Beat Hazard

I love music, from folk to metal. The problem is that I have no direct way to interact with it beyond pausing and rewinding. Let’s see, I have two left feet, I’m tone deaf and have an awful sense of rhythm. This means I could never hope to play in a band or sing, and even Rock Band poses a bit of a challenge for me. Of course that leaves me with the music games on the margins, such as the superb Audio Surf, a game that generates a race track and bonus points based on the music you are listening to.

This is why I must admit that Beat Hazard is a bit of a disappointment, even for a budget game. While it mostly succeeds as an “Asteroids” clone (you fly around and shoot space rocks and other ships) any musical elements are poorly realized.

First of all the ships you fight, the asteroids you blast, the big bosses who you evade, the order in which they appear seem to be determined by the song you play but have little to do with how tempo, variety or style. You can face armies during a chill out song or a steady stream of opponents during a much more intense track.

The only thing the music seems to really alter is the rate of fire of your weapon. Like a garden hose that runs on noise, when the beat is pumping you fill the screen with ordinance but as soon as things quiet down your rate of fire thins into a trickle. A typical scenario is when a heavy song switches to an acoustic guitar in the middle of a rough moment, you find yourself shooting tiny pellets at your foes instead of the usual mega lasers, and if the song has a moment of silence at the end you are completely doomed.

This is a shame, since the game could have been really cool. Instead it seems to pass judgment on your music, like a backseat driver who complains unless you play brain dead techno during a road trip. As soon as the beat slows, acoustic instruments come up or the bass gets irregular (jazz, progressive metal) you find your destructive capability severely reduced. Not only does the game fail to draw its pacing from the music and provide an experience that scales with what you listen to, it also lacks a lot of really obvious features. Sure, it would be cool to be able to rewind or mess with tempo using special items you can’t even compare your score on a song by song basis as you did with audio surf. I used to LOVE it when somebody beat the score on some super obscure song and I found out there was another Borknagar fan living nearby or that somebody else listened to the Amores Perros soundtrack. With Beat Hazard all that matters are the points and the duration of the song, and you need to unlock a dozen perks to even max out your point potential.

Hopefully patches can make a better game, but the first piece of DLC did nothing but allow you to play with DRM infected material you purchase from the Apple store and other backward digital retailers.

- Connoisseur Javier