After only three days since launch, Beat Saber (2018), the VR rhythm game that puts two lightsabers in your hands, is now the highest rated game on Steam—not just the highest rated VR game, but the highest rated game out of all titles, flatscreen games included.
Even at this early stage of development, it’s already won over the VR community enough to place it just above Valve’s Portal 2 (2011). At the time of this writing, Beat Saber boasts a 99% positive score with 1250 reviews, giving it an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ rating.
Hyperbolic Magnetism‘s Beat Saber is still in Early Access, featuring 10 songs and four difficulty modes; the objective is to slice incoming blocks with your trusty red and blue lightsabers. The video below, which was released by mixed reality company LIV, currently has over 1.5 million views.
It’s an impressive feat for sure, although there is some method to the game’s meteoric rise on the list of ‘Highest User Reviews’. Steam weighs the number of reviews against the review score—a method that weeds out titles with high ratings, but only a handful of reviews. So when you click the ‘User Review’ dropdown, you get something a lot of people have played and rated highly too.
The game also holds a 5/5 rating on the Oculus Store, with over 350 reviews at present.
Valve’s The Lab also held the coveted top spot of highest rated game on Steam after its 2016 release, but has since fallen to the 250th spot on the list at present—a prescient example of how player expectations tend to change over time. Beat Saber does however have the benefit of an active development team, who have pledged further development on the game for its exit out of Early Access.
Either way, it’s a great start for a game that critically hit the mark on polish, replayability, and ease of use—something you could consider a good candidate for showing off to friends and family. It doesn’t hurt that the music is catchy too.
Check out our Early Access review for a deeper dive into all the hubbub around Beat Saber.