Owning to the HTC Vive’s positional-tracked controllers and Room Scale system, the head-mounted display is a perfect fit for sword wielding videogames where players can slice and dice. Halfbrick Studios’ highly popular mobile title Fruit Ninja made its virtual reality (VR) debut last week, and back in April Atomic VR launched ZenBlade another fruit slicing experience. Today Xelphyre Games has released its own sword swinging title, but this time though no fruit in sight.
Beat Ninja takes a slightly different approach to the genre by adding a musical rhythm element to it. Like most rhythm videogames your actions need to be timed to the music playing, slicing the incoming objects correctly to build up a score. So what are players slicing? Music notes to be precise. These will hurtle forwards and each one is black with a white line through it. It’s this line that needs to be sliced, with some featuring two as Beat Ninja includes dual wielding.
On the music side players can choose their own .wav, .mp3, .flac, .aif, or .ogg files and Beat Ninja supports user made beat maps in addition to auto-generated ones. In further customisation options there’s a beat map creator letting players slice up their music how they like, and nine different swords to choose from.
While all this note slicing action is going on Xelphyre Games has included some extra background elements taking place in the world. Players are put right in the middle of a tower defence mini-game that plays out your actions. Don’t slice up those notes correctly and the enemy will succeed.
Beat Ninja is currently available via Steam with 10 percent off the regular price. Until 19th July 2016 you can pick up the videogame for £13.49 GBP rather than £14.99.
For all the latest HTC Vive VR releases on Steam, keep reading VRFocus.
