Beat Hazard
Music/SHMUP
Steam Link

I'd actually spent about eight hours on this game before playing it for this go-around, so I'm not new to it. This is a shoot-em-up game that is set to your own music. You pick a song and try to survive for the duration of that song.

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Along the way you collect power-ups, points to help you progress in rank and money to allow you to buy upgrades.

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There are also huge boss battles.

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Some of the power-ups that you collect increase the volume of the music as well as your weapon's strength. If you max out both you get a message that says "Beat Hazard" and... I'm not sure what it does, actually. I think it just makes the pulsing lights on the screen more intense.

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And yeah, the game gets pretty colorful.

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Although most of the gameplay is pretty straightforward, you occasionally get bullet-hell inspired bosses. Sometimes two at once.

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Since it's a "survival" game the difficulty is largely determined by the length of the song you pick. In the above screenshot I've got two minutes left in the stupid song and am already out of lives. (I did manage to survive, though, by being really liberal with using my powerups. By the end I was out of powerups but I WAS ALIVE.)

It's a surprisingly fun little game but I feel like its biggest flaw is simply that in an age of Spotify and music streaming, not everyone has all the songs they want to play lying around on their hard drive. I kept catching myself thinking "WAIT I KNOW WHAT SONG I REALLY WANT TO DO NEXT oh wait that's on Spotify/YouTube/etc. I don't actually own it. Damn."

If they rigged it to somehow be able to hook up to your Spotify account I'd dump a heck of a lot more time into this. I don't know if that's technically feasible or not but man, I'd even pay money to buy a sequel with that feature.

THE VERDICT:

  • Surprisingly fun
  • I'll happily dump a couple hours on it when I'm bored
  • Best for people with big music libraries
  • SERIOUS: seizure warning. No for real, the entire game is about flashing lights
  • If you are sensitive to that kind of thing this game is not for you
  • Other than that this is pretty good stuff!