Beat Hazard is a boisterous, music driven, flashy game. The gameplay in Beat Hazard is 'powered by your music', essentially Beat Hazard monitors the track you choose to play to and augments gameplay to match and flow in proportion to the 3 levels of the track, low, mid and high.
When you enter the game first you're instantly entered into a world of flash particle effects and UI that reacts to the music playing. The presentation is great, the UI alone conveys a rushing atmosphere and instantly tells you the developers intended direction. You can choose between survival mode or regular mode. In regular you simply select a song from your hard drive and play the game to that song. In survival mode you choose an Album to play and see how long your nifty fingers can keep your ship from exploding and losing all lives.
The gameplay is slick. It reminds me of a newer version of Asteroids, only this time I don't play to repetitive music and of course the gameplay reacts to the music playing. The game provides a variety of enemies, bosses and pickups. When you destroy enemies they have a chance of dropping pickups. These can be a score multiplier increase, a power increase or a volume increase. When your volume and power is maximized you get the Beat Hazard weapon, this doesn't overpower you though. The game also includes a leveling system, so those points mean something.
The visuals aren't exactly impressive. Infact, as cool as those particles look they often get in the way of your view and unfortunately can cause you to lose track of your spaceship and crosshair. The art direction is cool and simple but still fails to impress.
Sound design is excellent of course. It would surely want to be with genre of the game. The sound effects are brilliant and really adds to the games paces and style. The game handles your sounds easily and doesn't seem to compress the music for the sake of RAM or the game running more effectively.
Along with all these cool features the game includes leaderboards. So let the competition rage on!
Conclusively the plays very well and I love the arcade style gameplay the developer went for. The visuals are cool but unimpressive and often the particle effects can get slightly annoying and sound design is excellent. This game is not to be passed by and is well worth 10 bucks. Do your music a favor and implement it into Beat Hazard
Games in Asia: "We’ve got a nice mix of FPS games, mobile games, a rhythm game and a beat-em-up this week. Can you guess what they are?"
"Having written about Trading Cards in the past, I’m both pleased and disheartened to see the MMO qualities of this system come to fruition so quickly. I’m interested to see the reaction from the gaming populace at this new DLC method, and whether other indie publishers see fit to lock skins or small gameplay tweaks behind Trading Cards. Only time will tell if this will be a one off oddity or a new horse armor moment for the industry." - Alexander Santa Maria of Geekenstein.com
Gamesta.com has more indie deals to report on. The Indie Gala site has started its own brand of weekly game deals, with the Beat Hazard and Soulcaster series. This is, no doubt, in answer to the Humble Bundle weekly sales, but that means more deals for gamers.
