The Skrillex Music Pack for Beat Saber is available now, featuring eight tracks including a newly released song featuring Justin Bieber.
The eight tracks include Bangarang, one of Skrillex’s most well-known songs, and a new track called Don’t Go, featuring pop superstar Justin Bieber and Don Toliver, which only released just over a week ago. Here’s the full tracklist:
– Bangarang (feat. Sirah)
– First of the Year (Equinox)
– The Devil’s Den
– Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites
– Ragga Bomb (feat. Ragga Twins)
– Rock ‘n’ Roll (Will Take You to the Mountain)
– Don’t Go (feat. Justin Bieber)
– Butterflies
These tracks span across Skrillex’s career, with some quite recent entries and some that date back to 10 years ago. I’ve been able to try the pack out early, and while I have some minor qualms, overall it seems like a solid addition to the Beat Saber catalog. While Skrillex obviously shares a lot of musical touchstones with the EDM songs that dominate Beat Saber’s OST tracks, it still has its own flair and enough variety within the pack to feel different. If nothing else, it’s good that Facebook and Beat Games are branching out and trying to incorporate lots of varied artists and genres in the music packs they release.
The environment and new color scheme are serviceable if a little less exciting than some of the more recent music pack’s environments such as the Interscope Mixtape, and eight tracks feel like a comfortable size for a single artist pack. While I’d like to see larger packs featuring many different artists, like the Interscope release, the eight tracks here feel like enough to provide some variety and give you something to explore one by one without overwhelming you, unlike other packs that personally felt like they only have you a taste of its full potential (looking at you, Panic! at the Disco pack).
Highlights in this pack include Butterflies, which has an exhilarating, bouncy arrangement of notes in the bridge on Expert difficult, along with Bangarang, which delivers a challenging and hectic beat map on Expert that feels appropriate for the song.
That being said, the Skrillex pack does suffer from an ongoing problem with new Beat Saber releases — the difficulty levels are increasingly conflated and confused, not only between music packs but between songs in the Skrillex pack itself. To get a feel for the level of a pack, I generally try each level on Expert and see how it plays, and then sometimes run through on Hard to compare the jump between tiers. With this pack, I felt some tracks on Expert were definitely easier than others, but perhaps came a bit closer to consistency than other worse offenders like the Green Day pack. Moving between difficulties felt a bit jarring in places, with Bangarang on Expert feeling quite challenging and physically demanding compared to Hard, which felt less exciting and like a big downwards jump in terms of difficultly.
The wider problem is that there is increasingly greater variance in what constitutes Expert difficulty across most releases. While I used to feel like a solid and decent Expert player, it now feels difficult to judge just how hard an Expert track will be. Some of this is probably attributable to the releases expanding out to different genres besides EDM in recent years, but it still feels frustrating to go into a level unsure if I’ve picked the right difficulty or not. While those playing consistently well at Expert+ or Expert level may not notice or care, my guess is that the inconsistency might be more frustrating to those who play at a lower level to improve or those who are trying to find the difficulty level that they feel most comfortable at.
While these concerns are valid, they also might not be as pronounced for other players. Even so, it’s less of a fault of the pack itself and more the direction of the game as a whole. Those minor qualms aside, the Skrillex DLC feels like a welcome addition to the Beat Saber music roster. Despite not being the biggest fan of the music, I still really enjoyed playing each new track and found some interesting beat mappings and exciting segments that were well thought out and exhilarating to get right.
Given the genre, this pack will probably feel a bit familiar to long-time Beat Saber players. For those who are unfamiliar with Skrillex but enjoy the Beat Saber OST selection, this pack is probably the one that feels closest to home to those OG tracks. If you’re a fan of no-frills, EDM, high octane Beat Saber, then the Skrillex pack should do the trick.
The Beat Saber Skrillex music pack is available now for $10.99 or $1.99 per track.
