Video Games – Beat Hazard and Audiosurf

Ah music games.  Always a place in my heart will they have, with their combining of two of my favorite things, high-octane videogames and music.  To that point, two have been getting more play time out: Audiosurf and Beat Hazard.  For those who haven’t ever heard of these games, spend more time on Steam!  Both are built around using the players own music collection to create the action in the game, but both are otherwise not-similar.

Audiosurf is a game where you do just what the title suggests:  Surf audio.  Ok, well maybe that doesn’t make that much sense, so I’ll break it down for you.  The game casts the player as one of a variety of characters, each with their own special style, and tasks them with navigating a song.  The game play itself is a puzzle style racer where the player matches colored tiles in sets of three or more (touching in any non-diagonal fashion) in a field of 3×8 (24 total) .  Once a set of 3 is made, it has a small cool down time before it vanishes granting points, additionally getting another block of the same color extends the period the group exists as well as resetting the timer before it vanishes.

Overloading any given column destroys all blocks in the field as well preventing the player from picking up more blocks until a timer finishes and they “Respawn,” though the song itself does not stop.  The game is broken into two styles, with 90% of the characters on fields with multiple colors at once (such as with the picture of the left).  The “Mono” characters follow the same general rules but have only 1 color block and grey blocks, with the idea being to not get the grey blocks (which don’t activate or grant points).  The game play in Audiosurf varies between fast and frantic, and dulll, depending not only on the song the player uses, but the character as well.  Mono characters are the easiest, but can be frustrating and boring if songs slow down to often.  Other characters are generally far more frantic but are unbelievably hard to play well with an extremely high learning curves.

The music decoder is pretty solid but unsurprisingly unable to decode protected iTunes files.  What’s especially nice is that there is no DLC needed to play normal itunes music as there is with Beat Hazard.

Overall the game is (generally) fast and fun, with options to use keyboard or mouse.  The puzzle characters are hard (some might call them “Challanging” but honestly they’re just straight up hard) but fun to learn. Mono characters are easier to learn but just as fun to play.  In the end, the game is a ton of fun to play and people will often want to watch as the colors are eye catching and fun. The biggest issues are the non-intuitive keyboard controls and occasional crash bugs on start-up.

Overall: 8/10.

Beat Hazard is another action-music game that relies on the player’s music collection to create it’s game play.  Originally a Xbox Arcade game, it was released on via Steam later.  The game is an asteroids-inspired space shooter where the player fights against hoards of enemies as well as actual asteroids and bosses.  The player scored points for each thing destroyed, and accumulates score multipliers either by getting multiplier bonus drops (from enemies) or other bonuses (Going long enough without firing, for example).  Additionally, the game allows ranking up depending on how well you do on songs.  As you rank up the player gains additional bonuses (weapon power-ups at the start, lower death penalties, etc) which in turn leads to higher scores and higher ranks.

Graphically, the game uses sprites for player and enemies and highly stylized weapon fire.  So stylized is the weapon fire that I need to spend a minute talking about it specifically.  We’ve all seen flashy weapons before.  Blue balls of plasma scorching aliens in Doom, pink fuzzy doom from the needler in Halo, those annoying fucking bouncing balls of DEATH that you can somehow grab and throw at shit to make them cease to exist from Half-Life 2 and Portal, but all of these flashy effects?  They’re child’s play compared to the shit that goes down in Beat Hazard.   The colors are SO extreme and there is so much flashing going on any time you fire the damn weapon that they needed to put a seizer warning at the start of the game.  Everything from the balls of energy to the explosions of ships and the resulting few seconds afterwards flashes like a lightning bug on crack.  Imagine if someone was to put you in a room full of strobe lights and run them all at different speeds, that’s almost half as flashy as Beat Hazard.

Why am I making such a big deal about these?  Well, it’s because it leads to the first major issue with the game.  So extreme is the light show that it’s more than possible to simply not be able to see your own ship, leading to countless cheap deaths.  Some might call this a feature (“Clearly it makes the game harder, and was thus a design choice!”) but these people are stupid.  Even if it WAS a design choice, it was a poor one.  The player should never be punished for performing the primary goal in the game, that would be like Pac-Man getting leprosy after eating a power pill.

Additionally, it is hard to tell sometimes what is debris that can kill you is and what is just aesthetic debris.  If you play the game for big points, waiting until many enemies are on screen before tossing your super bomb you’ll know what I’m talking about when you hit 3-5 asteroids at the same time and get face raped by the tiny debris that looks remarkably like the debris from the larger ships you just blew up with the same bomb.

The only other issue with the game is that you need to buy the DLC to play non-protected iTunes files.  This, however, was an understandable design choice, as the codex is expensive.  Additionally the DLC is only $1, so it wont put a big hole in your pocket (if it does, why the hell are you buying games?!).

All in all, the game is engaging and fun.  The upper difficulty levels are hard, and require a lot of patients to get good at.  The games flaws are generally overlookable, but the more-occasional-than-it-should-be death can get very tiresome, very quickly.  Regardless, I highly recommend this game if you like asteroid-esque space shooters.

Overall: 7/10.