Rhythmic VR workout Beat Saber now has multiplayer
Wear yourself out in VR, with pals!
Until now, your only foe in VR sword-slasher Beat Saber was the music. A fight to the death against floating blocks hurled through the void in time to some boppin' tunes. While you'll still be decapitating cubes, the latest update for Beat Games' virtual, musical fencer adds multiplayer, letting you test your moves against up to five other humans making fools of themselves in their living rooms.
It's not like anyone's going out dancing right now, anyway - so why not make a competitive swordfight out of it with some strangers online?
Rather than face off against each other in a virtual fight to the death, Beat Saber's multiplayer update pits you and up to five friends or strangers on parallel catwalks, facing your own battles side-by-side. There's scoring, of course, to see who's the best musical Darth Maul on the block, but it'd have been nice to see a little more interplay. Maybe a good streak could hurl more notes at your opponents, or perhaps a Rock Band style format that has you each fighting over a different instrument?
Ah, well, enough armchair designing. To facilitate multiplayer personas, Beat Saber now lets you customise your little avatar. Not to the extent of some of the anime characters folks are dancing as on YouTube, mind, but it's a light enough touch. All songs from the base game and DLCs can be played in multiplayer, and while crossplay isn't in yet, the devs hope to add it sometime in the near future.
I don't mess around with VR headsets much, and reckon I'd collapse after 15 seconds of Beat Saber, but it is proper brilliant, eh? It's still one of our favourite VR games on PC, with Graham reckoning that actually it might be the best one ever made, probably. Add some extra players into the mix, and that's a recipe for one hell of a jam session.
Beat Saber is available on Steam for £23.79/€29.99/$29.99, or slightly less on the Oculus Store.