Tom

Beat Hazard (Image shamefully borrowed from Cold Beam Games's own site)

I wouldn’t call myself a particularly rabid fan of Rhythm Action games. I do really enjoy a good game of Rock Band with friends and I’ll be damned if I didn’t spend hours upon hours sitting on my own in the dark when Guitar Hero II was released, but when you take a step back the genre looks a bit… well, less interactive with the music than the finely tuned note charts of the aforementioned series’. Instead of the game directly influencing the music, the music just has some effect on how the game plays.

That’s the problem part of me had with Audiosurf. As I followed the hype before it’s release my head was picturing something responding perfectly and clearly to any song you popped into the game. Of course this was impossible, and whilst Audiosurf is still an enjoyable game it wasn’t what I was hoping for. Neither was Beat Hazard, a recently released rhythm action game for the PC and Xbox 360.

The best way to describe Beat Hazard would be a Geometry Wars that reacts to your music. And with a ton more glowing, flashy things, which if you’ve played Geometry Wars is a bit of an accomplishment! Yes, Beat Hazard is a top down, one-screen shooter, where many things are effected by the musical input. The spawning of enemies and bosses are effected, as are your weapons capabilities and indeed the plethora of visual effects the game utilises to help you on your way to seizure town.

The demo I grabbed off of Steam gives you 10 songs to play before it expires, so I quickly set about seeing what Beat Hazard could handle in a fun manner. I’d been told beforehand that it favoured something with a lot of guitar and drums, so I leapt into the Subhumans track ‘Internal Riot‘. The game seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake, the song starting off quite fast paced (and remaining so throughout) it seemed a bit hesitant to get going. Floating around with some asteroids made of space-junk to fire my pea-shooter strength lasers at for a bit before even getting my first enemy. Eventually it picked it socks up and got going, sending in a few waves and throwing out some volume and weapon powerups (The volume powerups are a bit lame.. I want it loud right away curse you!). All the time the aesthetics are bellowing into my eyes as I tried desperately to focus on my ship at the same time as keeping an eye on the swarm of enemies incoming, shrouded in a sea of particle effects, powerfully reacting to the music but.. well, just a bit distracting. I’m not very good at keeping my eyes on everything happening onscreen at the best of times (So shoot me?) and I was quickly overwhelmed and lost my three lives to end the song. Death was a bit disappointing, I enjoyed the “punish the score but don’t stop the action” stance of AudioSurf, but at least each death was pretty with all the colour draining out of the screen ’till I’d built the volume up once again.

Unperturbed I flicked open my music library and tried a bit of variation. “Bait Thief” by Bit_Rat, a nice, fast paced chiptune track was going pretty well until the bosses appeared and I got blown to smithereens., I’d recommend it if you’re better than me, which isn’t hard. The album’s free and available for download via that little link there, it’s a good listen. Next up was “Aint no rest for the Wicked” by Cage the Elephant, a song I unashamedly only know from the Borderlands intro. I fared much better this time, the game seemingly going easy on me with the slightly more laid back song, and I managed to make my way through the whole track unscathed, beating a boss in the process, another song I’d recommend playing! Looking for more variation I played “Warez loder” by YTCracker, “Cave Story” by Vernian Process, “California Uber Alles” by Dead Kennedys and “Indestructible” by Disturbed, which I lasted an awful 33% into, eep.

I forget the other songs I played (Yes I’m too lazy to check) but once I’d run the demo well dry of free songs, I idly clicked back to the main menu whilst admiring the continued music effecting the menu screen similarly to the game. There on the splash screen was the option to just watch the visualiser as a song plays. Well, I was terrible at the game, but I -do- like flashy seizure time set to good music! *Click*. I’m not quite sure how long I sat there watching lovely, lovely fullscreen colours, but it was probably not very good for me. It was pretty damn awesome though.

Apart from a few errors I had to start with (the current version of the game played up with my 1680×1050 resolution) and the error sat between the screen and the chair, the game was pretty fun. If I weren’t so terrible at these sort of games I’d probably pick it up on Steam, as it stands I am absolutely abysmal and would be very happy if I could get it as a WMP visualisation or something. Go on, you know you want to make one Cold Beam!

So yes, check out this gameplay video, pick up the demo now on Steam and give it a go- providing you’re not epileptic of course!

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