounge aren’t quite as good as they are on the courses. A little flick of my wrist and the ball went flying. 

Longevity

There are only three courses with two levels of difficulty and four mini-games in Pro Putt. You can play through every single aspect of this game within a few short hours. However, I still think this game has some great staying power. You may or may not get addicted to this game, but you’ll enjoy playing it. It’s just challenging enough that you’ll want to come back to it every once and awhile whenever you just need a quick break. 

I could easily see myself popping in for a round of mini-golf with my VR buddies. As far as long-term playability goes, I think the developers of Pro Putt, Golf Scope Inc., missed a real opportunity by making the Putt Lounge a solo game. The Putt Lounge mini-games reminded me so much of nights spent in a college pub, playing shuffleboard and darts with my friends, that I found myself getting a little nostalgic. Adding Putt Lounge to the multiplayer options could have easily added some real staying power to this title. Despite that miss, I know I’ll be coming back again and again to the courses and the Putt Lounge to improve my score.   

Conclusion

So, next time I go mini-golfing in real life, will I wow everyone with the mad putting skills I learned from Pro Putt? Sadly, no, I don’t think the game mechanics are realistic enough to have an impact on my real-world mini-golf game. I believe Pro Putt could be improved by adding a local party mode and adding the Putt Lounge to the games available in the multiplayer modes. But I’m okay with this game as is because right now, Pro Putt is precisely the game I needed. Every once in a while, we all need to escape real life for a few minutes, slow down and play a fun, wholesome, quick game of golf.

If you’re looking for Golf games on the Quest, you might also want to check out our CloudLands 2 review.

Last month, I wrote about how the Oculus Quest was a novel way to keep fit, especially when your space and money may be somewhat limited. This month, I was asked to evaluate a new app on the horizon: Supernatural. Supernatural bills itself “an immersive, virtual reality fitness experience that combines the best music, coaches, destinations, and movements into an incredible home workout.” It also promised a new routine each day. 

Supernatural is offering the first month free for all new users so they can evaluate the “fitness system.” After that, they charge your credit card $19 per month. That’s a pretty hefty fee, but Supernatural also makes some pretty hefty promises. The developer claims this fee is due to the nature of the personalized workout, as well as updates that include new content, including new music for at least one new daily workout. 

Over the next month, I’ll be reviewing Supernatural to see if it’s delivery matches up with their promises. Because they are charging $228.00 per year for the privilege of using their program, I’ll also be evaluating whether the value of the workout you receive is worth that kind of money. I’ll be doing so both from a fitness and an entertainment perspective (after all, if you aren’t entertained, you’re probably not going to keep it up). 

Calibration and Training

When I first arrive in Supernatural, I am greeted by an enthusiastic woman who assures me that she’ll be with me every step of the way. The surroundings are gorgeous. My first setting appears to be rocky mountains in the UK. The trainer walks me through a simple calibration process to assess my height, lunge, and squat. Once that’s done, I’m taken through a short training that explains the basic workout, and then another trainer steps in to introduce me to some advanced 360 functionality for a total body workout. 

The Basics

You’re given a white baseball bat for your right hand and a black bat for your left. You watch the screen for the balls with the corresponding color. On each ball is a transparent cone that indicates the direction in which you’re supposed to hit the ball. The balls are virtual, but they kind of remind me of kickballs from gym class. If you miss, they sound like kickballs too. Some balls have special features. If the ball has a tail, you’re supposed to follow through them differently. If the ball has several arrows emanating from it, that’s an indication that you’re going to want to turn. Golden triangles occasionally appear to indicate that you’re supposed to squat. If the triangle leans to the right or left, you’re supposed to lunge. If several triangles appear in quick succession, you’re supposed to hold the position. You do this on repeat to upbeat music, with a trainer giving encouragement and advice. After each song in the workout, your scenery switches. The scenes in each workout routine are themed to match something in nature. 

So far, there is a small list of workout routines to choose from, most of them last between 20-30 minutes. They all seem to rely on the same basic game mechanics. The trainer usually appears beforehand to tell you about the scenery and how it relates to the theme, give you some encouragement, and maybe a quick stretch. 

Glitchy and Slow

I have to be honest, so far, I’m not too impressed. The scenes are all exotic nature photos, absolutely stunning high def, full-motion scenes. But the time to load each song and backdrop within a routine can be more than 5 minutes. During that time, you have the privilege of looking at a yellow loading bar on a black screen, which I have already nicknamed the “yellow bar of death.” That’s 5 minutes of me standing still doing nothing. I’m not a patient person, and standing still in VR is plain uncomfortable, not to mention awkward. At least when my computer is taking forever to load, I can abandon it and make myself something to eat while I wait. I would be much happier with a slightly lower res-version of these backdrops if I could get going sooner. Right now, I have plenty of time to be patient and wait for a game to load, but when life is normal, and I’m working out, I’m usually fitting it in before breakfast when I’m on a time crunch to get out the door on time for work or class. Even two or three minutes between each song can mean the difference between me being on time and late. Frankly, I don’t want to have to wake up earlier just because I’m going to have to factor in 15 minutes of slow loading. 

The game also has crashed on me multiple times, usually several times before I’ve even worked out, leading me to get frustrated and want to abandon it for a game that won’t crash. Of course, I don’t. I’m literally sticking to this game like it’s my job. You can thank me later. 

[Editor’s Note: I didn’t experience such long load durations myself, nor any crashes. My average download time per level was no more than 30-45 seconds at most. After checking with Lori, we came to the conclusion that internet connection speeds were the likely culprit. My connection speed is 500 Mbps, whereas Lori’s (we tested) was around 100 Mbps. The average internet connection speed in the USA (according to Ookla) is about 132 Mbps, so most American users might very well experience the same issues that Lori did. It might also explain why she experiences lots of crashes, whereas I experienced almost none. Having said that, I often experienced a stuttering performance at the start of workouts.]

[UPDATE 5/4/2020: The rate at which the routines and workouts download have increased to the point where it now only takes a few seconds to move from one workout to the next. I have observed that the resolution of the background is very slightly lower as a consequence]

Good Workout, Iffy Design

Once I finally got going, it is a pretty decent workout, though I found I did not enjoy the gameplay as much as I could have due to a few design choices. Now a solid Expert+ at Beat Saber, I know that the key to success with these types of “hit the target” music-and-rhythm games is…do not overthink it! Let your body react to what you see. Beat Saber did a great job of keeping the background minimalist and using only a few different, brightly colored, and contrasting indicators, making it very easy to follow. 

Here, the game developers have made some conscious design choices that make it impossible to simply react. The directional indicators of the targets are transparent. From an aesthetic perspective, I get this: It looks very sleek and modern – and allows you to see the pretty scenery they’ve placed all around you. From a performance perspective, however, I hate it. My unconscious brain can’t process an almost entirely transparent image fast enough to react without my conscious intervention. 

I have the same problem with the light tails, which appear as little shimmers against the backdrop. You’re supposed to use your bat to follow these tails to the next ball, but you can’t really see them very well as they blend into the background — and there is no indication, haptically or visually, that you’re actually performing the motion correctly. There is some verbal feedback from the trainer, but it’s of the generic kind and doesn’t seem to adapt to your performance. 

I was grateful for the squats and lunges because lower bodywork is essential, but I had a hard time distinguishing the squat triangles from the lunge triangles. The lean of the lunge triangles weren’t so distinct as to make the corresponding action evident. I kind of wish they just made them different colors or exaggerated the angles of the triangles just a little more so I wouldn’t have to guess. 

I also was a little annoyed, and a bit worried about my future with this app when the routine had me rapidly turning only to perform a squat right away. I often didn’t have enough time to turn before the triangles came at me. My form was off, and proper form is pretty crucial when you’re squatting because there is a risk of injury to the knees or back if it’s performed incorrectly. I found the 360 nature of Supernatural didn’t add too much but did result in me doing a lot of inadvertent traveling, which led to my guardian lighting up a little more than usual, as well as me bumping into my couch a few times. 

Minor Wish List

Whenever I try out a new app, I always think to myself: what could the developers do to make this a better experience? A lot of the time, my answers are the same: let me choose. 

The Ever-changing Backdrops

Don’t get me wrong: those scenes are stunning. Especially right now, in the middle of a pandemic where half the world is in some form of self-imposed or government-mandated house arrest, seeing lush, beautiful nature pictures in high resolution is a gift. But… I mean, this is VR. There are tons of ways to see the world without leaving your living room, many of which are free (YouTube VR, for example). When I’m trying to get in a solid workout might not be the best time for nature backdrops…especially since all that beauty, while theoretically enhancing and stress-reducing, can also be distracting. Frankly, I kind of resented the developers needs to change the scene between each song, without making it an option to just let me stay put so I didn’t have to wait 5 minutes for the next part of my workout to load. Truthfully, I’d like the ability to pick and choose my scenes, choose if I want to change them between songs or, just stick with one scene if I really like it. I think it would be awesome to have a backdrop gallery. 

Set Workout Routines – Fit Someone Else’s Music Taste

Right now, there are only a few workouts to choose from plus the original daily workout. One thing that is glaringly missing, probably because it is an option in basically every other fitness-type game available so far, is the ability to choose the music I play to. A few games let you upload your own tracks, but most at least have a preset list of songs for you to choose from. BoxVR sorts their music choices by genre and lets you create and save your own playlists, which makes up for a lot of the game’s other shortfalls. 

Here, Supernatural only has workout routines. You can’t choose your own music or make a routine from a list, so once you’ve selected a workout, you’re stuck with whatever music that trainer has decided on to go along with their routines. So far, the music is ok, though not really my favorite kind: I’d definitely prefer to control my playlist. 

Also, I’d love to change around the colors of the balls and bats. I’d like to make them contrast more with the scenery. I’d love to be able to at least control the opacity of the directional cones for the same reason. Black and white is a very tempting choice when developing an app that relies on color, as you’re less likely to have an issue with colorblind players, and the color coordination has a sleek, modern look. But, it’s not just the lack of contrast: black and white get boring pretty fast. 

You can change the volume of the music, sound effects, and coach, but I’d like to be able to turn the coach off completely during gameplay. I found them unhelpful. 

The Missing Basic Elements

Fitbit Compatibility

I’m not sure why one of the country’s most popular fitness trackers was omitted from their list of compatible heart rate monitors, but Supernatural doesn’t (yet?) work with Fitbit. Apple watch, oddly, was not excluded, which given that the Oculus Quest doesn’t work all that well with apple, is a pretty odd choice. If this is going to be my main fitness app, I want it to come loaded with my personalized information. 

Restart

So there are a couple of basics that need to be in this game. First, You can’t restart a workout from the beginning unless you cancel out and go back to the main menu. I had a couple of adjustment issues with my headset and wanted to reset because I didn’t pause in time to get the dust off my lenses. You can pause, you can quit. You can’t restart. 

Keep Score and Streaks

After each workout, you’re scored on a graph that displays your accuracy and some other metrics. I think it would be good to see how what you’re doing affects your score real lime during the game. I’d also love to see a combo score and maybe a points multiplier. None of those elements are currently present.

Where’s The Party?

When I went digging into the app between workouts to see what social elements there were, there weren’t many. The companion phone app allows you to see your scores and friend’s scores, but I couldn’t find any way to challenge my friends in real-time to a battle. In fact, I don’t see a way to socialize with anyone. Also, since the platform is calibrated to my body measurements, sharing the platform with my husband doesn’t seem possible. There is a sort of demo mode my husband can use…but just like Oculus, it appears to be one account per person, not per household. So if my husband wanted to play too, he’d have to have his own account. This instantly means the price of the platform rises to $456 per year for our household, which…well, I could buy another quest for that scratch. That’s a full month of grocery money, or one toilet paper run, these days. 

Finally, this game assumes a lot about my social life. It thinks I have friends (I mean, of course, I have friends…ahem….) who I’ll want to share my workouts with, who also have a Quest, have Supernatural, and are also willing to pay the subscription fee. I actually doubt all of those things. I have a few online acquaintances though Oculus specific message boards, and the staff of 6DOF Reviews (who all live in different time zones), but few who I necessarily want to share my fitness stats with. I’d also be very reluctant to push an app on them that comes with such a heavy price tag. It would have to be some app to cost twice as much as a Netflix subscription! But I would want to make new friends and add them to a permanent friend list without also having to make them Facebook friends. I want to compete in real-time in the same (virtual) place. Maybe have the option to talk a little smack (and be able to mute)? And I’d love to see my scores on each workout and song on a global leader board. 

I’m also not entirely sure what value is added from the companion app. So far, after using it, I haven’t had any desire to check into it. 

The Fees Raised My Expectations…They Remain Unmet

So, I’ll be honest, when I saw the 19 dollars per month price tag on Supernatural, I thought: “no other Oculus game really does this, so it must be something extraordinary.” 

Given the price tag and the hype offering different workouts each day, I expected a suite of varying gameplay experiences, not just one type of music and rhythm game. Something akin to Sports Scramble where you pay a little extra upfront and then get tennis, bowling, and baseball, all with multiple levels, multiplayer capability, and full campaigns. So far, this just feels like Beat Saber— overlaid on top of super high def National Geographic/Nature Trek/Google Earth, but with less customization. Other than a little bit of extra lower bodywork, it hasn’t been that much better of a workout. When I exercise, I usually don’t spend 100% of my time in any one game. I will often switch between three or four games to both keep entertained and work my whole body. 

I don’t mind paying upfront for a good fitness game, particularly one I’d use a lot. Ultimately, I play each of the fitness games I’ve purchased at least a few times per week, so I’ve gotten good value for my dollar — as each time I play the cost-per-usage decreases. 

If it were a one time cost, I know I wouldn’t be so harsh, but I’m a student, and my income is limited. If I’m going to put most of my monthly game budget into one game, that game had better give me those things that I crave from gaming. If it’s my fitness budget Supernatural is taking from, it had better give me results I couldn’t have gotten spending that money elsewhere. 

Since the cost of Supernatural renews each month and is the equivalent of a new game each month, I’m not really sure what this game/app is giving me that I can’t get from the pretty crowded fitness game market I already paid for in full. I’d better want to play it every day. I’d expect Supernatural to be the entirety of my workout. At the moment, I’m having a hard time seeing how I could justify this cost. 

Even the claim that Supernatural workouts get harder along with my skill level isn’t all that impressive: almost every game on the market gives you the ability to choose what skill level to play at. Even though this is only my trial month and I’m not expected to pay anything yet, I can already feel myself thinking along the lines of: “I’d better use this to its full potential each day. Otherwise, I’m throwing money out the window.”

This point of view may evolve as the month goes on…and actually, I hope it does. I have a pretty good track record sticking with my workouts, and I don’t want that to shift. I’d love to add something new to my fitness regime. I’d also like to see if the results are worth the cost. They might be. Expect a full review with scores next month!

Stay tuned. 

• Why Don’t We Just Do What’s Good For Us?
• VR Fitness with the Quest: The Pros
• VR Fitness with the Quest: The Cons
• VR Fitness: Bring on the Games: Beat Saber, BoxVR, Synth Riders, Dance Central, Sports Scramble, Ninja Legends, The Thrill of the Fight, Pistol Whip, Guided Tai Chi.

Fifty percent of Americans resolve to exercise more every new year. You may have been one of them – I’ve definitely been one of them. So if we all know how good exercise is for us, why aren’t we all already exercising for at least 30 minutes a day 5 days per week?

The Oculus Quest is a fun way to get in shape, whether you’re traveling or stuck inside. 

Well, I can’t speak for you. I don’t know you. But I know me, and I’ll tell you what has always stood in my way: 

Why Don’t We Just Do What’s Good for Us?

For me, the pattern has always been the same: I’d resolve to exercise more. I’d then take steps to make it happen: join a gym, download an app, create a YouTube playlist, or join a class. I’d buy gym clothes, sneakers, yoga mats, etc… I’d go for 2 weeks, a month or even a few months…then, one day I’d be too tired or just not feel like it. So I wouldn’t go. One day would turn into two, and then a week. Finally, I’d face reality: I wasn’t going to start up again. 

Truthfully, these new healthy habits were hard to stick to because I was trying to talk myself into doing something I didn’t actually enjoy. I could lie to myself all I wanted, but deep down, I knew the truth. I just didn’t want to work out. It was boring. Because I didn’t enjoy what I was doing, I just didn’t want to do it again. You can only force yourself to do something for so long before your willpower runs out and you find better ways to spend your time. 

That’s not to say there weren’t some fun ways to workout, like dance or kickboxing classes, but they presented problems of their own. First, there wasn’t any guarantee that the classes I wanted to take were anywhere close to me, geographically. These classes were expensive, ranging from 10-50 dollars per class, and even if I could find a class I wanted to take in my area, they often didn’t fit around my schedule.

Another obstacle that really got in my way: my own shyness. The gym and group exercise environments can be intimidating, especially when you’re just getting started. I felt exposed and self-conscious. I was intimidated by the people who’s skill levels were so far above my own. They didn’t seem to get winded as quickly and didn’t make my mistakes. Knowing that no one was judging me and that most people were probably just as self-conscious as I am, didn’t change how I felt when I went.

VR Fitness with the Quest: The Pros

I didn’t buy the Oculus Quest as a piece of fitness equipment. I bought it because it was a standalone VR headset…and I thought it was cool as hell. It didn’t take long for me to see that when I bought the Quest, I was also buying myself one of the best pieces of fitness equipment available. Here’s why:

1. It removes excuses. Too cold to go outside? You don’t have to. Get home too late to go to the gym? It’s available 24 hours per day. Snow on the ground? Too cold? Too hot? Just don’t feel like going anywhere? Stuck inside because of a government-mandated quarantine? No travel required. You don’t even need to leave your bedroom. Feeling under the weather and not up to your usual workout? Play for a short while in beginner mode just to move around a little — and when you’re done, you can just take the headset off and go right back to bed (as long as this is cool with your doctor). You don’t need to find a babysitter. You don’t need sneakers. You don’t even really need gym clothes. There have been a few times that I’ve worked out in my pajamas because I was too lazy to put my workout clothes on. Those pajamas went right in the laundry basket after, but I’ve done it. 
   
   
2. You don’t need a ton of space. As long as you have enough space to keep your legs shoulder length apart and enough space to swing your arms in a wide arc, that’s enough room to play 95% of the games that include fitness benefits.
   
   
3. It’s portable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been chugging along with a daily exercise routine, only to have a trip come up and completely de-rail me. Hotel gyms are the worst. Since I’ve had my Quest, I’ve had to go on a few trips that included hotel rooms of varying sizes. Each time, I was able to get in my regular work out, without setting foot in the hotel’s gym. I did buy an Oculus Quest Travel Case for this purpose. This turned out to be a serious advantage. Being able to stick to my routine when I was away made it a lot easier to continue my routines when I got back home. 
   
   
4. It’s versatile. Sometimes, when you’re working out, that’s your whole purpose: exercise for the sake of it. When you’re feeling very motivated, that’s enough. Personally, my motivation to keep fit waxes and wanes. I make myself a little deal every morning: I put that headset on for a preset amount of time: usually, 30 minutes working out and 5 minutes for a cool down. During that time, I can play any game I want to, as long as it involves moving around. Some days, I spend 30 minutes playing one game –but that’s not usually how it goes. Today, for example, I did some rhythm boxing, played 2 games of tennis, danced to 2 songs in a nightclub, and cooled down with a session of Tai Chi. The day before, I spent 20 minutes killing Ninjas and 10 minutes playing Beat Sabers. Compare that to when I used to go to the gym: 35 minutes on the elliptical while watching Netflix on my phone, followed by 10 minutes of stretching. Sometimes I’d venture into the weight lifting section and pretend to know how to use the machines.
   
   
5. It’s as challenging as you need it to be. Most of the “fitness genre” games on the Quest have skill levels to choose from or have progressive campaigns where you can slowly progress through a storyline or set of challenges. Beat Saber, for example, has 5 solo play levels: Easy, Normal, Hard, Expert, and Expert+. This may not seem, at first, like a huge advantage unless you put this in perspective. I remember walking into a Zumba class for the first (and last) time. I love dancing, but having never done a Zumba class before, trying to follow along was exhausting. By the end, I was a sweaty, dehydrated, embarrassed mess of a girl. Maybe I would have improved as time went on, but because my very first class was so far above my skill level (extreme beginner), the immense challenge of catching up felt insurmountable. The potential feelings of embarrassment outweighed my desire to return. So I didn’t. When you’re playing games in VR, those games can meet you wherever your skill presently is. You might start out as a beginner, but as you get more advanced, you can choose to adjust the difficulty and intensity of your work out. Advancing through the various levels at your own pace might also encourage you to keep going. An actual judgment-free zone.
   
   
6. It’s fun. The Oculus Quest is, first and foremost, a gaming system. The apps you can use to exercise, with only a few exceptions, were designed not as workout routines, but as games. If games aren’t fun, you won’t play, or at least you won’t play for very long. Games are designed to be enjoyable. Games are designed to be rewarding. Most of all, games are designed to give you non-judgmental feedback to help you improve based on your experience and keep you coming back for more. When you’re “working out” with the Oculus Quest, you’re not exercising for the sake of it anymore. While you might get fit while playing, that’s not the designer’s objective, but a side bonus, to them at least. To you, it’s a huge advantage. If your brain doesn’t consider an action rewarding, it’s not going to want to do that action again. If you’re bored while doing math or feel self-conscious for making mistakes, how often are you going to want to do math?  If you’re bored on the elliptical machine, how motivated are you going to be the next day to get on the elliptical? You might do it anyway because you want the eventual results, but it gets harder and harder to force yourself to do something you don’t enjoy that doesn’t have an immediate benefit. If you feel like working out is something you HAVE to do, it’s a chore. If working out is a chore, you’ll have a hard time making it a regular habit. If you log onto your Quest to have fun, you’re going to do it again and again. It’s a lot easier to stick to something when it’s fun. 
   
   
7. It’s Effective. None of the advantages above mean anything if working out on the Oculus Quest doesn’t actually confer any real fitness benefit. But it does. I have been planning on writing a fitness feature for 6DOF Reviews for several months. During that time, I committed to using the Oculus quest as my primary workout equipment. Since I made that commitment, I have also been careful to track my calorie burn and my progress. I wasn’t disappointed. According to my Fitbit, depending on my level of intensity, in 30 minutes, I could expect to burn about 200-300 calories. Running, by the way, burns about 270 calories in a half-hour (per 10-minute mile). All the benefits of running without having to actually run? Sign me up. What were my results you ask? Within 16 weeks of using the Quest as my primary exercising equipment, I lost 30lbs and 6 inches off my waist.

“Wow, all that sounds awesome. But it sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?”

VR Fitness with the Quest: The Cons

You caught me. There are some downsides:

1. You’re unlikely to get a strength workout. I have yet to find a game that makes sit-ups fun. You can get some muscle tone, but the muscle tone is the same as you would get pumping your arms during a run, shadow boxing, performing squats, or lunges. Still, so far, I have yet to see any VR workouts involving your abdominal core. Before I log in each day, I do three sets of planks at one minute each. That seems to do the trick for a full-body workout. 
   
   
2. The design flaws of the Quest hardware are more prominent when you’re doing vigorous activity. The Oculus Quest is the first of its generation of standalone virtual reality headsets. The device was groundbreaking…unfortunately, it’s also a heavy load to wear on your face. Almost as soon as the headset went on sale, third-party sellers started selling hardware mods to get around the discomfort caused by the headset. In the first month that I owned the Oculus Quest, I felt like my cheeks were going to bruise from wearing it. I also found that the face pad irritated my skin, and I started to get pimples. The longer you wear the headset, the heavier and more irritating it feels. Don’t click away yet! Both issues are easily solved. The weight of the headset simply needs to be better distributed. I’m not one for modding hardware, but I made an exception. The first issue of weight distribution can be solved with a head strap or cushion – both of which are available for less than 30 dollars. As for the skin irritation of the face pad, VRcover makes a breathable, machine-washable cotton interface cover, that comes in sets of two and are under 20 dollars. Each solution takes about a minute to install on your hardware and won’t void the warranty. This article isn’t sponsored. But if you have discomfort when using your headset, I found these inexpensive workarounds solved those issues.  
   
   
3. This can get expensive, fast. Over several months, I purchased most of the games on the Quest that looked fun and involved physical activity. The games ranged in price from 9.99 to about 30 dollars. All in all, I spent around almost 200 dollars just on fitness games. I didn’t buy them all at once, but over several months – so I didn’t really feel that pain. I don’t feel as though I wasted my money since I use almost all of the games I purchased at least once per week…But the headset itself isn’t exactly cheap. So if you haven’t purchased the Quest yet, do your research. Make sure it’s an investment you’re willing to make. Would I suggest buying the Quest just for fitness? No, probably not. But the Quest isn’t just a piece of exercise equipment. It’s a full entertainment system and, in my opinion, well worth the purchase price. But I still suggest buying it from a retailer with a solid return policy in case you buy it, try it, and don’t like it. As for the games: The Oculus quest store has a few demo versions of games for free. Sports Scramble, Beat Saber, and Creed all have free demos. I suggest you download those and try them out before you purchase the full versions of those games. I’m going to quickly review some of the games below from a fitness perspective. We’ve reviewed most of them, and the reviews can help you decide which ones you want to try out.
   
   Still, you know yourself better than I ever could. The Oculus store has a good return policy: You can return a game within two weeks if you have played it for less than two hours (cumulatively). Once you’ve tried the demos, buy one game. Evaluate it. Decide if that is a game you will use: Is it fun? Is it challenging enough? Does it fit your personality? If not, return it and get your money back. You can always repurchase it later if you change your mind. 
   
   
4. It’s a little isolating. Playing games on the Quest is fun. Most of the fitness games include a “party mode” that lets you take turns with your real-world friends. Many have an online multiplayer/versus mode that allows you to challenge a stranger on the network or a friend from your friends’ list. Having said that, the Quest requires you to put on a headset that essentially blinds you to the real world for however long you choose to stay. Even if you have a friend or family member sitting right next to you, watching your progress on their phones or TV, you’re still alone in the world it creates for you. Non-VR systems have multiple controllers and multiple participants within one system. In contrast, the Quest is tied to only one user account and only allows one player at a time. This isn’t a feature I mind so much, but it is a limitation. 
   
   
5. If you want to see the benefits, you still have to stick with it, just like any other workout routine. I worked out today on my Quest, and I know I’ll use it tomorrow. I worked out when I was on the road. I worked out when I needed stress relief. I am calling it a “workout”– but really, I was playing games. I was trying to beat my top scores or trying to advance to the next level. I’m usually disappointed when my Fitbit timer vibrates and tells me I need to stop working out. Yes, I know it’s time to move on with my morning routine, or I’ll be late for work or my first class! I lost 30 lbs when the Quest was my ONLY form of exercise…But for me to actually see those benefits, I had to stick with it for a few months. I had to keep working out even after I got down to my goal weight to keep from regaining the weight or getting soft. The fact that I look forward to my daily workout routine doesn’t change the truth: If I didn’t exercise a few times each week, I wouldn’t achieve my fitness goals. To see the benefits of any workout routine, you’ll need to build yourself up to at least 30 minutes of exercise per day and as many days a week as you can. Your workout does not need to be all at one time, though! If you can only do 15-30 minutes in the morning and another 15-30 minutes in the evening, it still counts. One more thing to keep in mind: I was reviewing the Quest as a piece of fitness equipment, so I used it exclusively, but that’s not how you have to play it. If it’s nice out and you want to take a walk instead? Take a walk! Want to play on your Quest for 10 minutes, take a walk for 10 minutes, and then do 10 minutes of yoga? Go for it. The best workout routine is the one you can stick to.
   
   
6. You’ll have to stretch before and after. Just because your workout is virtual doesn’t mean you won’t get real sore muscles… I find that I need to stretch my forearms, my calves, and roll my shoulders, or they will tighten up. Be kind to your body: stretch it before any physical activity.
   
   
7. If losing weight is your goal, you’ll need to eat fewer calories than your body burns. There’s a saying(and I hate it): “You can’t outrun your fork.” Remember, most fitness tracking devices can be a little deceptive: fitness watches track total calories burnt during a workout but don’t take into account the calories you would have burned during that time if you hadn’t moved at all. Truthfully, I don’t believe that the body is a straightforward machine where if you eat less, you’ll always lose weight. Our bodies are incredibly complex systems, and there are many factors involved in weight loss, some of which have nothing to do with what you eat or how much you workout. These factors can make losing weight complicated, inconsistent, and slow. If you’re affected by one of these factors or think you might be, it’s a good idea to talk to a doctor and get a personalized assessment. Once you’re ready to do so, find a healthy eating plan that works for you. I personally chose WW. I liked their plan’s flexibility, reliance on scientific research, and peer support. Also, if you hit your weight loss goal and maintain your weight loss for six weeks, you can keep using their resources (for free!) to maintain your weight-loss.

VR Fitness: Bring On The Games!

Let’s get to the games! Note: this isn’t an exhaustive list. These mini fitness-game reviews are just the games that I personally enjoyed and gave me a consistent workout. 

Beat Saber 

Calorie Burn: 40-60 Cal / 10 mins

Why I Love It

Beat Saber is one of the few games on the Quest that has a free demo. When I first got my Quest, I was reluctant to spend too much money and was really happy to take advantage of any free content. Beat Saber has a great tutorial in their demo. The full version features a campaign mode and a solo play mode that allows you to practice individual songs with five difficulty levels for each. It also comes with some multiplayer and party mode features.

Recently, Beat Saber introduced the ability to personalize your experience by letting you choose custom colors and environments. They’ve also started to add a 360 gameplay experience to a bunch of songs, finally taking advantage of the Quest’s untethered nature. Outside community developers have also created downloadable, open-source, mods that allow the savvy player to upload their own music and create their own levels. For various reasons, I haven’t done this — and even so, I find Beat Saber a delight. 

Beat Saber is also a great way to uplift your mood and motivate you. Almost all of the music choices are up-beat, and whether we like it or not, music affects our emotions. Upbeat music will usually improve your mood. If you’re not in the mood for a workout, Beat Saber will usually get you in the mood to move. You’ll also be happier afterward, thanks to the endorphins your body produces in response to the physical activity.

Beat Saber has 5 levels for solo gameplay: easy, normal, hard, expert, and expert+. When I first started playing back in May of 2019, it took me about a half-hour to progress from easy to medium. It took me about a week to progress from medium to hard, and it took me two months to progress from hard to expert. Now, I’m finally playing at the expert+ level, and it is incredibly challenging. You’ll know you’re ready to progress to the next level of difficulty when you’ve started getting perfect scores on the songs you play. If the song seems to be too easy or you find your mind wandering while you’re in the middle of gameplay, that is a signal to move on to the next difficulty level. 

Why You May Not Love It

If you have a back injury or are prone to seizures, this game just isn’t for you. There is a lot of arm-waving, twisting and ducking and weaving. I mentioned the music is upbeat, and this is very true. But, except for the music packs that cost extra, you’ve probably never heard any of the songs, and the music may not be to your taste. There is a limited library (assuming you didn’t install the mods), so even if you did buy all the music packs — and this can make the game repetitive after a while. Beat Saber is also a bit on the pricy side (at around $30). This doesn’t include most of the DLC music packs from artists whose names you might actually recognize. The music packs range in price from 6-10 dollars each. They include artists like Panic at the Disco!, Monster Cat, Imagine Dragons, Green Day, and (coming next week) Timbaland.

BoxVR

Calorie Burn: 60-80 Cal / 10 mins

Why I Love it

Box VR does precisely what it’s designed to do: it provides an effective workout. If you choose to, it will display your calorie burn on the screen as you work out(though the calorie burn is wildly inaccurate). As much as I hate the warehouse environments, I will say that the fact that there aren’t lights flashing everywhere does actually allow me to focus. Box VR does have some good qualities that most of the other fitness games don’t have. You can program your own playlists and pick from a pretty long list of included songs separated by genre. The game developers have only added to the available music list and have not charged once for access to new songs. I’ve never heard of any of these titles before, but some of the tunes are pretty catchy.  

As much as I don’t really like the design of this game, I frequently turn to it for my workouts. There’s an excellent reason for this: as much fun as working out in the Quest is, sometimes, in the morning, all I want to do is go back to sleep because I’m on autopilot and don’t want to think. Box VR allows you to set up and save your own playlists. The fewer steps I have to take to work out, the more likely I am to follow through. Also, because the playlists are set up to play one song right after the other, I don’t need to pause my workout to choose a new song- so I’m more likely to work out for the entire playlist. Frankly, I wish more of the music and rhythm games would add this feature.

I usually choose a 10-minute workout from one of my own playlists, or I try one of the day’s featured playlists. By the time I’m finished, I’m warmed up and ready to move on to a more entertaining game. There have been many days where I just wanted a guaranteed burn and did my entire work out in BoxVR, but with all the fun ways to work out in Quest, this one is only a part of my diet. 

Why You May Not Love It

So, I’m actually not a huge fan of this game. It’s as expensive as Beat Saber, but nowhere near as creative or well designed. You only have a choice of 3 scenes: a day warehouse, a twilight warehouse, and an environment vaguely reminiscent of generic 80s sci-fi movies or a Windows 95 screensaver. The game advertises itself as having trainer designed programs, but you never interact with the “trainers” at all. All you see are portraits of people in gym clothes next to one of the pre-programmed playlists. Presumably, that trainer “designed” that playlist. I don’t actually see much of a difference between those and the playlists I made up based on my own music taste. Seriously, how hard would it have been for the makers of this game to incorporate some kind of player interaction with the trainers they advertise? Even if it was just a voice-over or even some short videos demonstrating the proper form. I find the lack of variety in this game lazy. The low-res environments are lacking. As is the inability to modify the colors of your targets (you can choose between two color sets). The poor tutorial and the lack of safety information also feel a little lazy.

There is a “survivor” mode that hoped would add some additional challenge or feeling of gameplay. I was wrong. When you choose to play in survivor mode, you get ten “lives”. Whenever you make a mistake, you lose a life. You can regain your lost lives by consistently hitting your targets without missing any. You play until you lose all ten lives. Supposedly, the longer you play, the more challenging it becomes. This does sound fun, but it’s not. There is only one non-lyrical house music type soundtrack in survivor mode, and it loops….over…and over…and over. The gameplay doesn’t get more challenging every time the music restarts, though. Instead, the targets just accelerate until no human could possibly move fast enough to hit them. This also means that no matter how good you are, you will eventually fail, which also means there is no way to win.

Tip: the game NEVER tells you this for some reason, but when you’re punching, 99% of your body weight should go on your front foot. Your back foot should be used to pivot. This information is available on the Game Developers website, buried in a youtube tutorial by one of the trainers.

My other tip: you are bobbing, weaving and squatting a lot with this game, just make sure that when you bend your knees, you’re not letting your knees go out past your toes. 

Synth Riders

Calorie Burn: 40-60 Cal / 10 mins

Why I Love It

This is another music and rhythm game “hit the target” type game. Synth Riders has such an 80’s futuristic vibe to it that almost always puts me in a good mood. The primary reason I decided to make this a regular part of my work out was that each song provides at least some much needed lower bodywork. You do a lot of squatting in this game.

There are a bunch of environments to choose from, including the ability to have a random environment, and you can customize the colors of your targets. Again, I haven’t heard of any of the music’s artists — they all sound like 80’s synth-pop to me. Lucky for me: I love 80’s synth-pop.

Why You May Not Love It

Synth Riders can be a little bit …much. Unlike Beat Saber and Box VR, there is a risk with motion sickness here. In Synth riders, you’re on a moving platform. If you’re like me, the sensation of feeling like your moving in VR, without actually moving IRL, can lead to motion sickness. Synth Riders does, however, have a setting that allows you to change your scenery to a stationary one. This, however, makes the game a little less fun…I can’t quite figure out why. I’ll also point out that, even though I am prone to VR motion sickness, I never have actually gotten motion sickness playing this game…or even felt queasy (to my absolute delight).

Dance Central 

Calorie Burn: 40-60 Cal / 10 mins

Why I Love It 

Dance Central is a dancing game (duh), rather than a “hit the target” game. It also happens to be one of the few games that can give you a whole-body workout. Dance Central was designed by Harmonix (creators of Guitar Hero and Rockband), so there are songs by several artists you’ll recognize…across several different genres.

You can completely customize your avatar from how you look to the clothes you wear. There are also a few game-like elements present in Dance Central that are absent from most of the other fitness type games I discuss here. There are 6 different characters you can choose to interact with and a storyline that progresses the more you play. There is also an adorable way to interact with the characters, and with the game using an in-game smartphone that you can customize with cases you earn in-game.

Why You May Not Love It

There are 6 scenes in Dance Central: the main entrance, the bar, the dance floor, the VIP room, the dressing room, and the practice room. For some reason, they have a balcony you can go on to, but it’s never been used in gameplay. In other words, it’s all modern style dance club — and by modern style, I mean mid 90’s. Frankly, when I go out, I prefer a hole in the wall with dim lighting, sticky floors, and independent musicians with ironic band names. If I ever went to a club like this IRL, it was because I was dragged by well-meaning friends who thought I needed to get out more. So the scenes here were a bit of a turn-off, at least for me. Also, the music, while mostly upbeat, which isn’t sooooooo bad, but can be a little on the grating side.

Unlike many of the games I’ve listed, this one actually does require a little bit of actual space to play, BoxVR and Beat Saber can be played in the Quest’s stationary mode pretty easily, but Dance Central requires some, though not a ton of, lateral movement. If you have the room, it’s great — if not, this isn’t the game for you. 

Ok, so I’ve gone through a lot of music and rhythm games– and these types of games aren’t for everyone. If you’re one of the people who doesn’t like them, I’ve got you covered:

Sports Scramble

Calorie Burn: 40-60 Cal / 10 mins

Why I Love It

So full disclosure, the only game that actually gives you an effective workout in Sports Scramble is the tennis game. If you have the room in your house, you can actually participate in a full-on tennis match complete with running and overhand serves. You can set it up to move around within a visual boundary (in the world). You’re also cheered on by a stadium full of adorable cartoons. I occasionally find myself waving to the crowd, pretending I’m Serena Williams.

Sports scramble has a demo mode, a challenge mode, a quickplay mode, and a party mode that allows you to challenge friends and strangers on the internet. You can customize your avatar and earn new gear. You can also turn off the “scramble” features, which constantly randomize elements of gameplay, turning your racket into a baseball bat, tennis balls into beach balls, etc. Now, when I first bought Sports Scramble, I went through its tutorial and “challenges”(which is like their campaign mode). I found that the best and most enjoyable workout for me was a traditional-rule tennis quick match (3 games) with scramble features toggled completely off. That being said, it’s pretty cool to buy one game and get a free bowling alley of your very own. The included baseball game was fun too, though not much of a workout.

Why You May Not Love It

So truthfully, as much as I love the sports part of this game, I HATE the scramble part of the game. Do you honestly think hitting a beach ball with a fish is going to somehow enhance your playing experience? Neither do I. This game is at the higher end of the cost spectrum and may not be worth it to you since only one sport out of three confers any physical benefits. Also, it’s on the campy side to the point of childishness. I don’t mind that so much, but you might. 

Racket: NX

Calorie burn: 40-60 Cal / 10 mins

Why I Love It

Racket: NX is a combination of Racquetball and pinball. You stand in the center of a giant geodesic dome and hit a ball of light with a racket. Racket NX has a long (and very challenging) campaign mode, consisting of several 5-7 minute rounds.

They’re all designed to help you improve your skills and keep gameplay interesting. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can challenge a friend or stranger to a game of racket tug-of-war. Racket: NX is a game that couldn’t exist in reality, has a great soundtrack built-in, and best of all, YOU CAN UPLOAD YOUR OWN MUSIC. 

Why You May Not Love It 

Unless you’re playing a multiplayer round, you’re completely isolated in the center of a geodesic dome. I found this game a little lonely, and after I progressed to a certain point, the rounds were so challenging that I got really discouraged after losing over and over and over…and because the environment didn’t really change, the gameplay didn’t change all that much either, and I found I couldn’t really play it for very long without getting bored. 

Ninja Legends

Calorie Burn: 40-60 Cal / 10 mins

Why I Love It

So, I’m 99% sure that Ninja Legends was not designed to be a fitness game. That doesn’t mean it isn’t one, though. Ninja legends is an adrenaline-filled game where you are constantly attacked by…you guessed it…ninjas. Lots and lots of ninjas who come at you from all sides. You start out with two katanas, but as you progress through the levels, you unlock more weapons. After just one level, you are panting from the exertion. Ninja Legends is a solid work out and a great way to take out your aggression in a novel setting.

Why You May Not Love It

Ninja Legends borders on the campy side. The gameplay doesn’t change, even as the levels get more challenging to beat. You’re placed in a slightly different scene at every level, and you have to kill ninjas that don’t vary much in physique or design. No cut scenes. Just a barebones storyline, written as a level description, to give you minimal context, and a BONG! Sound to let you know you’re about to be attacked. The intensity might annoy you more than it thrills you after a while. 

The Thrill of the Fight

Calorie burn: 80-100 Cal / 10 mins

Why I Love It

First off, it’s cheap: only 10 dollars. But you get a lot for that 10 bucks. Like Rocky, you start at a crappy boxing gym, sparring and then working your way through progressively more difficult opponents in higher stakes matches. You fight each opponent for 3 rounds. Each boxing round lasts 3 minutes, with a minute in between for resting and recovery. I will tell you: I get VERY into this. I never thought of myself as a particularly aggressive person. I also admit that I never enjoyed 2D computer games where the only objective was to beat your opponent to a pulp by button mashing. However, when you’re doing the same thing with your own fists — suddenly you’re floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. I found myself dodging, weaving, guarding my body, and doing that weird fight dance that boxers do on TV….and loving every minute of it. When my 3 rounds are over, I know that I burned a ton of calories.

This is probably the only game on the quest I actually need to pause for a short water break between rounds. Also, by boxing with a fictional opponent, I’m sublimating some aggression I didn’t even know I had! Surprisingly, this has helped me control my stress levels during the day. When you hit someone that doesn’t exist, they can’t actually injure you. You can’t get arrested for assault. The Thrill of the Fight provides all the fun of hitting someone, and none of the consequences. 

Why You May Not Love It

For one thing, you DO need a large play area for this game. The developers of Thrill of the Fight really took advantage of the 6 degrees of freedom and 6.5×6.5 square foot play area recommendation. I BARELY have this. I live in a relatively small apartment, and there is one space in it that has juuuuuust that amount of space to move around without bumping into furniture. You can’t stay in one place when playing The Thrill of The fight. You move when your opponent moves. You lunge to punch — you back up when they come for you. The Oculus Guardian (the blue cage that appears to warn you when you are about to bump into a real-life boundary), doesn’t seem to be very sensitive when playing this game.

I remember once I was playing a particularly intense round when I felt a sharp tap on my shoulder. I lifted my visor (never a pleasant experience to be jarred back into the real world), to see my husband’s horrified face. I had been so into my match that I was about to slam into my kitchen sink. One more step and I would have had the wind knocked out of me by my own kitchen counter. Would the Quest’s guardian have caught me before I made contact? I honestly don’t know. The guardian didn’t light up to warn me where I was —but I wouldn’t be too surprised if I accidentally ended up punching a wall. I have heard of this happening to others. From that point on, I was more cautious about where I was stepping. I won’t lie: having to force myself to be aware of my external real-world surroundings, did take me out of it a little.

So, if you don’t actually have 6.5×6.5 feet to move around in your play area, I wouldn’t even bother buying The Thrill of the Fight. One more thing: the NPC spectators in the early rounds are downright creepy. They don’t have eyes. 

Pistol Whip

Calorie Burn: 60-80 Cal / 10 mins

I wasn’t planning on including Pistol Whip in this feature. Pistol Whip is a first-person shooter, a genre I don’t prefer. I also couldn’t have guessed that Pistol Whip could even be used as a workout. My editor suggested I review Pistol Whip from a fitness perspective as a part of this feature, as this is a game he uses for a lower body workout. I couldn’t imagine how a first-person shooter could be a consistent workout. After trying it, I hereby and humbly stand corrected on all counts. Pistol Whip is an excellent full-body workout. Even for someone like me, who doesn’t usually enjoy first-person shooters, Pistol Whip is a lot of fun. It’s a game I now intend to make a part of my regular workout routine each week. 

Why I Love It:

• Customizable Gear: You get a gun (or 2 guns!), choose a song from a small (but growing) list of EDM songs. Your job is simply to shoot or pistol whip (thus the title) the pixelated bad guys while dodging bullets and obstacles. I mostly chose to use two of the larger guns, and I dyed them pink! Using two guns did reduce my score somewhat but was preferable to having an idle arm at my side. I could have used it to cradle my shooting hand, which is proper form IRL, but with controllers that made little sense. You can choose from a variety of different guns, unlock new weapons, and customize your pistol’s design and color. Customization seems like this small thing, but to me, I find it helps make any game feel more personal.
  
  
• Discovering my Inner Lara: The combination of high-intensity music, combined with targeting, shooting, and dodging makes for an insane mood booster. If I had to compare it to anything, I’d say it’s a less frustrating, faster-moving version of Superhot with a soundtrack. Playing through a song in Pistol Whip activated my deeply buried survival instinct as I dodged every bullet! As in The Thrill of the Fight, this workout also helped me work through some deeply suppressed aggression. After playing, I felt better and, ironically, more peaceful, in the real world. When Doc Neale reviewed Pistol Whip for 6DOF Reviews, he said he felt like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix. Personally, with my double guns, I felt more like Lara Croft.
  
  
• The Sneaky Burn at any Level: Pistol Whip is a sneaky workout. When I first started playing, I couldn’t help sort of bopping to the music as I assassinated bad guys and dodged bullets. Unconsciously, I ended up shooting and dodging with the beat of the music. Without intending to, I found myself picking song after song until I realized that I’d run through all of them in about 45 minutes. It was only after I took off my headset that I realized that I was utterly drenched in sweat. When I looked down at my Fitbit, I saw I’d burned more calories than I usually do with a more traditional fitness game like BoxVR or Beat Saber in the same time frame. I only bought the game a week ago, so I evaluated this game playing in Easy and Normal mode. I wasn’t ready to attempt playing at Hard. Even with the data right there, in front of me, even with the proof that Pistol Whip was a solid cardio workout – I had a hard time believing it! I didn’t feel like I’d exerted myself more; if anything, I felt like I’d done less. The natural movements I used to dodge and aim motivated me to move my entire body without being specifically dictated to do so and without much conscious thought.
  
  
• Freedom of Movement: There isn’t a dictated rhythm in Pistol Whip like there is in Beat Saber, BoxVR, or synth riders. Your movement isn’t choreographed as it is in Dance Central. You shoot where you want when you want, and you don’t lose points for misses, though if you get hit, you can die and have to start over(though you can choose to disable death, here). Each scene is custom-built for the song it accompanies, so each song gives you different playing experiences. Even though there are only ten songs available at the current time, each time you play through any one level would or could present a new challenge every time you play. 

Why You May Not Love It: 

• Possible Motion Sickness: One thing that made me nervous when I first started playing Pistol Whip was that levels automatically move forward, as though you’re on an invisible conveyor belt. Full Disclosure: I easily get motion sick. I had to take Dramamine to get through games like Journey of the Gods(which was worth it) and had to lay down for the rest of the day when I tried out Epic Roller Coasters (which totally wasn’t worth it). I appreciate it when game developers give those of us with weaker stomachs alternative forms of locomotion. Pistol Whip does not give you the option to remain still in-world. I will say that you should play a level or two for yourself to evaluate whether you will have issues with queasiness. To my delight, I did not personally get motion sick when I played.
  
  
• I Keep Getting Killed: Pistol Whip has three levels of difficulty: easy, normal, and hard. I only just started playing, and even normal was an insane workout and much more difficult than I would have anticipated. Several times, I died within the first minute of starting a level and had to start the whole thing over. Normally, I wouldn’t mind, but when you have to start a level over and over and over again during a workout, it interrupts your flow. Ultimately, since my objective was to get in a workout while having fun and not necessarily to be the master of Pistol Whip, I opted to make myself immortal and engaged the no-fail modifier.
  
  
• Lack of Context:  Honestly, one thing I’d love to see in Pistol Whip after playing it for a short time is some kind of optional campaign or story mode that could help the player slowly work their way up from super beginner to a pistol-wielding dynamo. A story mode would also give me some context for WHY I’m killing these people. In a few of the levels, there are some “bad guys” who aren’t actually trying to kill you. They’re just kind of standing there and dancing. Even though the enemies are just shadowy, abstract, pixelated figures, I actually did sort of twinge at shooting someone who wasn’t trying to kill me. The fast-paced action and intentionally retro graphic design reminded me of my two favorite FPS from way back in the day: Wolfenstein 3D and Area 51. Those games didn’t have much of a story but did force you to progress through levels, and the context was clear just by the setting of the scene: you’re killing Nazis/space invaders and a good guy. The lack of context didn’t lessen the enjoyment gameplay for me. Still, the addition of even a pretextual reason for killing the shadowy figures who weren’t even trying to kill me would have been very welcome.
  
  
• Limited Song Choices… all of Which are EDM: In Pistol Whip, you have the option of choosing from ten different songs, each with its own matching scenery. The songs are each only about 5 minutes long, and those minutes fly by. There are only thirteen songs to choose from, and they’re all EDM. The limited music and scenery choices may mean you’ll get bored with this game over time since you’re mostly playing the same levels repeatedly. If you don’t like EDM (I don’t mind EDM in this context, but it’s far from my favorite type of music), you might find yourself avoiding gameplay just because of the music. Three of the songs have been added to Pistol Whip post-launch. I’ve been told that they plan on releasing a new level every month or so, which should keep things exciting and fresh. But if you don’t like EDM, more EDM songs won’t exactly enhance your playing experience. Custom track packs have been made by fans that match the tempo of existing ones, but adding them isn’t a very straightforward process. My sincere hope is that the developers add additional levels with music genres that aren’t EDM. 

I would suggest avoiding boredom with Pistol Whip by not making it your only workout on any given day. I’d suggest making Pistol Whip one more part of your routine. Play one or two songs each day or on alternating days to keep your workout interesting, if you’re the type to get bored quickly with repetition. I’d also suggest playing with the modifiers, as you become more adept, to give yourself a challenge and keep gameplay fresh.

Guided Tai Chi

Calorie burn: 20-40 Cal / 10 mins

Why I Love It 

So, Guided Tai Chi is not technically a fitness game, but I use this app at the end of every single workout. It makes a great cool down and helps me transition from an adrenaline-filled exercise back into the real world. There are about a hundred routines to choose from, and one routine only takes about 5 minutes. There are a shorter 3-minute “arcade” mode and an “around the world” mode that takes 60 minutes to complete.

You can choose from about 10 different relaxing scenes. You follow the movements of transparent Tai Chi masters. As you play through each routine, a calm disembodied voice guides you and reminds you to relax. 

Why You May Not Love It

I did say this wasn’t a fitness game, right? If anything, this is more of a mindfulness/meditation app and an intro to Tai Chi. It focuses on the relaxation aspect and not necessarily the martial arts aspect of Tai Chi. Guided Tai Chi does not increase in difficulty as you play, which I personally found a little disappointing. 

VR Fitness: Conclusion

There is a lot to love about using VR to get a cardio workout. It’s great for beginners, reduces your excuses; it’s portable, versatile, fun, and as effective as traditional cardiovascular activities. A Quest is also a great option when you don’t have access to a gym, or the elements prevent you from being outside. Like any other work out, you should still consult a physician to make sure you’re healthy enough for vigorous cardiovascular activity. However, the cost of the Quest, in addition to the games you’ll need to purchase, can get expensive. I personally suggest creating a workout routine that incorporates a few different games to keep the experience of working out entertaining.

TLDR: The Oculus Quest will give you an insanely fun and very effective workout that reduces your excuses and yields similar results to many traditional cardio workouts. You’ll have to use the same caution as you would with any other exercise routine. 

Sources for caloric burn information: https://vrhealth.institute/

Featured Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

This is your workshop. A secret place where you can practice your magic without the fear of discovery. Your friend greets you upon arrival. He is glad you’ve returned. “There is much to be done.” This, you know. As you move from workstation to station, you ready yourself for the next opponent you’re going to face: though they are a mystery. When you are ready to modify your wand, you choose the four spells to take with you into the arena. You can only guess what is going to be helpful once you’re in the heat of battle. You choose your disguise. Finally, when you’re ready, you psych yourself up with a few internal pep-talks and prepare for your battle as you step into the portal.

The Tutorial

A voice that sounds like its coming from an intercom (radio?) begins a tutorial. This struck me as odd– because the setting of the game suggests the game takes place sometime in or before the nineteenth century–a time before radio existed.

The tutorial is somewhat entertaining, and you do come away with a general sense of how to use the controls. You also learn how to customize your wand, a large staff that can only carry 4 spells at a time, well 5 if you include teleport. The game seems to include teleportation as a spell though I don’t think that the only method of locomotion within the game should be viewed as a spell.

While you’re in tutorial mode, you’re shown how to teleport to arenas and taken to what appears to be a sewer. This is where you can try out any spells you’ve acquired on some dummies.

The Controls

The wand controls are incredibly clunky. It takes a few seconds to cycle through your spells to pick the one you want. If you need to use a defensive spell quickly, as is often required, this is a severe disadvantage. In gameplay, there is a small buffer for this. Each player only has a limited amount of ‘mana’ which takes time to recharge. Now, Wands was adapted from the Oculus Go version, which only has a touchpad. I think not adapting the controls for the quest was a mistake on the part of the developers. There are, after all, 4 game buttons on the Quest controllers (A, B, X, Y), in addition to the grip and trigger buttons. Being able to access my spells more quickly would have significantly improved my gameplay experience.

Another slight drawback: even though you can see both of your hands, only one controller actually works. This appears to be another carry-over limitation from Wands‘s initial development with platforms like the Go, which only have one controller.

Even if your left hand is visible in the world the developers created for you, it’s vestigial. Frankly, this annoyed me. I tend to think games should follow Chekhov’s rule. Every element in a game must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. Elements shown should not appear to make “false promises” by never coming into play. Having an extra hand that is there, but useless just reeks of unrealized potential – which seems very much to be an underlying theme throughout this game, at least to me.

Dueling

Wands is a two-player dueling game. Duels always last three minutes, and whoever has the most HP left at the end of the three minutes wins. Of course, you can also win by knocking-out all of your opponents HP.

While you can level-up and gain experience by defeating opponents, leveling up doesn’t give you any significant advantage in gameplay. However, you can obtain new spells and new avatars. No matter what level you are, you always enter the arena with the same set amount of HP and ‘mana’ as your opponent. ‘Mana’ will recharge every few seconds, and you can heal your HP with Gold syringes that appear in the arena during the first two minutes of gameplay). Otherwise, it won’t recharge. 

Even as you level up you gain access to new spells, you can only take 4 spells with you into battle no matter what level you are. While I like the idea that a newbie can take on an experienced player, I also saw this as a missed opportunity to incentivize gameplay.

Each spell has a spell that can counter or neutralize it, but knowing which spells counter others isn’t always an advantage, especially if you’re facing an opponent whose spells you can’t counter effectively. You generally don’t know who you’re going to meet, or what spells your opponent will have equipped in their wands. As a result, I began to take at least two defensive spells into the arena with me. This kept me alive until the end of battles, but also made it more difficult to defeat my opponent.

You vs. AI

The AI opponent is a great way to practice if you’re nervous about playing a real human right out of the gate, or don’t feel like interacting with actual people. The AI, like many an AI, is very predictable. I can only attribute this to the limited number of spells you’re allowed to bring into the arena. For the most part, the AI generally uses the same 4 spells no matter what level you progress to with only a few variations.

Even as you level up, the AI doesn’t appear to get any smarter or harder to defeat. This great if you just want to level up without having to worry about losing too often. It’s also a great way to practice new spells…but it also makes solo gameplay tedious after a while.

You vs. Friend

I think playing a friend in Wands the most fun way to experience this game. If there is anything Wands was built for, it is sh!t-talking and razzing your friends.

“Take that!”

“Better luck next time, Sucka!”

“Oh, man, You dead.”

You can engage in this type of stirring conversation as you batter each-other senseless. Also, while a human opponent is less predictable than a machine, if you’re playing the same group of people, you can start to understand their patterns over time. Still, they also begin to adapt to yours, so this simple game becomes a lot more entertaining.

More than anything, Wand’s friend-mode reminds me of the late nights in high-school and college taking out some nerdy aggression in Golden-Eye or Super Smash Brothers. I think Wands would be infinitely more fun in friend-mode if there was a ‘party’ setting, where you could battle multiple friends. As time wore on, I definitely longed for that type of functionality, though I do realize that would defeat the purpose of a “dueling” game.

You vs. Random

For some reason, whenever I chose to battle a random opponent, it always took ages for me to pair with someone. I found myself bored silly while standing in a rather stunning “lobby.” The graphics in the vast lobby were gorgeous, but just standing around is just no fun. While you’re in the lobby, you do have the option to leave and just battle the AI, but when you do, the game also stops trying to pair you with another human.

If I did have the patience to stand still in the lobby long enough to get paired with someone, I almost always had my ass handed to me by someone who was a much better player. No matter how much I leveled up, usually, whoever I was playing was just…better. I found this a little disheartening. Still, my lack of magical skill isn’t the game’s fault, and I definitely don’t hold this against Wands or its incredible team of developers.

If you’re feeling brave, you can choose to converse as you try to find a way to kill a random stranger. Maybe you’ll make a friend? You also can choose to mute your opponent (if you’re worried about talking to a creep), which is always an advantage. For the most part, any time I was paired with a random opponent, one or both of us chose to mute our microphones, and I think that’s for the best. Personally, while I love shit-talking my friends, I’m less comfortable doing so with strangers on the internet.

Gameplay with an opponent is always the same no matter who you’re playing. A random opponent will almost always help you develop your magical skills more quickly than playing a predictable friend or algorithm-driven AI. You’re also less likely to know which spells you should take into the arena with you because you don’t know anything about who your facing. It was facing random opponents that convinced me that the best offense is a good defense, for example.

Drawbacks of random opponents: you can’t host a random opponent, and your arena is always chosen for you. I would have liked the option to have some kind of home-court advantage occasionally. I also would have liked the ability to select a skill range to battle. As a newbie, it would have been nice to battle other newbies. As I got more skilled, I didn’t enjoy beating someone who just started playing. It seemed…unjust.

The Arenas

There are six arenas in Wands. All of them are absolutely beautifully designed immersive works of art and provide a unique challenge of their own. Each arena has a set number of health “pick-ups” that will allow you to heal yourself periodically throughout gameplay for the first two minutes of each battle. Each arena also has at least ten teleportation tiles, and each arena has a unique magical property. 

Apsis Prison

A fiery dungeon and what I imagine hell would be like. About a minute into any match in the Apsis Prison, a gigantic, and very fake looking skeleton emerges to spit fireballs down the center of the arena. He is easy to avoid, though, in the heat of battle, you might still get caught and take a good chunk of damage. The first time I played in Apsis Prison, I thought my AI opponent had summoned the skeleton. Nope. It’s all apart of the scenery, folks. I also learned that you can’t defeat this skeleton. Once he appears, he stays to wreak havoc till the end.

The Temple of Ophidian

Reminiscent of Indiana Jones, the temple’s power is giant rolling stones that roam the corridors in periodic intervals. The only places in the arena where you are safe from getting smushed are teleportation tiles in the very center of the arena. An eternal conundrum presents itself! To be safe from getting squished and losing a ton of HP, you have to put yourself in a most vulnerable position and risk attack or ambush by your opponent. However, each rolling stone is preceded by a distinctive sound, so, as long as you’re vigilant, you can avoid getting hit… but in the heat of battle, good luck with that. There is an advantage to this arena: The temple of Ophidian is full of corridors without a line of sight. Those provide a lot of strategic hiding places, so you can probably hide safely at least for a few seconds if you need to recharge your magic.

Celestial Halls

My personal favorite, simply because I didn’t love the aspects of the other arenas where they continuously try to kill you. The Celestial Halls is an absolutely stunning arena that only has a few rooms, but allows for some hiding spaces if you care to recover. Its “special power” is an energy portal on the ground floor. If you teleport inside the energy portal, your mana regenerates quickly, as long as you stay on the tile. Still, you’re also more vulnerable and lose more HP if you’re attacked.

Ortis station

Ortis station is an Asian-styled arena with trains that periodically pass by, cutting off access to non-visible areas of the arena. You cannot attack around the trains, either. The trains come with a significant advantage: they have “pick-ups” unique to this arena. If you point your wand at the pick-ups as they pass by, you can teleport for 15 seconds without using any of your mana (leaving more mana for spellcasting).

Dead Masters Vale

Another of my favorite arenas. Lots of hiding spaces to recharge if you need a little air during the heat of battle. The center of the arena has a rotating crystal in the sky above your heads. Every once-in-a-while, the crystal will change colors and then either attack or heal the player closest to it. It turns red when it’s about to shoot a beam that will hurt, and blue when it’s ready to heal. Because the crystal changes color before it shoots its beam, you can choose to hide from it. However, in the heat of battle, you’re probably not looking up the whole time, and sometimes you’ll inevitably get zapped.

Sanctum of Sahir

This arena keeps you moving. When you begin gameplay, you start on the outside of the Sanctum. Every minute you survive, another door opens. The arena forces you to move through the door by making the previous area uninhabitable, first by a sandstorm, then by poison gas. Although the first two sections of the Sanctum are vast, there are no places to hide. Teleport in this arena to get a health pick-up and because you’re being chased by the arena. In the last minute of the match, you and your opponent are forced into the final inner sanctum: cramped space with no health pick-ups. There is nothing to do but shoot spells at each other until one of you is dead. Any time I’ve battled in the Sanctum of Sahir, it’s always ended on a TKO. Each player is just too exposed.

The Spells

Your spells are your weapons when dueling an opponent. When you start out as a new player, you have access to the four spells pre-loaded into your wand (and teleport). When you go through the tutorial, you will pick up an additional spell. However, you can only ever have four spells at a time per battle. Even as you level up, this does not change. You have to pre-select which spells you will carry with you. You also have no way of knowing, ahead of time, who your opponent might be, or what their spells are – unless you’re playing against a friend, of course.

If you’re playing a lower-level opponent, they have limited access to spells — but this does not confer any particular advantage on you as a higher level player. Whenever you level up, you gain the ability to unlock one new spell: any spell you want. While each spell has a counter-spell, as a low-level player, this doesn’t mean much: you only have access to a few. Currently, there are 26 spells available. The developers will keep adding spells as time goes on to keep the game interesting.

Characters

Personally, when I play a game, I love customizing it as much as possible. Wands gives you a lot of space to make your experience unique. In the workshop, you can change the avatar your opponents see when they play you. However, no matter which character you choose, what you see does not change. You will always see yourself as a pair of disembodied hands in brown leather gloves.

I had a few problems with Wand’s characters. For one, as I stated above, you only see yourself as a pair of gloved hands: I really would have liked for the gloves to change with my characters. For another, the characters were all…well, depressing. I know this is a magic game where magic wielders battle each-other to death. I know they’re going for a sort of steampunk vibe, and it definitely comes across, but do all of the characters need to be so dark?

I didn’t particularly care for any of the characters, and because I couldn’t see my avatar anyway, there wasn’t much motivation to bother changing my avatar from the default knight. The characters were also costly to purchase. Again, here I see real potential for improvement: each character could come with a different pair of disembodied gloves or a custom spell unique to that character. This would make purchasing a new character worthwhile and keep the duels interesting. Each new opponent you face might then have a unique ability you couldn’t possess.

The Wands

Again, I really appreciate the ability to customize elements of gameplay whenever I pick up a new game. In the workshop, you can choose to modify the appearance of your wand. Purchasing a new wand requires winning a lot of battles, however. As expensive as these skins are, they don’t confer any advantage on their wielder. They don’t affect gameplay whatsoever. I found this to be another unfortunate missed opportunity to incentivize gameplay. If a wand’s appearance also gave it some power (maybe a spiral wand conferred some damage protection), I would have logged a lot more hours in the arenas to try to earn new wands.

Longevity

Truthfully, the longevity of this game is dependant on what kind of person you are. This is a great game if you enjoy one-on-one battles. This is a great game if you always wanted to be a wizard. There are games, like this one, that simply focus on fighting for the fun of it: GoldenEye and Smash Brothers come to mind.

I will say that I did not enjoy that the only functionality of the game were these one-on-one matches. After a few battles with the AI, I almost always became bored due to the lack of challenge. At the other extreme, I was so overmatched by random opponents that I found myself reluctant to step back in. It was crushing – having my ass handed to me so thoroughly.

Eventually, I built myself up to be a better player and hold my own, but what kept me going was knowing I’d have to write this review, rather than fun or challenge of the game itself.

Dueling is the point of Wands. As a dueling game, it is very good, and I’m going to be grading it from that perspective. However, in the tutorial, the disembodied voice set up a promise of a whole world with grandiose statements. You learn in the first few minutes that magic is forbidden above. You learn you have a patron: Lord Gault, who apparently gave you this fancy workshop. Knowing nothing about Wands the first time I played, I believed that – beyond dueling friends (and one algorithmic AI that never changes strategies) – I would be discovering the purpose of my magic.

I would have liked a campaign mode so I could see the world referenced in the tutorial. I would have wanted to know WHY I’m battling other magic wielders. I’d love a chance to quest and develop my skill as I went along, playing increasingly difficult AI or different AI altogether. I would have loved a background story to go with the arenas. Why these places? I would have loved a story mode that explained all of those elements first referenced in the tutorial – even if they were just represented as random letters from this mysterious Lord Gault – appearing in the workshop at intervals. That, on its own, would have incentivized me to keep playing. 

Seriously, I want to know more about this Lord Gault person.

I also would have loved a party-mode and/or the ability to team up with friends — and not just beat them to a pulp. But all of that represents me and the kind of person I am, the kind of game I enjoy, and I’m not necessarily Wand’s target audience.

Many play to level up their avatar. Many play to win more swag, new wands, and new spells. I personally love the ability to customize a game, as I have said throughout my review. Wands definitely goes out of its way to let you personalize your game experience. There are enough characters, wands, spells, and arenas that you can have a unique gameplay experience every time you log into your workshop.

On weekends, you can often level up more quickly, as there are often promotions offering double experience points within specific time-frames. Best of all, the Wands development team is continually updating its platform, so many of the issues I had with the game may well disappear as time goes on. I’d keep my eye on their updates.

Conclusion

If you’re into one-on-one, adrenaline-fueled, gameplay (and, of course, magic), this is a game you will definitely enjoy. The basic gameplay is relatively static, and the number of arenas is limited, but the ability to play against endless opponents and customize your wand’s appearance and spell loadout, keeps the battles interesting.

Even though some elements of Wands are can be tedious, in general, it is a genuinely fun social experience. And yeah: magic. 

Gameplay

You are introduced to Half + Half with a short scene. You appear in a blue space and a vision of your Teletubby-like avatar, whom the developers have named “Wanda,” appears before you. It won’t take you long to realize that the avatar in front of you is a mirror image. When you lift your arms, Wanda lifts its arms (I say “its” because “Wanda” is completely androgynous). Wanda’s arms wiggle whenever you move them. Words appear above your head. You are welcomed and told you will soon meet the others. The game then quickly instructs on how to teleport, and a door appears on the other end of what seems to be a vast space. You practice teleportation by going to that door. Once you step through it, you have your first introduction to the lobby: a mostly white space with five doors leading to mini-games. When you start the game from then on, you will immediately appear in the lobby.

The Lobby

There is no tutorial in the lobby, but the menu button on your Oculus Touch controller will bring up a sparse menu. The menu has 3 options: “How to play,” which brings up an image of your oculus touch controllers with some pointers on how to use them in-game, “Invite friends,” and “Mirror.” 

Flat out: Mirror does not work unless they’ve fixed it by the time you read this review. The mirror will show you a grey disk, but if you stand in front of that disk, all you see is the blank grey disk. I realize there are bugs in virtually every game…but this one really rankled me. Why include such a simple function if it can’t be executed properly? 

To test the “Invite friends” function, I invited a few of the writers from 6DOF Reviews to play with me. A seemingly simple action, sending an invite to a friend from your list to join your party, was extremely frustrating and wildly inconsistent. When I received an invitation, I’d click “accept,” and nothing would happen. When I’d invite others, some would appear in my lobby, or rather our party’s lobby…others would not. I’d click to “leave the party” to see if that did anything and the screen would say “Joining Party,” and then I’d just end up in the lobby by myself. 

Eventually, we all paused the game to try to troubleshoot why our invitations weren’t working. We tried inviting each other through the Oculus home screen…that definitely didn’t work. After about an hour, our editor got so frustrated that he stopped trying to join us and asked for a refund from the store. The party functions may be fixed after a few updates, but Half+Half is a game almost entirely based around social interaction, so a glitch in this fundamental aspect of the game definitely deserves mention. 

Already that calm, happy feeling the beautiful imagery in Half + Half initially evoked was beginning to disappear. 

Once I was able to join a party, there were positive points. Whenever a member of my party spoke, Wanda’s lips moved with their speech. I thought this was absolutely adorable. I also admit I love Wanda’s wiggling arms. 

The developers of the game appear to be attempting to create a family game that will be appropriate for all ages to play. Wanda is clearly an androgynous character, free of even the remotest possibility of appearing attractive or unattractive. Wanda is simply cute.

Making New Friends?

Unless someone you are in a mini-game with is already on your friends’ list, you will not be able to hear what they say to you. You will see their lips will move, and you’ll hear a sort of cooing noise that varies in pitch, but no actual words. 

The voice-scramble function is one I have mixed feelings over. Half + Half is marketing itself as a game designed to establish so-called “meaningful” interactions. But how can you make new friends if you can’t really talk to them? Sure you can add the random avatar you’re paired with to your friends’ list, but because you haven’t actually spoken with them, you also don’t know if they’re creeps, so you remain reluctant to do so. This makes every interaction with a non-friend a fleeting one.  

On the other hand, I’ve met a lot of creeps and jerks in other social applications, especially when I design an avatar as a female. These negative interactions in other apps have made me wary of even entering multiplayer gaming spaces. For parents, I could see how voice-scrambling could be a desirable function. I do wish, however, that it could be disabled or that we were given another way to communicate with others in the game.

The Mini-Games

To enter a mini-game, you click through one of five doors in the lobby. Four out of the five mini-games will let you proceed through the door without another person available. So theoretically, you can play them by yourself.

SpaceWalk

The objective of the SpaceWalk game is to contort your body into the shape of what I can only call a police chalk outline. When you first enter the game, your height is measured, though my height personally was measured either an inch taller or an inch shorter than I actually am. The outline of the avatar that appeared during this measurement period had its arms out…but was I supposed to put my arms out as well? I have no idea. There were virtually no instructions (which was an underlying theme in the mini-games).   

Once the round of SpaceWalk began, I attempted to put my body into the shapes of the outline. There was almost nothing challenging or all that interesting about this game at all. Put your arms out or above your head. Lean toward the side. Bend your knees. I think the entire point of SpaceWalk was to make you look ridiculous in the real world. If that was the developer’s sole intention, then they succeeded. If they were trying to make a mini-game that the player would enjoy, then they failed spectacularly. 

I can imagine this game being entertaining for children between the ages of four and seven, for whom merely moving your body to shapes can be interesting…but I’m not four, and there aren’t very many VR users who are.

Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek seems to be the only genuinely developed game with any kind of meaningful tutorial. This is also the only game within Half + Half that consistently pairs me with another avatar to play with when I’m not already in a party. 

When you enter the game, you are brought into a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired cityscape. For about thirty seconds, you and any other avatars in the space are all the same size. This short time gives you just enough time to wave your wiggling arms at the other players, possibly mutter some scrambled speech, before you realize that no one can understand what you’re saying (unless they’re friends) thanks to the voice scrambler. Eventually, the randomly chosen seeker grows to giant size, while the other players shrink. 

The Hider

As the hider, you shrink to the size of a mouse and the seeker Wanda grows to Godzilla-like proportions and is briefly blindfolded. You are given a brief tutorial on how to use a slingshot to teleport around the city. You are instructed to hide, find orbs located around the city, and of course, not get caught. Being tiny, you don’t know where the orbs are, so you have to seek those while evading detection. You try to stay out of sight as Godzilla Wanda hunts for you, throwing balls at you that will make you grow. You can’t just find one hiding spot and stay put, because without finding orbs, you don’t get any points. The game doesn’t bother to tell you this, but collecting orbs is the only way to win points in this game.

The Seeker

When playing as the seeker, you become a giant and are brought to a pretty star-spangled space for about thirty seconds. You are told how to move around, which is not by teleporting, but by pumping your arms. This smoother locomotion made me queazy, as I always get a little motion sick from games where I appear to move in-game but remain still in the real world. For this reason, I wouldn’t recommend using Hide and Seek to show VR off to your friends. We want people to enjoy VR play spaces, and no one enjoys nausea. After the thirty seconds are up, you will hear a countdown “3…2…1…. Seek!”

Only… you’re not told how to seek. You have to play around with the buttons until you press the trigger button and finally, you see something to do. You get a black ball and are just instructed to throw it, but you’re not told what that accomplishes. When thrown, it explodes on impact. So you seek by throwing balls at strangers to make them grow. Your hiders are given away by the squeaking sound they make as they teleport…and the fact that, eventually, they will have to jump into the open to find orbs. 

Throwing the balls was more challenging than it should have been. Even with just a small flick, the ball would go soaring far past where I aimed. There seems to be a goldilocks force, but when I actually managed to spot my hider, I just started throwing balls at different strengths and hoping that one would hit. From the number of times I’ve played, randomly throwing balls and hoping you hit a hider by accident seems to be the most effective strategy. 

This was the most fun of all the games I played on Half + Half. It was fun with painfully short rounds. I’m sure I could or would sign on to play a relaxing game with friends, had it not been for the motion-sickness I felt when I played as the seeker. Put simply, this game was just good clean fun and reminded me of being a little kid playing hide and seek in my backyard with my neighbors from across the street. 

Swim

“Swim” is marketed with the promise that you will “swim in an endless ocean.” I wouldn’t necessarily call this false advertising, but that’s what it feels like. First, I can’t really call this an “endless ocean.” There appeared to be only two schools of fish at the most. Second, I can’t really call this an “ocean.” It was a blue space: the higher you “swam,” the lighter the blue got, the lower you “swam,” the darker the blue got. The school of fish stayed squarely in the middle, looping around the same area, over and over. 

You’re also not told how to “swim.” I did eventually figure out the movement though: If you move your arms like you’re doing the backstroke, you will go up. You pull the water towards you (like you’re doing a pull-up) to move downwards. The movements made no sense whatsoever, except that I am sure I looked ridiculous in the real world. 

This “game” had absolutely no discernible purpose. I admit that, for the first few minutes, I thought the ocean was cute. While I had a friend in my party, and it was a lovely space in which to have a conversation (mostly trying to figure out the controls), we could have done that in the lobby. 

Overall, I think Swim is a great concept executed poorly. There needs to be more to it. There needs to be something to see, beyond the one looping school of fish. There needs to be something to interact with, and the locomotion mechanics just feel wrong.  

Wind

“Wind” is the only mini-game where you have an Out-of-Wanda experience. “Wind” put simply, is a hang gliding race. You control your avatar by pumping your arms to make your glider rise and fall. The faster you pump, the higher and faster your avatar will go. If you hit the barely-visible streaks of wind, you will glide much faster through those streaks.

There is no tutorial to this game at all, but it’s not hard to figure out. That being said, there is only one round, and the racecourse never changes, which I think is unfortunate. I could actually see this mini-game being fun if there was slightly more to it. 

Glide

Glide, by far, was the most confusing mini-game of the bunch, which is saying something. You are told when you first step through the door that you can hit the ball with your glider…only you don’t see the ball anywhere. It’s there. Look down. It is WAYYYYY below you. You have to glide down towards the ball, which you then realize is gigantic. And you’re supposed to hit it….with your glider? Okay…so you hit the ball, and it starts to accelerate in one direction with a comet-like tail. But there’s nothing for the ball to rebound against, so it will just keep going in the same direction.

There are three levitating hoops set up in a triangle. If you are in a party with your friends, you and your friends can work to bounce the ball off each other gliders to get it through the hoops. You do hear a celebratory ping if you happen to get the ball through one of the hoops…so is that the point? There’s also a white monolith in the distance, far from the hoops. Are you supposed to race to the finish line? This game was so difficult to understand that it’s nearly impossible to give a review on it. I will say that I have absolutely no idea how we’re supposed to collaborate with non-friends (given that you can’t understand their speech) to get the ball through the hoops. 

Frankly, I think Glide is an underdeveloped concept and has no place in Half + Half as it currently stands. I have no doubt that Glide could be refined and developed to be more fun, but every game needs some kind of achievable purpose or set of objectives. Glide was missing this element entirely. 

Longevity

This game has a lot of elements that I found playful and calming. I liked the general atmosphere: The feeling that you are just having some innocent, child-like fun. I know we’re supposed to be adults, but games are supposed to bring out a sense of whimsy. You came into the world of Half + Half to play just for the sake of playing. The gameplay is simple, and the stakes are low, so clearly, Half + Half is only supposed to be a pretext to socialize and make friends. But if that’s the case, why scramble the speech of strangers? Why not give us the option to disable that feature?

Other than Hide and Seek, frankly, the games were uninspired. How many times do you think you’ll play a game where you put your arms into YMCA shapes without hearing that catchy tune? The ocean might have been endless and relaxing initially, but they didn’t put anything in it besides some fish and nothing to do.  

Possibly, Half + Half is a game I would show a child to introduce them to the concept of VR, except for one big problem: I would never start someone in VR on a game that used a locomotion method, like the one in “Hide and Seek”, which is almost guaranteed to make them queasy without so-called “VR-Legs”. For now, I’ll stick to First Steps and First Contact to demo VR to friends and family. 

Half Baked

I admit, some of the elements in Half + Half utterly charmed me. I loved the minimalist graphical style, and I thought Wanda was one of the cutest avatars I’ve ever seen in a game. “Hide and seek” was good old-fashioned fun, though the motion sickness-inducing locomotion made me wary of repeat play. I was charmed by Half + Half‘s world and the idea of an innocent space in which to play and socialize in a non-judgmental world. 

In a world where cyberspace brings out the worst in people, the world that developers Normal try to bring you into could be a tempting one if it wasn’t so frustrating. The difficulty with the multiplayer aspects, the confusing party invitations, and the non-functional mirror….all these issues yanked me out of the illusion the game attempts to create. Swimming in an empty blue ‘ocean’ wasn’t relaxing, it was boring. I love the idea of playing with a child-like sense of whimsy, but I’m not a child, and, as I’ve mentioned above, I’ve moved past the stage in my life when standing still while making a shape was fun.  

Half + Half feels like a concept demo, rather than a full-fledged game and it definitely wasn’t worth the price. I think developers Normal made a mistake in not marketing Half + Half as a free demo while developing a better thought-out experience that was worth purchasing.

You’re standing near the edge of a cliff above a gently flowing river. Above you is a clear blue sky. In the distance, a waterfall cascades down a steep granite slope. Birds chirp around you as gentle music plays. On either side of you and in front of you, Tai Chi masters are encouraging you to mirror their slow, controlled moves. You do, almost exactly. The four of you move in perfect synchronization as a woman’s disembodied voice reminds you to control your movements and relax. All too soon, your time together is done. You feel relaxed and balanced.  This is how I start and end most days thanks to Guided Tai Chi. 

Guided Tai Chi is not a full-on Tai Chi tutorial designed to turn every player into a Tai Chi master. Likely, a real Tai Chi enthusiast would find this app lacking, as it focuses on the relaxation and meditation aspect of Tai Chi, rather than Tai Chi a martial art. The entry bar is relatively low, and the instructions are easy to follow. To play, all you do is select a five-minute “Flow” guided program or three-minute “Arcade” challenge. 

The Five-Minute Flow

In the guided program, you select from a long list of inspirationally titled programs and the scene you want to practice in, then you’re transported to the relaxing setting of your choice to begin your session. 

Your hands are represented by two orbs. Your left hand is a black orb, and your right hand is a white orb. Your goal is to keep these orbs in the center of their circles as they move. There are thin black and white tracks that the circles will follow, so you have an idea of what to expect. 

Helping you through the motions are two footprints on the ground to show you where to place your feet. You also have transparent Tai Chi masters on either side of you and in front of you to imitate. You’ll also see a timer counting down your session and a transparent image of the footprints as an additional guide in case you don’t want to look down. None of the moves require much coordination or balance, except for one that requires you to lift one leg for a few seconds. You do have the option not to see the foot guides, but I find them useful. 

One frustrating aspect of the guided program is that the transparent masters are all facing forward, and they’re only somewhat transparent, which makes it a little challenging to see precise hand movements. Of course, you can look to the side to see this detail, but keeping turning my head from side to side was a little distracting. 

As you follow the movements of the transparent masters, soft spa-type music plays, and a disembodied woman’s voice gives you encouragement, affirmations, and advice. As the session comes to a close, the woman’s voice thanks you. I thought that was a nice touch. 

One five minute session is very relaxing and almost feels too short. If you do more than three sessions, your arms will start to burn. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can choose to do a sixty-minute “world tour,” which consists of 12 random five-minute programs and scenes, which feels to me to be too much. I found myself wishing there were a few 10-15 minute continuous programs to choose from, just for a little more variety. 

Arcade Challenges

The developers of Guided Tai Chi are aware that their app is being used on a VR gaming system and added the arcade mode as a little mini-game. Here, you can pick your three-minute challenge and your scenery (or choose the random option), but as an added bonus you also get to select from a list of slightly more upbeat, rhythmic music. 

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Once you make your selections, you are again transported to the scene you chose, but there are no masters to follow and no nice lady to encourage you kindly. Your goal is once again to keep your orbs in the corresponding circle as they move, but this time you’re playing for points. Every few seconds, points are added to your overall score, which is pictured right next to the timer. The longer you keep your orbs in the circles, you’re rewarded with a points multiplier that increases every 10 seconds or so. The points multiplier appears in the center of your orb so you can keep track of it as you play. This function is quite sensitive: if your orb veers out of the center of the transparent circle for even a second, bye-bye multiplier. 

At the end of the short three-minute challenge, you see your score relative to other players. I’m not sure if the game is stroking my ego or if I’m somehow a Tai Chi natural, but I usually come in the top three most of the time. 

I do enjoy this mini-game within Guided Tai Chi. The length was just right, and it requires a lot of focus. I really only found that I had two small gripes. The first was that the multipliers were different for each hand, so if your left hand messed up and you lost your multiplier, each hand would show the score pop up, and their multipliers increase at separate times. Maybe I have OCD, but this drove me nuts. More than a few times I found myself deliberately tanking the other orb just so both spheres would score simultaneously OR I would just restart the challenge altogether. What? Don’t look at me like that! I’m competitive, even when I’m trying to relax. 

The other thing that bothered me is that the points for each hand would pop-up next to your orbs every few seconds. I found this distracting, and sometimes losing that focus would reduce my ability to keep my hands moving in line with their respective paths. 

Longevity

Guided Tai Chi is more of an app than a game, even though it does have the one game-like setting. This isn’t a game you’ll get addicted to and need to play for long hours at a time. But it is incredibly relaxing, almost like a meditation quick fix. I find myself using Guided Tai Chi every day for just that reason. 

I usually start and end each VR session with one or two of the hundred guided programs. After sweating with Beat Saber or slaughtering Ninjas in Ninja Legends, its a great way to wind down and transition back to the real world. There have also been times when I’ve been incredibly stressed out and found myself putting on my headset ONLY to do a session of Tai Chi. 

While there is a wide variety of programs, I have to say that there isn’t much variation between them. There are only 20 different hand motions, and there is no real skill level progression, which the more I play, the more I want. If anything, Guided Tai Chi made me interested in finding a local real-world class to explore the martial art of Tai Chi for a bit more challenge. 

The Scenery

Eventually, users might find the limited number of scenes tedious: there are only about ten. There is some playful variety. There is a delightful underwater setting where you are placed at the bottom of the ocean surrounded by cute cartoony sea creatures. There is one scene where you are placed on the giant chessboard in central park. Personally, I would have liked to see some nighttime or twilight scenes, especially when I was playing in the evening. 

While these scenes are undoubtedly beautiful, they also vary in artistic quality. Some aspects of the scenes are very realistic. The skies and running water are so well rendered that they are almost like photographs. Other elements are more cartoonish and obviously computer-generated. The grass on the mountain tops or in the gardens, for example, are rendered in angular, unnatural straight lines. There were just one or two grass objects drawn and then copied repeatedly. While I don’t think I would have minded consistent cartoon quality scenes, the disparity between the realistic elements and the poorly rendered ones becomes painfully apparent when they are juxtaposed in the same scene and takes me out of it just a little bit. 

A Gentle Workout

No experience is required to try Guided Tai Chi. While you may become more adept in the balance and control, the app as it is right now is limited in terms of skill progression and might become too simple over time. 

All that being said, there is an unexpected benefit of the game: The strength workout. The slow, controlled motion in Guided Tai Chi is similar to isometric holds. This benefit becomes a lot more evident if you do more than two five-minute sessions in a sitting. If you actually make it through the world tour, you’ll actually sweat from the effort. If you do at least two short programs four or five days per week, you will notice some new muscular definition. I wasn’t expecting that to happen, but it was a pleasant surprise. 

[Editors Note: It does feel a bit weird to do Tai Chi with both your hands tightly held around the controllers rather than open and relaxed. The easiest way around this – is to use one of the controller grips available for the Quest (the Mamut grips, the AMVR grips – which we favor, or the Orzero grips), any of which would allow you to play with open hands while retaining full tracking – it’s also a great way to support our site with no additional cost to yourself!]

Conclusion

Guided Tai Chi simultaneously encourages you to move and to relax. Beginning and ending your time with a short five-minute Flow session is a great way to transition from virtual reality back to the real world and give your body and mind a break from some of the adrenaline-fueled adventures and vice versa. This app really shows the potential for a class-based fitness game, like Yoga or even a proper Karate class, even if Oculus doesn’t yet track foot placement. 

Game Play

Racket: NX markets itself as a combination of racquetball and pinball. I feel like that’s a little too simplistic. For one thing, the arena is a giant geodesic globe. You stand in the center, like the charming snowman in the center of a giant hexagonal snowglobe. The graphics are immersive. You feel like you’re in a giant futuristic arena, even if your play space is only a few square feet. 

Thankfully, there isn’t a lot of lateral movements on your end. I was grateful for this. I don’t have a ton of room in my apartment and having to move even a few feet in any direction would end in me slamming into something, guardian be damned. However, the arena is a 360° play space. Consequently, you are turning around quite a bit during gameplay. 

There are pinball elements to the game, like gutters, bumpers, and stoppers, but they’re more tributes inspired by pinball rather than anything that really gives you the feeling that you’re in a pinball machine. You never lose the ball, you only have the one racket (as opposed to multiple controls), and it lacks the whimsy of a pinball game and gives off a more intense feeling.

Your goal of the game is to hit all the targets before your time runs out. Your time is determined by an energy bar located near the bottom of the dome. If you hit boosters in the arena (represented as blue + signs), your time increases. If you hit the red-power draining hexes (that look like space invaders), your energy decreases, as does your time.  

In the Solo Mode Campaign, There are four levels (basics, advanced, hardcore, insane) each containing 5 challenges, increasing in difficulty as you progress. The targets eventually start snaking around the arena and become a lot harder to hit; bumpers/stoppers are introduced that prevent you from hitting at certain angles; the number of boosters in each wave decreases, etc. Each challenge has several “waves” to complete before you pass. The faster you clear all the targets in each wave of the challenge, the higher your score. Simple enough? Not so fast.

The Physics

The physics in Racket: NX are internally consistent, but not earthly. The ball only appears to adhere to some of the rules that apply to the rest of us. The ball never stops moving unless time in the arena has also stopped. The ball never just falls to the ground, but it will always eventually come back to where you are, standing in the center of the arena…from no matter where it is. 

If you hit the ball, it might bounce off the walls of the dome…or it might travel across the dome, sticking to it as if controlled by magnets. However, this isn’t consistent, sometimes you might hit the ball gently, and the ball will ricochet several times, but you also might hit the ball quite hard, or rather, use a lot of force in your swing, since the ball isn’t actually there, and the ball will simply bounce off once. 

The ball will go where you hit it, but the aiming in Racket: NX is very strange and not like any other racket sport I’ve ever played. There’s a sweet spot on the racket, and if you aim with that spot on the racket, the ball will go where you hit it. Otherwise? Good luck. This takes some getting used to. Because the physics of the racket and the ball are so unlike anything you would find in reality, it does somewhat dampen the illusion. 

One handy tool you are given is the ability to press the trigger of your controller and draw the ball to you from wherever it is in the arena. This helps when you accidentally send your ball flying into an energy-draining red-hex, or if you don’t have a lot of energy left and need to send your ball into a few boosters. This is also insanely helpful during multiplayer gameplay, as you have to take turns and you don’t want your one shot to be missed because you can’t locate your ball.

At first, I admit I was annoyed when my energy drained before I beat a level. But as the days passed, I became grateful that I did in fact, have a time limit. It would be far too easy to lose track of time hitting that glowing ball all over the place and just keep playing until I cleared all the targets…and be late to work.

Multiplayer

There are two multiplayer modes: competitive and friendly. After playing both, the only difference appears to be who you’re playing against: a friend from your list or a stranger the game picks out for you. I will say that competitive multiplayer gameplay is not so smooth. The game froze often, and often my opponent or I will get booted out of the game. When they get booted, I win by default, and I’m not about to complain about that, except I didn’t get to play that person and have to re-start the multiplayer mode find someone new to play with.

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There is no way to practice for multiplayer competition. I was utterly blindsided the first time I entered a multiplayer game. I didn’t know what the objective was or what the rules were. I didn’t know that I was only to hit the ball when it turned my color. I didn’t know how to win, how not to lose, or what could make my opponent lose. I had to guess, and that’s a flaw the designers could quickly fix, though the general concept is buried in a text-only tutorial area. I’d like to see a multiplayer practice game, an AI opponent would add a lot to the game if I didn’t feel like having to interact with a real person.

I was hoping for some kind of co-op mode from the friendly multiplayer mode, but nope: It’s just a friendly competition. In multiplayer, you and your opponent take turns hitting the ball into the walls, and whoever reaches the high score first wins the set. Whoever wins the most out of 3 rounds wins the match. I have to admit, I feel like multiplayer could be done a little better. For one thing, you get one shot at your ball at a turn. If that ball goes into the wall before you’ve had a chance to hit it when it changes to your color: no turn. When you’re not the only one in the arena, the ball can get hard to keep track of. Watching others play in multiplayer did help me become a better player myself, and I did learn how to use the tractor-beam control more strategically.

The competitive mode of multiplayer comes with the same risks as challenging any stranger on the internet: sometimes, you can get creeps and jackasses as your opponents. Sometimes the skills aren’t equally matched. Sometimes they’re much better than you and vice versa. Personally, I would have liked more options with the multiplayer mode. I think having team challenges would have added an enjoyable experience…maybe something akin to tennis doubles? 

Arcade Mode

Finally, you can go into Arcade Mode at any time. Arcade Mode has two subsets: Zen and Classic. The classic mode starts off simple and increases in difficulty with each wave. The waves are infinite, and you can keep playing until your energy runs out. The further you get, the harder your game becomes. Eventually, the session will get difficult enough for you, and you lose. Again, I don’t see this as a bad thing. I could play this game for hours and still be entertained. But this also means there is no winning in classic arcade mode. No matter what, eventually you lose, which felt a little crushing.

Racket Zen

That being said, if you want just to practice or don’t want to die at all, Racket: NX has you covered. Zen mode gives you immortality until you decide you’re finished. In Zen mode, every target, booster or energy drainer you hit turns into a pink lotus blossom. Personally, I took out some of my anger and aimed at those stupid red hexes quite a bit since I knew they couldn’t kill me in Zen mode. It is, however, tough to stay angry with upbeat music pumping into your ears and lotus blossoms everywhere.

When you decide you have had enough in Zen mode, you’re surrounded by Lotus blossoms and treated to an ancient proverb. I’m not sure what the point of that is, but I have to say, I don’t mind it.

Longevity

If you look at Racket: NX purely as a VR sport, this game has excellent longevity potential. It offers the same appeal as racquetball. The rules and gameplay are relatively consistent. The game comes with an upbeat soundtrack of its own, but you can also add your own music, which could make for a reasonably good workout, at least as for one arm. 

I think that the main thing that could keep many players coming back is the fitness aspect. You do get a great workout in Racket: NX. My iWatch will often buzz while I’m playing and ask me if I’m doing an indoor run. I still don’t know how I feel about sweating so much in my headset, but the fact that I’m working up a good sweat can only bode well. Of course, you could spend weeks just making it through the Solo Campaign playing each level several times before you even pass or repeatedly play the same level simply improve your score once you do pass. Even after you’ve played through the entire campaign, the arcade modes give you a new experience each time.

Multiplayer will always give you a different experience each time, as every player has a different style, as well.

But there are some drawbacks. For one, the game is relatively static. While the gameplay increases in difficulty, unless you’re playing one other opponent, you’re always standing in the middle of an arena, hitting a ball by yourself. You can’t customize your Character (which appears to be either a red or blue robot), your racket, your ball, or the arena, which eventually feels a little monotonous because the main gameplay is solitary. 

Even if you’re playing for fitness, once you’ve mastered the game, playing can feel more like being in a tennis court hitting balls with a ball machine–a machine with upbeat music, but a machine no less. One significant advantage of playing a virtual sport, as opposed to a real one, is the infinite possibility for variety. I think just being able to change some colors would be a nice change.  

There is strategy involved, but it’s limited in scope. Once you’ve mastered hitting the ball where you want it to go (which admittedly can take a long while because of the wonky internal physics), the most involved strategy is merely staying alive long enough to finish a level, and even that becomes a bit easier. Each game goes for about 3-10 minutes, and that’s a good thing because, after that, it can and does get repetitive. 

Conclusion

Racket: NX really shows the potential of VR to create sports that simply couldn’t exist in the real world. It’s a fun experience, a great way to bond with friends, and an excellent way to work up a good sweat in the comfort of your own home. The gameplay can get repetitive, and over time I found myself popping in for only a swift round, losing in about 10 minutes, and going about my day without the desire to return until I was ready to work up a good sweat the next day.