Suppose I'll put this here.
Game name: Audiosurf
Players: 1(Or 2, if you have a big chair and a wide desk)
Age rating: E-AO, depending.
Review:So. Audiosurf. Just some Guitar Hero ripoff, but for the PC. And you use a mouse? How lame.
...Oh wait, did I mention that it uses any and every song on your hard-drive as its "setlist" and generates a custom track for each one?
Oh fuck that sounds awesome.
And it is. So very, very awesome.
So yeah, it's a rhythm game. Very straightforward, no plot, no story-mode, you just start it up, select a song, and play. Like I mentioned, it generates a track for the song when you select it, but it's not just random notes everywhere, it makes a track, and that's the track for that song. For everyone. Some kid in Asia will be playing the exact same track for The Ding-Dong Song as you will.
[1] I know what you're probably thinking. "Oh sweet Jesus, that'd take like 10 years to load a song." Surprisingly, no. It took me around fifteen seconds to load "Still Alive" the first time, and less than ten each time after that.
It plays kinda like the vocal section of Rock Band/Guitar Hero, but instead of controlling the "pointer"(which is now a spaceship) with your voice, you control it with your mouse. Or, if you're lame, the
S and
D keys. You slide it back and forth to grab notes, which show up as different-colored squares. When you collect them, they show up on a grid on the bottom of your screen. The goal is to pop the notes on your grid by making notes of the same color line up in a group of three or more, vertically, horizontally, or in an L-shape. Not all notes are created equal, though, hot colors like red and yellow notes score big, while cooler purple and blue notes score you little, but are far more common.
Each spaceship has different abilities. One can jump over notes with the spacebar, while one can clear all the notes of any given color out of its grid. This adds, in my opinion, quite a bit of replayability, even among the already-infinite replayability that it had by nature alone.
Now, I'll be honest. Aside from the fuckawesome backgrounds, this game has...absolutely nothing going for it graphic-wise. The spaceships look kinda like the boats from Hydro Thunder. The notes could be accomplished by attaching sticky-notes to a treadmill...And those are basically all the graphics you'll see. Though, I don't know about you, but I don't play rhythm games to see the shadows move realistically as the light changes. Just my opinion.
The difficulty level is...odd. Different songs will obviously have different difficulty
[2], but, for most of the songs I tried, even the hardest difficulty was a little less than that of GHIII's Hard mode. Now, this may be a major downer for you people who could play rhythm games for a living, but then there's the double-ship...
When you play with that ship, you have twice as many note lanes as normal, twice as many notes flying at you, and...two different ships to control. One with your mouse, and one with the aforementioned
S and
D keys. I tried this once, on the hardest difficulty, lasted for around a minute before going "OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK" and closing the song. I'm fairly certain the original goal of this was multiplayer(as noted in the header), but it works as an Expert+ difficulty setting, easily.
Also, did I mention that the "songs" are really any sound file? Which means that you could actually play a rhythm game to, say, DoFuss's podcast. Just sayin'.
RatingsGraphics: C.
Sounds: A+ through F. Hard to rate this, as the sounds are your music. Though if you play crappy songs, that's your fault, not the game's.
Gameplay: A. An amazing time-waster, and mind-trip.
Replayability: S*+. Three days on, ah...A legit site to legally purchase songs, and you've got a setlist to last you a lifetime.
Overall score: A. Very very worth the, get this, $10 it costs.
And for those(Blokey) concerned with the system requirements, they are slightly steep for what you're getting, which I find odd, because my system is absolute crap, and the game starts almost instantly, and runs fine.
Here's the Steam page for it, you can check the specs there. You could also just download the
free demo, and see if that works.
[1] Ding-Dong Song[2] Holy Mother of God.Edit: Good Lord, I need to proof-read these things. Especially when running on very little sleep.
Dubble edit: Okay srsly this is dumb, I wrote this on two hours of sleep, so if you spot a typo I missed, point it out.
