After getting a feel for the basics and being able to competently direct the flow of a song, I started to appreciate the additional depth waiting beneath the surface. With the Music Reality Engine, and a concise tutorial built into the game, it didn’t take long before I began to understand what I could do with the tools in front of me and started stringing together satisfying sequences that had me grooving to the beat. In addition to keeping all of the backing tracks and stems on beat, freestyle instruments shift your notes to keep them in sync (also called quantization). This is thanks largely to what Survios calls the ‘Music Reality Engine’: an underlying system that keeps all aspects of music in the game on rhythm and in tune. Thankfully, the game does a lot behind the scenes to make whatever you do sound decent. Now, if Electronauts just threw all of this at me, I’d surely make a fool of myself, as I went into this knowing almost nothing about DJing. For now, here’s a short overview of the tools, which will be helpful context for the rest of this review: It sounds simple, but there’s an impressive amount of depth to the tools you’re given. The basic experience involves queueing different backing tracks-which are logically named, for example: Intro, Build, Drop, Break, Deep, Outro-layering in vocals and loops, and jamming on the freestyle instruments.
Each song in the game ( 40+ at launch, covering a range of EDM sub-genres) is effectively a custom-built music kit which comes complete with backing tracks, freestyle instruments, ‘sound grenades’ (for one-off percussion), and vocal segments (for some songs). If you’re anything like me-someone who can fall deep into music, but isn’t musically trained-you’ll find a totally unique and approachable platform for expressing your inner groove.Īvailable On: Oculus Store (Rift), SteamVR (Vive, Rift), PlayStation VRĮlectronauts can be thought of as a virtual reality DJ tool, but it’s smartly design to be accessible by people who don’t know the first thing about DJing. Your experience with Electronauts then may vary depending upon what you hope to achieve with it. Electronauts sits at an interesting intersection somewhere between game, experience, and tool.