GAME REVIEW: Beat Saber OST Volume 4 (Oculus Quest 2)

 (Overkill - RIOT)

If Beat Saber isn't the most popular and most successful VR game that's ever been released, it's gotta be in the top 5.

(Goes and Googles that...)

Yeah, so, Beat Saber's the most popular and most successful VR game that's ever been released.  It really only has one Achilles Heel -- should there be an apostrophe after Achilles?

(Goes and Googles that too...)

Okay, we're good.  Anyway, it really only has one weakness and that's the fact that unless you're playing it on a system that allows for the play of custom content, you're going to get bored with the music at your disposal.  It might not happen today or tomorrow, but...soon.  The makers of Beat Saber, Beat Games, know this and they've taken several steps to try and stave off that boredom.  Some days, it comes in the form of paid content that they produce in partnership with popular(?) artists such as Green Day, Linkin Park, and Boom Kitty.  Other days, it comes in the form of free DLC-based additions to the game's existing original soundtrack.

The last tracks for OST Volume 3 dropped two and a half years ago. Beat Games has kept busy with additional paid music packs from BTS, Linkin Park, and Green Day but the March 18th release of OST Volume 4 has been something fans have still been clamoring for.

Was it worth the wait?

THE SHORT VERSION: 

Yep.  And hey, free stuff!

THE LONG VERSION:

Let's be real about the fact that Beat Games continues to churn out additional content for this game at no cost rather than simply spinning off a sequel.  This is a game that was wildly successful when it came out in May of 2018.  Beat Games could have easily produced a sequel by now or at least charged for the additional content that game composer Jaroslav Beck was largely responsible for.  Instead, they gave it away.  Yes, they've also worked with bands to produce paid content, but even that paid content is relatively inexpensive for what you're getting: Hours of additional gameplay and EXERCISE. 

The original game came with ten songs, people.  In less than three years, Beat Games has given away 26 additional tracks for free.  They've also upgraded the beat maps for many of the existing songs already present within the program.  'Easy', 'Normal', 'Hard', etc. etc. are all beat maps.  So are the 90 and 360 degree variants as well as Single Saber.  Having tried to build my own custom beat maps, let me tell you: This is not a fast or easy process.  

To further put this into perspective, Beat Games could have been easily forgiven for creating 'Beat Saber 2' when the Oculus Quest 2 launched, especially now that Facebook owns Beat Games.  They could have done that, made it exclusive to Quest 2, crammed the Linkin Park, BTS, Timbaland, and OST4 songs in there and STILL made bank by charging for both the base app and the new exclusive content.  Instead, they continue to give stuff away for free.  In the age of the 'EA Games' playbook, that is huge and should not be overlooked.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's talk about the songs that we got on OST4.

Volume 4 launched with four songs, which seems paltry until you consider the rest of the work that Beat Games has been doing.  And, again: Free!  Plus, their track record suggests that there will be other songs wandering along within the next six months.  Composer Beck went on record stating that he wanted to focus a little more on the electric guitar with this next block of songs.  That shows in the pack's lead-off song, "Into The Dream."  Easily the pack's strongest song to date, Beck continues to show a strong grasp for not only composition in general, but also the discipline of building a good pop hook into any genre.  That delicious guitar is front and center and the song works exceptionally well.  My first play-through of the song was in Versus Mode with my good friend Lord Hotness and we both ended up grinning like fools while we flailed our way through it for the first time.

The remaining songs in the pack -- Spin Eternally, LUDICROUS+, and It Takes Me -- are certainly playable songs, but notably weaker as songs.  Also notable is the fact that LUDICROUS+, a song credited directly to Beck, has almost nothing whatsoever to do musically with electric guitars.  While the song is still catchy enough to play to, it's also disappointing to the metal heads like myself who were looking forward to more offerings like 'Into The Dream'.  These other tracks are perfectly serviceable as Beat Saber levels, as most Beat Saber Songs are, but they lack the 'Lightning In A Bottle' easily felt from 'Dream'.

With regard to playability, the four songs that shipped with OST Vol. 4 are well put together in general. Unfortunately, they suffer from the same problem that many songs from Beat Games -- and just about every custom song you can find out there on Beast Saber-like sites -- does:  There doesn't appear to be any kind of a barometer for what constitutes a 'Hard' song versus an 'Expert' song or an 'Expert+" song.  If there's an algorithm for this, I can't make heads or tails of it.  I play Beat Saber quite a bit as it's one of my primary forms of exercise. I typically play for 35-40 minutes at least four times a week, usually six times.  I can play through a significant chunk of the OST tracks on Expert+; every one of those songs has one thing in common in that it scales in a relatively linear fashion as it increases in difficulty level.  In contrast, songs like 'Burning Sands' and 'Angel Voices' ramp up in difficulty levels in a fashion that feels less linear and more exponential.  Unfortunately, every single one of the tracks on Volume 4 feels this way.  I barely kept up with 'Dream' and 'It Takes Me' on Expert, but Hotness and I wisely decided to drop back to Hard so that we could get through the music without failing out.  I went back later and upped the difficulty of both tracks to 'Expert' and was shocked about how much harder it was -- so hard, in fact, that I failed out of one of them entirely.

That's a very small price to pay for new, free content though.  OST Volume 4 is still very playable, very new, and at the risk of beating (hah!) a dead horse, very FREE.

Get some.