Game review: AudioSurf

Oct 27

Reviews David No Comments
audiosurf, Games, music, steam

Approximate reading time is 3 minutes

This is the first time I’ve done a game review. I’ll be honest, I don’t really get new games. Although I have started using Steam as a games platform, partly because I prefer not to deal with physical media. One day, as I loaded up Steam to play Team Fortress 2, the Steam news page popped up with an alert to a game available for pre-order, something called “AudioSurf” [Wikipedia].

AudioSurf is a music visualisation game. If you’re like me, then the idea of standing in front of a TV with a toy guitar for something like Guitar Hero makes you cringe. AudioSurf is different though, besides the music visualisation, AudioSurf feels like the result of a wild one night stand between F-Zero and Columns. The audio visualisation comes by means of determining the course’s speed and curvature, and density of blocks. As the music’s tempo slows down you tend to climb up hill, as if you’re on a roller coaster. Then when the tempo speeds up you’re going down hill, and fast! For particularly intense periods in the music, you get treated to a psychedelic tunnel of light.

When you first play the game you are taken through a helpful set of video tutorials, which give you an idea of what you’re doing. My first impression when I started playing was “WOW”. Not because of the graphics, but because of the speed and intensity of the experience. As you’ll have gathered, I liked this, I liked it a lot. Your basic view is a three lane highway with a “hard shoulder” on each side. The central three lanes are littered with different coloured blocks. You have to hit the blocks with your car, which then register as coloured squares in a grid beneath your car. Making patterns of three or more blocks scores you points and makes them disappear. Blocks which were above the ones you’ve just made disappear fall down in a Tetris/Columns fashion, hopefully to make new like-colour patterns.

After racing to your first few tracks, you get to unlock “characters”. Characters in this games are different sorts of racing cars. Each have different abilities, which gives you very different styles of game play. For instance, there’s the “Picker” with which you can scoop up blocks by pressing your left mouse button, then drop them with your right mouse button. There’s the “Pusher” with which you can push blocks into neighbouring lanes with your left or right mouse buttons. These different cars also have difficulty related variants, at “Casual”, “Pro”, and “Elite” levels. There is also a co-operative type car for a two player mode, but I haven’t found anyone to play this with yet . Given that we’re living in the social web age, there are also internet wide high-score tables to compare yourself against. The latter makes it all the more surprising to me that you can’t play the cooperative mode with a friend elsewhere via the internet.

We haven’t even covered the most attractive features yet though! The biggest selling point of this game to me was that you can use all of your own music. AudioSurf can play MP3, OGG, FLAC, M4A, WMA. It can even pull music from your iTunes library, if you have one. If you’re not pulling from iTunes, you are given a simple file navigator to choose your music from. This level of freedom is a welcome breath of fresh air. The other very attractive feature of this game is that it only cost 5 UK Pounds to order on Steam.

Overall, AudioSurf is a highly original game with fantastic graphics. Most of all though, it is fun, which is something games tend to miss these days. It’s too early to say whether this game is relying on its novelty value instead of longevity. Although for £5, a novelty game isn’t that painful. My only other possible concern with this game is that, I hope it isn’t some elaborate industry ploy to spy on what music we all have. All that said, and putting my tinfoil hat aside, I am happy with my purchase and I recommend it.

Finally, here is a video of me playing the game (excuse the poor camera work):