Is Quest’s hand-tracking good enough for a rhythm game, which genuinely needs low latency and precise input? After playing the early access version of BEATABLE, which gets you tapping, clapping and snapping to the beat, XR Game’s latest entry is definitely good enough for casual gameplay, although it left me feeling conflicted whether it was actually precise and sticky enough for now.
BEATABLE Details:
Developer: XR Games
Available On: Horizon Store (Quest 2 and above)
Reviewed On: Quest 3
Release Date: April 10th, 2025
Price: $10
Note: This game is in Early Access which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game only at its current Early Access state and will not receive a numerical score.
Gameplay
As a seated or standing experience, you only need a relatively small area of your desk, table, or any flat surface to play Beatable, with the game offering up four tapping ‘lanes’ where beats appear from the horizon.
The actual total playspace only takes up about the size of a keyboard, serving up two beat types to smack down (‘note’ and ‘hold note’), and mid-air symbols for clapping and finger snapping. While still an inherently physical game, it’s a welcome change of pace for players who are mostly used to Beat Saber’s calorie-burning, arm-swinging motions. It also comes with in mixed reality mode too, which is cool.
And Beatable is just as easy to learn as Beat Saber too. It essentially relies on tapping the table with your open palm, making onboarding significantly faster than something like Guitar Hero, which requires you to mentally map buttons to on-screen colors and positions. While easy to pick up, I don’t know if I’ll ever get really good at Beatable for a few reasons.
Being able to finger-snap with one hand and nail a quick smattering of notes in the other is fun, although my sneaking suspicion is Quest’s hand-tracking latency may still be a little too loose to generate that rock solid, 100% repeatable muscle memory you’ll need at higher levels.
“That ‘aha!’ moment when creativity gifts you something special! —— BEATABLE is that game! Kudos to XR Games for this instant classic!“ Money Mark—Beastie Boys. 🙏🏽
Here’s a video of us pushing the @MetaQuestVR’s hand tracking… pic.twitter.com/tk3QyExzHe
— XR Games (@xrgamesvr) March 24, 2025
Granted, I don’t have any way to precisely gauge how reliably I activate notes, and whether my ‘Perfect’ hit was actually perfect, so your mileage may vary. I can say precision feels ‘good enough’ for casual gameplay right now, although generating expertise may take a lot more fiddling with optimal hand positions. I found myself hovering over notes, hoping to smack them with the least amount of force possible on the beat, which gave me mixed results.
Considering it’s relying totally on hand-tracking, Beatable is compensating when it comes to activating notes. The studio says this tracking delay is mitigated by “applying a small input and audio delay, syncing detection accordingly,” which is a technique console developers use too.
In any case, your best bet is to calibrate your playspace to your table as exactly as possible before starting, otherwise you’ll forever be hitting notes too early, or too late. Also, and this is a big one: make sure to have optimal lighting for the best possible results.
While have that 100% precision is fundamental to creating high-level skill, my main issue with Beatable wasn’t that, or its suitably catchy, if not wholly unrecognizable music currently on offer. For me, it’s the stickiness of gameplay, which I talk more about in the Immersion section below.
Immersion
Honestly, I’m conflicted. I’m used to VR rhythm games making me feel cool, even if I look like absolute dork playing it—I never cared about that last bit anyway, and you shouldn’t either. But feeling cool is one thing Beatable is missing for me.
Tapping on my desk and hitting the beat is engaging, and there are a lot of interesting flow patterns to follow in intermediate and expert-level songs. But besides that, Beatable doesn’t really approximate anything beyond slapping a desk and clapping.
While Beat Saber doesn’t make you a great swordsman, and Dance Dance Revolution doesn’t make you a great dancer, they’re designed to make you feel like you are in the moment. In Beatable, I don’t know what I’m doing—I’m just doing it. And maybe that’s okay.
I can’t help but think that maybe if they were bongos, or I had to operate a control panel that was going to blow up if I didn’t hit every button on time—something more than just hitting a note bar on a table with admittedly cool graphical flourishes—I would be a little more in love with Beatable.
That said, XR Games probably didn’t set out with the ‘cool’ factor as its primary goal, but rather how to work around one of the biggest problems with hand-tracking games: the lack of haptic feedback. Beatable has absolutely conquered that in a very clever way, as the table is essentially your ‘button’, although I wish that ‘button’ was just a little more reliable.
Comfort
Beatable is a very comfortable game since you can play it anywhere you have a flat surface, seated or standing, and there’s no artificial locomotion as such.
Pro Tip: if you’re going ham on a surface for too long, or haven’t dialed in the force you think you need to hit notes reliably, you may consider one of those large desktop foam pads to deaden both the force and sound of the hit.
Conclusion
Precision feels all the way there for a casual game, although the ability to create expertise is still pretty questionable to me at this point. Having the table do the heavy lifting for haptic feedback is nothing short of genius though, and I can only hope the studio dials in even further on what it can do to mitigate Quest’s hand-tracking woes. If Beatable can do all that and keep the DLC music drops coming, it feels like one of those foundational games that could lead the way in a new and interesting subgenre of XR gaming.
Note: This game is in Early Access which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game only at its current Early Access state and will not receive a numerical score.
