Hit the decks! Tribe XR is a virtual DJ application that gives users the ability to experience what it is like to be in control of two Pioneer DJ decks.
Tribe XR is very much an app rather than a game. There’s an excellent tutorial that greets you when you first start the game up. It takes you through the basics and explains what each button does. Importantly for a VR experience, it also explains how to – gripping the buttons on the controllers and moving up/down as well as rotating gives you fantastic capability to manage all of the various dials in the same way you’d expect to in real life. As for the gear you’ll be able to get your virtual hands on, you can jump onto equipment like the flagship Pioneer DJ CDJ-3000 professional multi player and DJM-900NXS2 professional mixer, letting you mix, scratch and generally be a DJing badass on kit that would usually cost you a couple of grand per device. Pretty handy.
Top tip: play it standing up. I did try sitting down initially, and despite not realising you can lower or raise the height of the deck (which is explained fairly early on) I found being able to peer ‘over’ the deck quite important. You have two decks, side by side to which you can play and queue a selection of preloaded music. More decks are available if a) you are a hardcore DJ and b) you buy the add-on content to do so.
Tribe XR is very much billed as a full replica to support budding DJs. You can do everything you’d expect to, and learn about other bits you didn’t know DJs did (it’s more complicated than simply pressing play and pause). Fading in new tracks, playing with pitch and even, yes, scratching the decks, are all available here.
But really, you need a good library of music. The preloaded tunes are sufficient but I had not heard of any of them before. Brilliantly, you can connect to Soundcloud which unlocks a massive library of music, and you can connect and transfer music from your personal computer, so you can DJ your own library.
There’s the option to live stream through a multiplayer component too, which is a great addition. It feels like, particularly at the moment, this is a fantastic substitute for getting on the decks in real life – even wearing the headset and bopping along feels akin to how you see DJs in a massive pair of cans going for it.
The real testament to something like this is how much fun do you get out of it. The first time I played it, 90 minutes had passed – so that’s a pretty good indication for me. I’ve had some more time with it since, and it falls in the ‘chill out’ arena for of things to relax with, and on that basis, I’d recommend it.
To find out more about Tribe XR head to www.tribexr.com, and for more info about the kit used in-game, check out www.pioneerdj.com.
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