The newly released Les Mills Bodycombat offers a polished, effective, and fun training experience on Quest, and the lack of a subscription plan is a big plus. Read on for our impressions.
Sensing the potential for VR fitness to one day be as lucrative as membership gyms, many training apps have moved to a subscription model in recent times. Supernatural paved the way with his daily workouts that earned him attention of a Target acquisitionand BoxVR completely overhauled its offerings to become the subscription-based FitXR (a move that got some backlash).
The benefits of constantly updated fitness platforms are undeniable, but VR is still making its way into the fitness space, and these services don’t offer as versatile and intense a workout as their everyday alternatives. That can make the subscription commitment hard to justify for some. Les Mills Bodycombat’s one-stop shopping approach could appeal to those who are still on the fence about the prospect.
For $29.99, Bodycombat offers 30 boxing-based workouts. If you’ve played FitXR or most other rhythm-based VR games, you’ll know the basics: targets come to the beat of the music and you have to hit them, while obstacle zones require you to duck or crouch down to get out of the way. . You select a playlist that is between 5 and 20 minutes long and you can even compete with other players’ previous scores to keep you motivated.
So this isn’t the most original VR training experience, but Bodycombat gets the basics right and then expands on them with a welcome personality. Instructors Dan Cohen and Rachael Newsham have pre-recorded tutorials and voice work for each workout on the app and talk to you constantly during a session. He gives each session a bit of camaraderie in the spirit of a spin class, and while his breath can sometimes be out of sync with his actual performance, we definitely appreciate his constant reminders on how to properly execute the moves.
The app also puts a lot of emphasis on technique and offers a few more moves that we haven’t seen anywhere else, like hitting high and low or swinging my arms in a T-position. In a 20-minute high-intensity workout I found myself without breath, legs began to feel heavy from the amount of squatting. I’m a pretty active person who runs and bikes regularly, so it’s always comforting when an app can make me break a sweat on my first session.
Elsewhere there are some issues, as usual with VR apps being too keen on the calorie counter, but overall the experience is pretty smooth. Music is also your standard gym fare, though this isn’t as important as it is with games like Beat Saber.
Ultimately, Les Mills Bodycombat might not be the slickest VR fitness app out there, and it doesn’t have the novel ideas that developer Odders delivered with OhShape, but it gets the basics right and offers a refined experience and wide range of features. effective workouts. for a single price.
Les Mills Bodycombat is available on Quest now for $29.99.
