Star Wars meets Guitar Hero is the elevator pitch for Beat Saber, an Early Access VR rhythm game that's making waves on Steam. The game comes with a limited number of tracks but users can build their own, and an active community has grown at beatsaver.com, where people upload their creations set to songs of their choice. You can watch one such custom track played in the video above, and it's mind-bogglingly cool. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to go out and buy a VR headset on the spot.
The video, uploaded by Ruirize, starts of calmly enough, as he slashes his dual lightsabers at the coloured blocks in time to the beat. And then the music picks up and blocks start pelting him, coming in pairs in quick succession. In Beat Saber, you have to hit each block from a particular direction, so he almost looks like proper Jedi, twirling his laser swords to get the right angles. It's beautifully hectic.
It's a modded version of the game: from what I can tell some of the visuals, especially in the background, have been tweaked from the base version. It's filmed using LIV, which is basically a cube that you can project VR games onto, allowing you to film someone in third-person while they're playing wearing a headset.
Only marginally less cool is another video, below, in which one player has stuck his lightsabers together like Darth Maul. He's using ProTube VR, which can hold one VR controller on each end, essentially combining the two lightsabers into one. It makes the game a lot harder, but he's playing without directional slashing to make it manageable. Take a peek (and hat tip to UploadVR for the spot):
You can pick up Beat Saber for $19.99/£15.49 on Steam or the Oculus store. If you want to find out more, then Jack interviewed the creator here.
