Beat Hazard: Beat your Music

What could be better than gameplay experience driven by your own music? A $7.49 gameplay experience driven by your own music. Some of you may be aware of the existence of this genre with the popular Audiosurf game, which reacts as a single ship racing game on a track entirely based on the music currently playing, collecting blocks scattered throughout the track in order to create combos and score some points. Beat Hazard follows a similar path but replaces the racing with a more arcade shooter feeling. As the title of the blog suggests, "Beat your Music", the player is allowed to choose the music from his or her hard drive as the main feature of the game in order to alter gameplay. Much like Audiosurf but in a different genre, to understand clearly how it works, we first need to get the basics down.

In Beat Hazard, the gameplay follows something similar to Asteroids, or for the more recent, psychedelic type of shooters, Geometry Wars and Super Stardust HD amongst many. You control a space ship flying (or drifting, floating, or whichever you think is possible) in space encountering occasional asteroids and enemy space ships. Every once in a while, in a random manner, you will often (or not so) encounter bosses as well which consist of either a large space ship, which often come in pairs of two, or you will encounter a very large one all on its own. The goal is simple: Last the entirety of the song chosen and destroy as many asteroids and enemies as you can to score bigger combos and gain more points. The more points you get, the faster you level up. Such is the basic of the game.

Where does the music come into play? It simply becomes your most powerful ally during your quest for points. The more up-beat or aggressive the music becomes, the faster you will shoot. This can be helped by collecting bonus items:

- Volume+ which raises the volume of the music, thus enhancing your firing abilities to a wider area.
- Power+ which raises the strength of your shoots, allowing you to destroy enemies faster.
- 1x which raises your combo by 1 point. Note that not shooting for a certain period of time charges the Dare Devil meter which also gives points for the combo bar, as well as a Survivalist meter which fills in after a certain period of time without deaths.

Once both the Volume and Power metters have been filled entirely, you finally enter the BEAT HAZARD mode which is the absolute power in terms of seizures and strength. Losing a life at this point (or any other point prior to reaching the mode) discards every power ups collected, but in case of a risky encounter, one can use a bomb that destroys almost everything on screen at the moment of explosion. Be aware that the slower a song becomes, the harder the game gets as the weapons will barely shoot and will not deal much damage, making every encounter, even against regular enemies, a real danger.

The game does have it's share of issues though, but widely not enough for me to stop loving it. First of all, and the most important thing to note would be the visuals. While I find the game to be stunning, it is extremely important to consider them before making a purchase. The game consist mainly of a constant, trippy, psychedelic visualizer as a background when playing, or even when wandering around the menus. I repeat it, it is extremely important to consider the visuals if you are sensitive to flashing lights and strobe-like effects as it uses fullscreen strobbing effects. Luckily for us though, the game starts with a message about this and does not go away unless input is given by the player, ensuring that people can and will take the time to read the warning. Unfortunately, there is no options to lower the visuals to something more acceptable, so if you play it, prepare to bleed out of your eyes for the first time in your life.

The second and remaining issue I have with the game is that it is not well balanced. While your weapons are based entirely on the music, the enemy waves aren't. This means that you could end up with a big power metal song, playing through a level that has barely any enemy waves, while you could play some calm, classical music and end up encounter 3 large ship bosses one after the other. One place to enjoy a more challenging area is to play the Survival mode which plays through an entire album until all lives are lost and delivers much bigger enemy waves.

Put aside these two issues, this is quite the enjoyable game at the fair price of $9.99 on Steam. Why did I mention $7.49 earlier? Because the game is currently on sale until April 22nd 2010, which is why I made this blog right now instead of my second part for the Touhou bosses. The game is also available on Xbox Live Arcade as an indie title for 400 Microsoft Points. On Steam, the game supports both the mouse and Xbox 360 controller, therefore it isn't at a loss for those who would of prefered playing with a controller. It is also available through the Official Beat Hazard Website for PC for those who prefer not using a client, or simply for more information regarding the game.

I will end this blog with a video captured by myself. In the video, I used a song provided with the game to avoid unnecessary legal issues in case YouTube decides that my music is innapropriate and forces me to go with the audioswap option, so while the provided songs aren't the best example in terms of insanity that can come out of this game, it still provides a nice visual experience for those wanting to see it in action.

Until my next blog, enjoy this video!