‘BEATABLE’ Early Access Review – Casual Rhythm Gaming Cleverly Designed for Hand-tracking

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. Read More