Beat Hazard

So as much as I don't like Steam, it does have its uses.  There are free weekends of games all the time, and plenty of free demos to be had.  Earlier today I downloaded (and immediately exhausted) the demo for Beat Hazard.

Beat Hazard is a twin stick shooter.  Which is interesting because even though Steam can't find my PS2 controller->USB adapter as a joystick for some reason, the game found it just fine.  I immediately had gripes with...  The PS2 controller's analog sticks.  My thumbs slip off of them way too easily.  The game really wants an Xbox 360 controller (and uses its button graphics and controller picture), but fortunately it worked with the PS2 controller, as I don't have a 360 controller.

Everything about Beat Hazard's gameplay revolves around music.  The graphics, the enemies, the bosses, everything.  Furthermore, even though it comes with some music (which I didn't play), you can choose your own audio tracks.  It supports a wide variety of audio formats: MP3, WAV, AIFF, OGG, and FLAC.  Due to patented decoder licensing costs, support for iTool formats like m4a and aac are an extra dollar's worth of DLC on top of the game's cost, which seems reasonably inexpensive, and thus worth it if you have music in those formats.

The type of music matters greatly.  Metal is pretty damn difficult, with several boss encounters per song, whereas something lighter like Green Day will be easier.  The two Lonely Island tracks I played were both really easy and also very low-scoring.

Of course, there's powerups.  What would a shooter be without powerups?  Here's what you get:

• Power: Increases your weapon's power.
• Volume: Increases the volume of the music, and the amount of color in the game's graphics.
• +1: Increases your score multiplier.
• Bomb: Gives you another bomb to use.
• Beat Hazard: I'm not exactly sure what this does, but when you max your power and volume, you get this.

In addition, you get multiplier bonuses for surviving for a while, and for not shooting for a while.  It's pretty easy to max the volume and power, so most of the gameplay will be spent collecting score multiplier powerups.

The game's instructions explains exactly how it works in much greater detail than I really care to remember.  All you really need to know is that the more involved the song is, the harder it's going to be.  I counted several boss encounters triggered more or less exactly when Galneryus' drummer was doing really fast double bass.

The soft parts can be difficult too, because even at full power, your weapon fire rate reacts to the music.  So if you know there's a soft part coming up, try and kill as much as you can before your fire rate goes down (and then get a bunch of daredevil bonuses by not firing).

The game tracks your cumulative score and uses it to give you extra bonuses, such as reduced multiplier loss when you die, powerups when you start a song, and more powerups from bosses.  In the ten songs the demo let me play, I managed to get high enough to have a volume, power, and multiplier powerup at the beginning of the song, and bosses were bleeding powerups.

Twin stick shooters are generally decent games.  The added gameplay mechanic of making everything depend on the music keeps it fresh and different from other twin stick shooters like Geometry Wars, Smash TV, and I MADE A GAME WITH ZOMBIES IN IT.  It feels a bit easier than the aforementioned games, but the difficulty really is dependent on the music.  I played on Normal and had very few problems, but I'm used to twin stick shooters.

The ten track restriction in the demo is really constricting, I would have liked the opportunity to experience a bit more of my collection.  In addition, it won't let me see what rank I got to in the ten songs I played (even though it showed me after each song).  Once it's expired, pretty much the only thing the demo can be used for is its visualization mode, entered by pressing V on your keyboard at the title screen.  Despite the displayed controller buttons for the visualization mode and next track, I found that every controller button entered the menu instead, so I had to use the keyboard.  I don't know what the game's mouse+keyboard controls are, because as soon as I found that I could configure my PS2 pad, I did that and didn't look back.

The game itself is $10 on Steam (excluding any sales, of course), with an extra dollar getting you support for Apple's audio formats due to accursed software patents.  I wish it supported APE audio.  Maybe I should transcode all my lossless Galneryus to FLAC, I dunno.  Regardless, it's an inexpensive and enjoyable game with as many levels as you have audio tracks.