Today we're doing a review of Taiko Frenzy on Meta Quest. This is a rhythm game that I had under my radar for a few months now and I finally had the opportunity to try it and talk about it with you guys! If you know me, you'll know that I'm very picky with my rhythm games in VR. A VR rhythm game can be quite boring if it's not hard enough and if the quality is not there. So let's find out together if this one follows the beat of the drum!

Taiko Frenzy was released in early access in May of last year, but after many updates, it is now a full release as of August 22nd. The game is available on SteamVR and Meta Quest and is compatible with the Quest 2, Pro and 3. The developers of the game are Glitchr Studio and I believe that the only other bigger project that they've tackled is Sky Sanctuary which is a collection of minigames. Alright let's get drumming.

Gameplay

Taiko Frenzy is a Rhythm game where you have to bang on a Taiko drum with the beats given to you. I think that it's safe to say that this was inspired by a game called Taiko no Tatsujin. A series that was pretty popular in the Japanese arcades and consoles where you actually use a taiko drum to follow the rhythm.

At it's core, it is very easy to understand what you need to do. But there are different types of notes that you have to hit. The red circle are just regular beats where you have to hit in the center of your Taiko. The blue X beats have to be hit on the side of the instrument. Then you have the long lines where you have to drum as fast as possible for the amount of beats that is indicated during this period. The last type of note are the pink flowers. For these, you have to give more power when you hit the taiko to register this note to the fullest.

The last mechanic is the special ability that you can trigger. This bar will fill up as your streak continues without missing any notes. If you do miss a note, the bar will significantly go down. So it's very crucial that you miss the least notes as possible. When your bar is full, you then need to raise your stick up in the air to activate it, and then you score will be doubled for a certain amount of time.

Scores / Ranking So as you don't miss any notes, your score multiplier will increase up to 5 times. As soon as you miss a single note, your multiplier completely resets and you have to build your way back to the max multiplier. When your special is activated, your multiplier starts at 6 times and goes up to 10 times. The max score that you can achieve per note is 250. Except for the long lines where you can achieve up to 1000.

When you're done with a song, You will then get transported to your score and the game will let you know your ranking. If you do poorly, you may not even get a bronze badge. But your main goal is to do your best and achieve the best badge, which is the gold one!

Your score also gets updated to a public leaderboard. So even if you achieve a gold badge, you can revisit the song and try to beat the score of everyone else.

There are also over 60 achievements for the game! So the game has plenty to keep busy, and I'm not done talking about the things that you can do in the game yet. Most achievements will be about performing well on songs and performing certain things. The only thing that I'm not a fan of is that the difficulties doesn't stack. So if there's an achievement where I need to do a silver ranking on 5 normal songs. Then I need to lower down my difficulty and play them on that difficulty. I wish that they would've unlocked while performing expert songs, because I would never go back to a lower difficulty otherwise, and it will feel kind of boring and tedious to work on these achievements.

Difficulty / Mods So speaking of difficulty, you have 4 of them. Easy, Normal, Hard, and Expert. They are all pretty well dispersed. You know, I consider myself somewhat good at rhythm games, and something that I dreadfully hate, especially in VR is when it's too easy. I'm happy to say that it's not the case here! The way I start a new rhythm game is I try the easiest difficulty up until I achieve the highest rank, and then I do the same thing for all difficulties up until Expert. Hard started giving me a little bit of a hard time, but I was still able to make it. And now here I am on the hardest difficulty with only around 5 songs mastered so far.

The game has gotten constant updates since the very beginning, and now the library contains 4 volumes with a total of 20+ songs. What's actually cool is as you go further in the volumes, the songs actually starts to get even harder, so you're in for a challenge. Volume 2 is personally my favorite because it contains an assortment of Japanese style music, but with some heavy rock influence in there with distortion guitar. I love it!

I could go on more about this, but I just want to quickly mention other things:

• You can't fail a song, no matter how bad you are, the song will continue.
• One of the challenging thing about later songs in expert is that they are really fast beats and it is hard to master.
• There is a training mode where you can slow down the song.
• There are modifiers that you can activate to remove the rim notes, the heavy hitters and things like that.
• There is also a PC app that you can use to make custom songs, but I am unsure if it's compatible with the Quest version.

Graphics / Environment As you might've noticed, the environment looks beautiful in the headset! And the colors pops even more than what you're seeing here. There's only one environment, but I personally like it and is very pleasant to the eyes. What's nice is that there's also shadows to almost everything, even your drum sticks, and the game never really dips in framerate. The game was very well optimized.

You also have the option to use Mixed Reality! I personally would rather see the awesome environment that the developers have crafted instead of my boring living room. But something that I would love to try is playing while I'm in a forest, or near a waterfall. I feel like playing Taiko Frenzy in mixed reality in a beautiful real life environment would be really cool. So I'm happy that they've added it in the game.

Battle Pass / Cosmetics Remember when I mentioned that I'm not done talking about the things that you can do in the game yet? Well here it is! You have a battle pass in Taiko Frenzy that you can complete at your leisure. You can unlock up to 100 things through it. You get experience by completing songs, and the better you do, the more experience you'll get for the pass. You also get more experience by beating your own highscore.

The type of things that you'll unlock through the pass are cosmetics for a few things. You'll be able to add keychains on both of your sticks to something that represent yourself. You can also change the appearance of your sticks. You can then change the color of your Taiko drum, and also the type of skin that the top of the drum has. I really enjoyed taking the time and change things to what I like. You can also use coins earned to unlock different type of color and style to the sticks that you've already unlocked.

Outro Thank you so much for watching my review of Taiko Frenzy guys! If you like what you see here, this is what you get, so I definitely recommend the game if you have the need to hit a drum to the beat! No issues that affected my enjoyment of the game, and to be honest, even though I played the game for the review, I ended up playing it outside of it out of enjoyment. Heck I'm about to start it up again as I finish this review. Taiko Frenzy is now one of my top 3 Rhythm game in VR right there with Beat Saber and Spin Rhythm XD, so that means a lot!