Ragnarock

I put on a headset, grabbed two virtual hammers, and thirty seconds into an Alestorm track I was already sweating. That's the Ragnarock pitch in one sentence, and it holds up across dozens of sessions. WanadevStudio, a small team out of Lyon, France, built something genuinely physical here: a VR rhythm game where your drumming isn't just scored, it actually propels a longship forward. Hit your runes cleanly, your Viking crew rows harder. String a combo together and you can slam the shields on either side of you to trigger a speed burst. Drop the beat and the ship slows. It's a feedback loop that feels alive in a way flat-screen rhythm games can't quite replicate. The core mechanic is closer to Rock Band's drum kit than anything Beat Saber does with lightsabers. Four drums sit in front of you on the longship deck, and runes scroll in Guitar Hero-style from the horizon, mapped to whichever drum they're heading toward. Easy mode is genuinely approachable for anyone who has ever tapped a steering wheel to music. Hard mode is a different beast entirely, and the jump between difficulty tiers is steep enough that critics specifically flagged it. That gap is real. Expect a plateau before things click on the upper settings. Custom song support in single-player softens the sting for players who exhaust the base tracklist, and the roster of licensed acts, Alestorm, Gloryhammer, Wind Rose, Saltatio Mortis, leans hard into the Norse-metal aesthetic with enough variety across celtic rock and pirate metal to keep sessions from blurring together. Multiplayer is where Ragnarock earns its longevity. Public and private lobbies support up to six players in cross-platform PvP races, and the ship-race framing makes leaderboard competition feel visceral rather than abstract. Watching another player's longship pull ahead mid-song creates a specific kind of low-stakes panic that solo play never matches. Split-screen co-op covers the couch scenario for households with a single headset and someone willing to share. Ghost ships let you race against your own previous runs, which sounds minor but quietly becomes the reason you play the same song four times in a row chasing a gold medal. The visual presentation is cartoonish and colorful, and reviewers have noted it skews low-res in the backgrounds. That's a fair criticism. The environments are pleasant, nordic mythological landscapes cycling through a handful of biomes, but you will rarely notice them because you are too busy reading incoming runes to appreciate the scenery. The art direction is purposeful rather than ambitious, keeping the frame uncluttered so the gameplay reads cleanly at speed. There is no progression system or story mode, which will matter to some players and not at all to others. What the game lacks in structural depth it compensates for with pure session feel. The "one more song" pull is real and well-earned. If you want a VR rhythm game that makes you feel like you are doing something with your whole body, one that works equally well solo, at a party, or in a late-night online race against strangers blasting power metal, Ragnarock is a serious contender for the top of that short list. The DLC tracks sit behind in-app purchases, and the base song count will feel slim to obsessive completionists once the tracklist is memorized. But for everyone else, the hammer hits harder than it has any right to.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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