Band Space offers a new take on Rock Band in VR, letting you perform sets with up to three other players. Here are our demo impressions.
While Rock Band VR already exists, Band Space clearly wants to carve itself out as a similar type of rhythm game. The demo lets you rock out on drums, keyboard, drums, guitar, or bass to several songs. Booting it up presents the usual calibration options stuff, then you can choose one of four avatars. You won't be looking at this avatar, but it's a nice touch considering multiplayer is the main focus.
You can try out the different instruments to learn them, and it's great that all four play differently. Drums require you to hit them as they appear, with purple variants needing a harder hit for effect. The keyboard is basically a bar that you must push down on in certain positions. The bass involves strumming with one hand and moving your hand along the neck with the other. Finally, playing guitar is like the bass, the main difference being that it uses the grip and trigger button, alongside moving your arm along the neck.
There's a great concept with each instrument. However, as someone with basic knowledge of the real life equivalent, the keyboard feels deeply unsatisfying to play. I also encountered some issues when trying to hit some of the drum notes, and I'd watch the drumstick go through the drum. That feels bad in a standard rhythm game, but in VR, that feels considerably worse because you're moving your arms about.
Aside from these two issues, Band Space has considerable potential. That's especially true if you can wrangle some friends into a session, or if you don't mind dipping your toes into the sea of random band members online. It looks good and the songs are catchy enough, even though I didn't know any of them. That might just be because I'm old now, though.
As far as demos go, Band Space does well in showing off what it's all about. I'd need to see more songs and test out the drums in the full version, though. If the main game has the same detection issue, I believe that particular instrument will be more annoying to play than fun.
Band Space targets a Q4 2024 launch on Quest and Steam storefronts now, and the Quest demo is available now.
