Drums Hero

This is the best drum simulator game for VR that is actually fun to play because you beat to the rhythm of various songs on a 8 drums set and even the easy mode is challenging.
The drums can be adjusted on height as a whole set after pressing the pause button inside the song stage on the pole on your right.
It is not a simple arcade game having 4 drums and it is not a simulator where you have no idea what to do other than randomly hitting the drums and make noise.
There are a lot of nice and cool songs from indie pop, rock and alternative styles. NO EDM.
The DLC is also worth it.

Good idea, terrible execution

I really wanted to like this game but it's just not good for a few reasons.

-You have to go through playing the song twice before unlocking the pro version, which didn't sound like such a bad idea at first, but once you get a hang of the controls, the "fun" mode of the songs is anything but fun, it's rather boring.

-The notes are just not syncing with the music. Some songs are worst than other but most of the ones I played were off.

-Since there's not really any feedback, it's rather common to double hit the drums without realising it.

-Which leads me to the next issue, the notes you hit will count way before they reach the line, but if they pass it ever so slightly, it's a miss. So basically, there's "good" and "perfect" before the line, but nothing after, it's a miss.

-UI is not clear, couldn't find an option menu in the main screen, pause during song doesn't seem to be assigned to any button on the controller, but is simply an in game button next to your drum kit and the way the notes are displayed is confusing...surely there was a better way than using controllers buttons for the labels.

-Personal preference, but the songs are just not very good.

There's still a good concept behind it and seeing this game was released 3 years ago, I don't expect it to improve. But I hope someone else will publish a similar game, just more polished.

This game is a 2 out of 5 stars! Let me explain...

There are less than 20 songs

When your playing a song, you would think that the only drums you hear are yours, but know they dont even cut out the audio for you to play and hear your own. You are just playing over the songs.

When playing the songs you have a choice of 3 difficulties, they are fun mode, hard mode and pro mode. I am not even a drummer in real life and I would rather play the pro mode than the other two modes. The fun mode is more like the play 1 note slowly for the whole song. This game is so stupidly easy and is only fun to play in the pro mode. But to play in the pro mode you have to play in the other two modes to get to it. This makes the game way longer than it needs to be. What I liked about guitar hero is that it gave you the option to choose what mode to play in, this says no you have to earn your way. Imagine playing guitar hero or rock band and you want to play a song, but you have to play the whole dang song 2 times first on easy mode just to play it on hard.

There are only 2 maps/drums

There is a thing on the side for lyrics, but many of the songs dont actually show the lyrics so why even put that in the game.

The only good thing about this game is that when you do get to play in pro mode it is fun... thats it, its not worth your time to play everysong 2 times to get pro mode. If there are like 17 songs and each song is like 3 minutes, then you have wasted around 2 hours cause sometimes it will say it wasnt even good enough and you have to play it again. The total amount of fun that you will have in this game is less than an hour, while like I said you will be wasting your time not having fun in this game for 2 hours.

This is a tough one. Playing the drums is not satisfying. The cues are too far from the actual drums so it's hard to get in a groove. There's no aftertouch/velocity so it's hard to get in a groove. The easy modes don't feel like you're playing the drums. it's like they removed random notes and you have to hit the notes that are left. And you have to beat the easy modes before unlocking the full drum part for each songs which are difficult to beat because it feels like random notes that don't sound like a drum part which makes it hard to get in a groove.

Ignoring all of this, the game has it's moments. I would say "yes" once you've played newer more modern VR drum games and are looking for something more arcadey to mess around with. Occasionally feels like playing the drums but not really.

Game is thoroughly underwhelming. Can't believe that this cost the same as Beat Saber. I played about 5 songs before requesting a refund. All beats feel off tempo. Game UI is also so limiting. Nothing to do but basically hit "play" and can only play difficulties you have unlocked.

TLDR

Pros

• visuals
  
• controller/drums response

Cons

• small song selection (~15 or so?)
  
• as song progresses, the visual track and score-keeping logic get progressively out of sync with the audio track
  
  

  Issue Details - Visual Track Lag

  
  [list]
  
• this forces me to hit the drums AFTER I hear them being played in the audio track
  
• I have to purposely hit everything late if I want to score well
  
• it starts feeling too disorienting as it nears half a beat off(~1 min in?), and quickly feels completely unplayable after that
  
• controller/drum responsiveness and audio remain fine, but feels/sounds really horrible being played late

Recommendation

Ummm, it doesn't feel like the controllers tracking and the game notes sync right at all... I've played a ton of GH and DDR...and the timing feels all wrong in this one to me.

This is less relevant but the music choices were atrocious....the only good song was the first one (the theme), aside from that there was no real rock/metal, it was DnB and love songs and whatnot...totally the wrong feel for a drumming game. I was pretty open to trying new music out, but damn near all the choices (DLC included) were painful to listen to :\

This is a VERY fun rhythm game using drums !

It feels really good when successfully hit the correct drums for long sequence. You might also enter your inner focus mode and get in tune with the song then suddenly can hit correct drums sequence for a moment, weird and very satisfying.

The song selection is quite good and varied. The drum sequences for the songs are very well made and very fun to play along with the song. Even for a song that's not favorite, the drum sequence still feels really fun to hit and play.

All songs have at least 2 modes, Fun and Normal, some have Pro. I hate rhythm game with super hard sequences that nobody cares to play, but that's not the case with Drums Hero, even at Pro level the sequence isn't too intimidating, it's definitely harder than fun and normal, but it is still very much playable even at first try.

This game or Drummer Talent VR? Answer: get both! They are both fun to play. I'm not sure if I could play a real drum kit after playing this game, but it sure feels like I can. Definitely got the beat/rhythm part down.

The songs in this game are actually pretty cool. I was surprised by the quality, even if I hadn't heard of the songs before. The note map is very easy to read, so you know just what to play (unlike Drummer Talent VR). Although, sometimes it may be hard to "hear" what you're supposed to play because the song actually plays other drum parts that you're not currently playing (at least on fun/easy and normal mode).

Also, it doesn't seem to matter how hard or sotfly you hit the drums, it will always sound the same (unlike Drummer Talent VR). Other than that, it's very reponsive and I didn't notice any missed notes due to tracking or delay. There's only two visual environments, and neither are that good (Drummer Talent clearly has this better).

Rating: 8/10, fun to play, good songs

If you like music games, consider Drums Hero. I also own audioshield and soundboxing, but I like Drums Hero over those two. IMO the drumming in VR works pretty well. I like the music selction, and it's also great that the dev is growing the songlist. The interface also is pretty good.

The drum tracks are a bit wierd though. There are 3 difficulties for each song: Fun, Normal, and Pro. I felt that for some songs, the order is incorrect. And for other songs, the drum track doesn't match the actual rhythm of the song which is a bit jarring. What is also weird is that the three difficulties are pretty much different and mutually exclusive of one another. Usually for rhythm games, the easist mode has some missing beats, the normal mode has fewer missing beats, and the hard mode would have all of the song's drum beats in the track. But that's just not the case... so getting good at fun mode doesn't help you get better at normal mode, and getting better at normal mode won't help you get better at pro mode, since the tracks are just completely different from one another. Strange that the dev made that choice.

Other problems include the fact that the drumming experience is limited because there is no way to activate a pedal kick drum. Sadly, it's not really the same without a drum pedal.

I'm also not a fan of the letters used to label the drums, would have preferred the Rock Band style notation which is easier to read. This is a somewhat minor gripe though.

Anyway, all in all it's a decent VR drumming game. If the dev's fix up the drumming tracks and implement a kick pedal (let us plug in a keyboard and have us press the space button with our foot, for example), then the game could be that much better.

As others have said, hitting the drum doesn't appear to line up with the music at all. I can do pretty well playing the game by just aligning with the notes, but when I get a streak of perfects it is as if I'm playing the music to a _different_ song. Alternatively, if I play to the beat of the music I miss almost all of the notes.

I think I could find this game fun if it felt like the notes matched up, even closely. Perhaps adding a delay setting that allowed me to move the bar forward/backwards would help as I would then be able to set it up so it _felt_ synced to me.

Note: I play with bluetooth headphones. Normally I experience zero delay with games, but perhaps its related.

Note 2: When I hit the drum, I can see my stick going through the drum and then a moment _later_ the sound comes through my headphones, so I don't think its just a problem with the notes lining up.

At first I really liked Drums Hero, then I had to be off-line and found I couldn't use it. All games that are on-line only need to have a huge warning label so that I can avoid them.

Loving this game! Its forgiving when you miss or hit something else, you can hear the mistake yet it blends in track that sometimes, that wrong hit makes it sound interesting. There are couple tracks I could play non-stop but many are not of my favorite. I like Manhat10 - Dream the most so far and wish that the developers would add a youtube or another choice of playing any songs we type in search field. So far its very limited in tracks and the game lacks training tracks, like youre being thrown into chaos straight from the start even if the songs start on easy and you need to work yourself to normal and hard via higher scoring. Kinda disappointing, as youre just throwing your arms everywhere. But I know this isnt a teaching drums game, its an arcade just like guitar hero and you miss the pedals. I thought triggers would do the trick, or that it unlocks in tougher difficulty, nope, sadly its not there. Still, the game is fun and actually, going to play few more songs before sleep. Its quite late as you can see the time of my review posting. Great game! Would recommend YES! Definitely, I have it in BEST VR category of my games, good job devs, but PLEASE DEVS give us the option to play any song like other song games do. Drums, bass and hights should not be hard to be generized, or? PLEASE CONSIDER THIS as the list of songs so far is too low, and my selection limits it to less than number of fingers on 1 hand :((((((((( I want MUSE, Metallica and lots of others like Deadmau5, you cant please everyone so please add the option!

EDIT: Months go by, no support whatsoever. Have not seen a single new song added since first reviewing the game. Coming soon guys. Gets annoying for real. Other music games like audioshield lets you play random song. This wont do nothing but give you about 20? Games good, developers suck. And I aint sorry for saying this. They act like the game doesnt exist, or am I wrong here? I bet you I aint.

I'm a drummer of over 20 years and the fact that I have to go through 'fun' mode to unlock any kind of decent difficulty is just annoying to start with.

But the real deal-breaker is the delay between swinging your arm to hit the snare and the game registering that you've hit the snare. It's so large that it just puts you off straight away. Even though I'm playing it perfectly in time the game thinks I'm too late and it breaks my combo.

Then when it wants you to play a roll or a fill the whole thing just sounds like a muddied mess that's completely out of time with the song.

I've read they've reduced the delay with v1.1, I hate to think what it was like before but this is still not playable.

Such a shame, i was really looking forward to a good drumming game in vr so I can keep myself limber.

Maybe in 6 months I'll try again...

This is as close as you can get to Rock Band or Guitar Hero drums in VR. Lots of fun and quite challenging. I was very skeptical to the haptic feedback when hitting drums with no resistance but this feels great. Song library is growing and there are some good ones but I didn't recognize any of them. Hope to see more known songs in the future if licensing can be sorted out.

Wonderful game, Well made. Too bad it's not easy to get the rights to put good and popular songs on this. The only issue I have with this game is the song's are meh but you can't expect them to be able to buy the rights to use any of those song's when it's an indie company and only a 20$ game. Great job dev. Love the game. 5 of 5 stars. Met and exceeded expectations.

*Edit after Patch 1.1*

Since this update, I have changed my recommendation for this game from a "No" to a "Yes".

There have been significant graphical and GUI changes and a variety of needed options have been promised to come soon.

But the MOST IMPORTANT part of this update is the improvement to the drum response time. There was originally a substantial delay between hitting the drums and the sound being played which made it very difficult to play on the beat. There is still a bit of a delay but it hasVERY MUCH IMPROVED making the game much more enjoyable to play.

Most of the songs I have played since this update have been synced well - showing "Perfect" when the drums are played accurately to the audio cues in the song but one song (can't remember the name, sorry) was very out. To get "Perfect" hits I needed to hit the drums about 1/4 second after the beat.

There seems to be a problem with the leaderboards. For most of the songs the leaderboards were empty, showing my position as "0". Even after I replayed the songs my leaderboard position stayed at "0". This will need to be fixed.
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*Edit after Patch 1.0.2*

The update has fixed the "Miss" issue when you play to the beat but there is still a significant delay between when you hit the drum and when the sound plays. This is very offputting. If this issue can't be resolved I would like to be able to turn off the drum hit sounds (turn the volume of the drum kit all the way down) so the only drum sounds that I hear come from the track itself. That way I won't be hearing double hits every time I play "on the beat".

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*Original Review*

I purchased this game last night and played for a bit over an hour. I'm a drummer so I wanted to like this game. Everything about the game, graphics, music, difficulty etc was great...except...THE LATENCY ISSUE.

The drum sounds would trigger a fraction of a second after the drum hit. It was very noticeable and made the game frustrating to play for someone who tries to drum on the beats of the songs. A few times the game would appear to pause to load for about a half second which caused the music and the visual cues to be totally out of sync.

I tried looking for a setting that would allow custom timing, like the guitar hero games, but It wasn't there.

I'll probably continue to play this game because I love drumming in VR but I can only recommend the game when the latency issue is totally sorted out.

Awesome! Had to take my shirt off. Feeling is incredible.
I wish there were more songs. Great nevertheless.

Very, very fun game well worth it. If you ever thought your self a drummer you should try this game. If you are like me and played the drums in school but were never very good at reading music try this game. Honestly though the songs are nothing I would normally listen to but are not bad and fun to play. Game give a good job making you feel like a natural. Highly recommend.

Just bought this game out of pure impulse as i'm a drummer myself and absolutely love playing things like Rock Band etc etc..

PROS:

- Very fun.
- Visually not too disturbing and off putting when trying to concentrate on the specific hits you need to make.
- Looks failry good graphically in the levels.
- Very smooth and has a vey good possibilty of longevity value to it.


CONS:

- Drum hits you make do not sync with the audio at all, it's actually delayed by 1/8th of a bar on one of the first songs..this makes it entirely difficult to play the game wihtout fault.
- Navigation around the game is awkward, left trigger is pause (in game) which is easy to tap by accident when playing..right trigger is accept. The game just needs to use the typical point and click, like most VR games.
- Results screen resolution is terrible...the scoreboard is higher res than the background scoreboard image.
- You only have two songs on the game to start and can only start on easy and unlock the next difficulty by beating easy at a certain percentage...this makes the game very slow and tedious for people (myself in particular) who can play drums or these types of games better than just hitting one drum at a time for the whole song length.

SUMMARY:

All in all i'm glad a game like this has finally been made for VR...It has a hell of a lot to address in this to be honest, but the potential is there if it's worked on better.
Not entirely sure it's worth the full £15 i spent as it needs so much improvement but I would keep an eye on this game if you're interested by it's inital concept.