Maestro VR is a rhythm game with a pretty big difference. Instead of wafting around lightsabers, shooting targets or hitting drums, you’re stood in front of a crowd of people wielding musical instruments at your direction. With a conductor’s baton in your right hand and the ability to cue instruments and sections with your left, I’m sure the leads of the string sections are quite glad you don’t have weapons… heck, thanks to hand tracking you might not even have controllers!
Inevitably the game begins with a lengthy tutorial that is essential to understanding the experience – this isn’t Beat Saber, where holding a lightsaber and seeing boxes with arrows and scary red walls is self explanatory. Without this tutorial you might be able to figure out the more obvious bits like tempo – moving your baton to the arrows is simple enough – but you’ll probably be a little confused about why there are glowing circles, not knowing that you should point at them with your left hand to cue the musicians. Raising and lowering levels for crescendos and diminuendos with your left hand flat, palm up or down, respectively, also isn’t obvious unless you’ve played or conducted a real orchestra.
This tutorial is given to you by the theater’s librarian, a faintly sarcastic man who looks a bit like a vampire in a courtroom thanks to his pallid skin and white wig. This guy will pop up between performances to give you some champagne, macarons, and anything you’ve unlocked – additional difficulties for the song you’ve just completed for example, or a new baton or environment to perform in.
Once you’ve completed the tutorial, you’re free to try conducting some of the musical pieces in the game. There’s fifteen in the base game, featuring absolute bangers like Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights, and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. It’s not all classical though, with a few jazzier additions to the tracklist like Sing, Sing, Sing by Louis Prima and Levy’s Whiplash, which are particularly satisfying to play due the faster tempo. There are also DLC packs available that add some crowd pleasers – how about the intro theme to Game of Thrones? The Bridge of Khazad Dum, from the Lord of the Rings, or Duel of the Fates from Star Wars, complete with a tiny lightsaber baton!
These aren’t all available from the start, most of them being unlocked as you complete the ones you start with, and they’re all available with three different difficulties as well. This will come as a relief because Hard mode earns its name here, with a significant increase in multitasking, by which I mean tempo with your right hand whilst also cueing or crescendoing with your left, which is very difficult to get used to.
After you’ve had some time to get to grips with it, Maestro feels impressive. It’s challenging and incredibly satisfying. Most of you won’t have ever raised a crescendo with your left hand, palm upwards, and closed the hand to stop an entire orchestra playing all at once. It’s honestly hard to describe how good that feels, or how bad it feels to miss something and mess up In the Hall of the Mountain King with an off or out of time note. I’s tragic. It’s cliched by now, but I do feel like a conductor whilst playing, even though I keep pouring champagne all over the poor librarian’s head whilst eating digital macarons between performances.
Now, I’m not really a conductor, so I can’t speak to the specific of how accurate the actual conducting of these songs is to the reality. You’re not having to read a full musical score, but it absolutely feels like every shred of footage you’ve seen where a conductor is waving their arms around wildly in time to the music.
Probably the biggest difference between Maestro and reality is that in reality, the orchestra likely isn’t dressed as a barbarian horde, performing against the backdrop of a burning revolution, or being conducted with a tiny lightsaber. You unlock these outfits, locations and batons as you progress – my favourite being at the foot of a hill with a very large, creepy mansion on it – and they help add a little more to the visual style. The game looks pretty good, with musicians that are detailed and surprisingly atmospheric locations, but the audience watching you always looks very samey, and is always sat in the same concert half. It would have been neat to have the audience transported to these wild locations as well as the orchestra.
Then there’s hand tracking, which blew my mind. While I initially played with normal PSVR 2 Sense controllers, like some kind of VR caveman, i put the controllers down for the second play session and then my actual hands were in the game. Just…there, being tracked by the cameras in the headset. Admittedly, there’s the slightest little bit of added lag that makes playing on Hard a bit too difficult, and you need to keep your hands in front of you so they don’t disappear, but this is the kind of thing that teenage me dreamt about. Rejoice, for we are truly in the future.
In general, I can’t tell if the game is a touch too forgiving, or if it sometimes registers cues that you’ve missed. I’ve often found that it will trigger musical cues when I’ve missed them, registering my left hand as pointing when it isn’t, but there is some generous timing to ensure that music won’t be interrupted if you’re early, though your score will be lower. If your score drops too low whilst playing, the performance will end whilst the audience throws rotten tomatoes at you, after which you can throw them back because this is a VR game and chaotic shenanigans are VR’s mouldy bread and gone-off butter.