Beat Blaster VR

Review

Who doesn’t like a good parkour game?  Well, if you’re a parkour-lover and own a VR headset (HCT Vive, Oculus Rift or Windows Mixed Reality) you might want to check out a funky game call Beat Blaster!

Beat Blaster is a VR parkour (arcade) game developed and published by Ivanovich Games and released on the Steam platform on 16^th February 2019.

I must say, it is the first time that I’ve played a VR game where direction is simply commanded by how you move your head around. By leaning forward, you’ll gather more speed, while leaning slightly backwards will slow you down. You can move left or right by tilting your head in either direction. It can be a bit of a shock if you are not used to this type of movement but be assured it will pass fairly quickly as your equilibrium adjusts itself. That said, it might be a good idea to remove any furniture in your vicinity to avoid any accidents while tilting a bit too far!

The game has 30 levels to beat and your goal is to reach the end of the song and accumulate as many points as possible by collecting blue spheres and shooting at floating enemies, destroying moving targets and static weapons such as cannons on the floor or on the walls. The key here is to constantly move forward. Yes, you can slow down by tilting your head backward, but if you slow down a bit too much, you’ll die. The other way of dying is if you have been hit by an enemy’s projectiles or lasers, or even just by touching a wall.

Each of the levels is designed with several segments, and each segment has its own obstacles to avoid and enemies to destroy. These phases can vary in length; some are rather long while others are extremely short, and they will end when you reach a door which opens onto the next segment. In some cases, the doors will open as you move towards them, while others might need a certain mechanism to open them. For example, you might need to step on a button or shoot a specific red light somewhere on the wall to open the door while you keep moving forward. It can be tricky at times, let me tell you!

The levels are randomized, which gives Beat Blaster great re-playability. So far, I’ve managed to beat 15 out of the 30 levels and the difficulty has slowly increased with each subsequent level. New enemies are introduced as you move forward into the game. In my case, I now have some sort of giant floating armadillo who spits at you with invincible balls of varying sizes. The balls cannot be destroyed, but it is possible to change their direction by shooting at them. There are other fun obstacle to deal with, too, but I’ll let you discover them as you go through each song.

Nice graphics and the game runs extremely well. Really cool Techno soundtrack which suits the game perfectly. It can be a bit frustrating at times, especially when you are forced to step on the fast-forward mechanism in narrow areas.