BoomBox is a VR rhythm game where you are the drummer. The game has crazy levels of difficulty to keep it challenging, and there are many custom beat maps that have been created by the community. This game could be great for parties or for VR novices because it’s easy to play.
Thumper-esque
First, let’s talk about the gameplay itself. BoomBox is an extremely simple game to pick up and while it doesn’t have a campaign story or any single-player modes, the challenge of getting higher scores in increasingly difficult songs makes it fun. The way BoomBox works are that you are presented with four drums that represent your toms. One in the middle and one for each hand. Your right-hand drum has just a simple black circle while the left-hand drum has three circles of different sizes representing the bass drum, snare, and high tom respectively.
At first, it’s pretty easy because there are only two notes on the screen that you need to hit. The bass drum and either the high tom or snare. You can play these songs on easy, medium, hard, and expert (a special mode only unlocked after you earn 50 stars) depending on how fast each song moves and which kind of beat it has. As you move forward through the game, however, there will be more than one note coming your way at a time with some pretty interesting combinations that make it stay challenging even for experienced players.
What’s great about this is that according to how many notes are being thrown at you at once, the size of the circles representing both drums gets bigger so it’s still readable but adds just enough color to keep your eyes from being overloaded. Different kinds of beats will appear on the screen as you progress. There are points where it looks like a Thumper-esque waveform and there are others where it’s just a plain red circle moving around.
You also have a small white box that represents your power track, basically meaning that if you hit enough consecutive notes in a row, the power track will fill up and if you don’t miss any beats after you activate it, BOOM! It becomes this super awesome beat blast with flashy colors and everything starts moving fast as hell, making it difficult to keep up but definitely satisfying when done properly.
The way you rack up those combos is by hitting every single note so having an extra set of hands would be helpful if thy game had multiplayer. Unfortunately, that’s also about the only thing wrong with the game. It lacks multiplayer, has no single-player story mode, and I feel like there are some features missing.
For example, after you get hit by a note it only takes three more consecutive ones to fill your power track so I really don’t understand why it doesn’t just automatically activate when full. Also, even if it says on screen that there are fifteen notes coming at you in a row, it never actually happens in my experience because they’re usually either slower or faster than what’s on the lower difficulties for example.
Regardless of that though, I enjoy this game very much and would totally recommend it to players new or old who want something simple but challenging enough to stay fun for a while. I’m going to give it three and a half stars out of five, losing half a star only because the lack of multiplayer and story mode is too much for me to ignore.
BoomBox Review Score: 3.5/5 Stars