The Lady Gaga music pack is now available for Beat Saber, but is this release on the Edge of Glory or is it more of a Bad Romance? Here are our impressions.
When the Interscope Mixtape DLC was announced for Beat Saber, we hoped that it maybe signaled the beginning of a larger or ongoing deal to bring more of the label’s artists to Beat Saber. A few months later and approaching the end of the year, we can now say things played out pretty much as we had hoped — not only did Interscope and Beat Games release the Billie Eilish pack in September, but they’ve teamed up again to finish the year with a Lady Gaga music pack as well.
These two artists are a step up in popularity for Beat Saber — Eilish is one of the biggest pop stars right now, and Gaga has remained a huge force of nature in the music industry since her late 2000s debut. We were pretty impressed with the Billie Eilish pack and we’re happy to say that, by and large, the Gaga pack delivers as well.
The song selection is both generous and encompassing, hopefully pleasing long-time Gaga fans and the casual crowd alike. It helps that Gaga has such a selection of hits — when there’s so many certified bangers on offer, it’s hard to go wrong.
The majority of the tracklist features hits from Gaga’s debut album The Fame and its subsequent expanded reissue The Fame Monster. There’s also a few tracks from 2009’s Born This Way and the more recent 2020 release Chromatica. The new Gaga-themed environment is based on the latter album and looks absolutely fantastic.
But how do the new tracks play? For the most part, really well. I played on Expert and found that tracks to be fun, engaging and possessing a bouncy energy that feels reflective of Gaga’s style. The beat map design in this pack lands in the sweet spot that, for me, encapsulates good Beat Saber track design — not so hard that you have to replay tracks over and over just to understand and finish them, but not so easy that you can finish them on the first try and have zero areas to improve or practice.
There are, as usual, a few exceptions — Bad Romance seems noticeably easier on Expert, for example — but overall the tracks are solid and engaging, with Just Dance, Poker Face and Stupid Love coming away as my personal favorites. While the pack might be a tad easier in difficulty overall compared to its Eilish predecessor, on their own merits I found the Gaga tracks to be fun, unique and challenging in equal measure.
Difficulty aside, it’s really the creativity of these DLC packs, particularly their mapping, that is starting to become a selling point. The DLC packs seems to capture the spirit of the artists in their mapping increasingly well with each new release. The fun zany quirks of these beat maps evoke the exact right feeling and spirit for a Lady Gaga-themed release. Likewise, the rigid yet playful mapping of the Eilish beat maps felt well-curated for her tracks as well.
These little, almost-indescribable je-ne-sais-quoi elements that are sprinkled throughout the maps really sell the tracks as unique and thought-out experiences, tailored to the music and feel of the artist. This has improved with each release and it’s becoming a defining and differentiating factor of Beat Saber’s DLC.
As more Beat Saber music packs release, the disparity in difficulty between them is taking a back seat and becoming less important. While it would be nice to have more consistency across the board, it’s also commendable that Beat Games is are able to make each of these packs feel distinguished from one another and interesting in their own way.
Beat Saber is on the precipice of having so many DLC packs to choose from that the difficulty scale between them won’t matter. What will matter is that your preferred pack is fun to play and feels somewhat representative of the artist in question. In this way, both the Gaga pack and the Eilish pack are recent home runs, and I can’t wait to see who is next on the roster.
The Lady Gaga music pack is available now for Beat Saber on all platforms, with tracks sold individually or available as a bundle.
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