BEAT ARENA Reviews

I've just played a few tracks off Beat Arena and despite the huge accessibility issue and major stuttering I've had (which I think because of my setup with Virtual Desktop) I would recommend this game to those who really like Bemani or just wanted a Bemani experience within a premium budget. This game interestingly opt out from western licensed music (unlike most western localization) and instead listed a handful and popular bemani music from both pop'n music, and gitadora. The music is limited, but I found some of my most favorite classics are listed. The gameplay itself is pretty basic, but works well with VR. The drums being the most obvious is kind of clunky since the virtual drum is huge and you can't really adjust the size of it. The guitar and bass is straightforward enough, use your dominant hand to strum and your non-dominant hand on the neck. It's straightforward enough and once you got the gesture, it's actually the most fun (apart from way too many vibration happening) I haven't tried other instrument yet, but I assume it's mostly simplified version of the actual instrument but made it fun to play. Two major downside however is the music sync and performance. Again I'm not sure if its because of my setup, but some music played have some sync problem where the instrument would play ahead of its vocal or some instrument would lag behind your own instrument. The other issue would be performance where the game would lock up sometimes and actually stutter so bad that it hurts. Steam VR thankfully would restore view to the Steam VR view but if you can't handle it, it's pretty bad from time to time. In case you wonder my spec is a R9-5900x, RTX3080, and 64gb RAM. It's a workstation basically but it suffers from these performance issue. One minor downside would be the gesture and UI camera being way too close sometimes, it's also unclear sometimes as to what to do within certain situation. These however are something you could get used to from time to time. Overall, again I'm recommending it for Bemani fans, if you just want a basic rhythm game maybe look elsewhere, but if you still like this anime heavy aesthethic, you might get yourself converted to liking the Bemani lineup.