Screenshots :.
Beat Hazard
PC
Matt
23-04-2010
"Prepare to injure your eyes"
"... the goggles do nothing!"
"Like a 1980s laser disco... in space."
So, here’s the thing. I am currently sat here at my desk suffering from what most people would usually call a migraine, except I know it isn’t. It’s not a self-inflicted headache as a result of a heavy night of drinking either. No, it’s the stinging brain explosion of a couple of hours spent playing Beat Hazard, a game so vibrant and hectic that it makes Graham Norton’s selection of jackets look comparatively meek and mild by comparison.
The game is, quite simply, a top-down Asteroids kind of affair, except it generates its content depending on whatever music track is being fed into it. This, brilliantly, includes anything that happens to be knocking around on your PC in MP3 form, meaning that you can play through your favourite albums and tunes, leaving the game itself to present you with some kind of visual representation of how they look in video game form.
On a basic level, the game works like this: you are a small ship, and must shoot at any enemy ships or floating rocks that happen into your field of vision. Blowing them up will reward you with either a multiplier bonus or one of two power-ups, one that increases the number of streams that fly out of your ship’s weapon, the other that increases the music volume and hence your weapon’s intensity. Cleverly, you also gain a bonus for floating around dodging things and not shooting, a situation that often leaves the screen cluttered with nasty enemies that are best cleared with one of a small number of superbombs at your disposal.
As a general rule, the more beat-filled and up-tempo your tune is, the more action you are going to get. This doesn’t mean that picking a slower song will leave you on easy street, mind; the trade-off is that the slower songs mean your weapon isn’t quite as devastating as in the faster tunes, balancing things out really quite nicely.
As much as this is an unscientific statement, it really, really works. Why? Because... it just does. First song that I fired in was Blackout by Muse, a slow, lilting song that drifts rather beautifully along for its approximate 4-minute lifespan. What played out was some kind of strangely relaxing space waltz in which the enemies and my weapon warped and floated around, with the late-song intensification of tremolo picking sparking up some truly awesome effects in the background.
Picking a song such as Metallica’s recent All Nightmare Long, in contrast, will lead to huge explosions, countless enemies and pulsing weaponry pretty much from the get-go. Ships zoom around, boss ships charge into view and asteroids zap around, all putting your ship into constant peril. Your weaponry feels much more powerful, however, and unlike the aforementioned gentle space romp it keeps mercilessly pelting all kinds of stuff at you.
It does fall down on occasion, mostly when things on-screen get a little too colourful for their own good and you get lost amongst a sea of flashing neon. You control your ship with the cursors (or WASD if you’re more inclined) whilst aiming with the mouse, although much in the same way as you can lose your ship amongst the chaos, you can quite easily lose your aiming cursor. On occasion it is pot luck whether you survive an onslaught or not, and it can slip into being quite frustrating.
You forgive it though, because it’s a pretty cheap way of entertaining yourself for hour-long chunks, and it can produce some utterly lovely levels to go with your songs. Plus, along with the single play mode in which you simply take on a single song, you are also given a survivor mode that keeps loading ‘em up until you lose your set amount of lives. Combined with a rank system that gives you additional bonuses the more total points you score you’re onto something that, whilst not the kind of thing you’re going to be ploughing through in huge chunks and becoming massively addicted to, is something that sits nicely alongside Audiosurf as a cool little title that bases itself on a soundtrack of your choosing. Good effort, that.
NOTE: It goes without saying, but just to make a serious point on this: if you are sensitive to flashing lights and the like, it’s better that you give this one a miss.
The game is, quite simply, a top-down Asteroids kind of affair, except it generates its content depending on whatever music track is being fed into it. This, brilliantly, includes anything that happens to be knocking around on your PC in MP3 form, meaning that you can play through your favourite albums and tunes, leaving the game itself to present you with some kind of visual representation of how they look in video game form.
On a basic level, the game works like this: you are a small ship, and must shoot at any enemy ships or floating rocks that happen into your field of vision. Blowing them up will reward you with either a multiplier bonus or one of two power-ups, one that increases the number of streams that fly out of your ship’s weapon, the other that increases the music volume and hence your weapon’s intensity. Cleverly, you also gain a bonus for floating around dodging things and not shooting, a situation that often leaves the screen cluttered with nasty enemies that are best cleared with one of a small number of superbombs at your disposal.
As a general rule, the more beat-filled and up-tempo your tune is, the more action you are going to get. This doesn’t mean that picking a slower song will leave you on easy street, mind; the trade-off is that the slower songs mean your weapon isn’t quite as devastating as in the faster tunes, balancing things out really quite nicely.
As much as this is an unscientific statement, it really, really works. Why? Because... it just does. First song that I fired in was Blackout by Muse, a slow, lilting song that drifts rather beautifully along for its approximate 4-minute lifespan. What played out was some kind of strangely relaxing space waltz in which the enemies and my weapon warped and floated around, with the late-song intensification of tremolo picking sparking up some truly awesome effects in the background.
Picking a song such as Metallica’s recent All Nightmare Long, in contrast, will lead to huge explosions, countless enemies and pulsing weaponry pretty much from the get-go. Ships zoom around, boss ships charge into view and asteroids zap around, all putting your ship into constant peril. Your weaponry feels much more powerful, however, and unlike the aforementioned gentle space romp it keeps mercilessly pelting all kinds of stuff at you.
It does fall down on occasion, mostly when things on-screen get a little too colourful for their own good and you get lost amongst a sea of flashing neon. You control your ship with the cursors (or WASD if you’re more inclined) whilst aiming with the mouse, although much in the same way as you can lose your ship amongst the chaos, you can quite easily lose your aiming cursor. On occasion it is pot luck whether you survive an onslaught or not, and it can slip into being quite frustrating.
You forgive it though, because it’s a pretty cheap way of entertaining yourself for hour-long chunks, and it can produce some utterly lovely levels to go with your songs. Plus, along with the single play mode in which you simply take on a single song, you are also given a survivor mode that keeps loading ‘em up until you lose your set amount of lives. Combined with a rank system that gives you additional bonuses the more total points you score you’re onto something that, whilst not the kind of thing you’re going to be ploughing through in huge chunks and becoming massively addicted to, is something that sits nicely alongside Audiosurf as a cool little title that bases itself on a soundtrack of your choosing. Good effort, that.
NOTE: It goes without saying, but just to make a serious point on this: if you are sensitive to flashing lights and the like, it’s better that you give this one a miss.
8/10
