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Audiosurf Review
PC Review by Dan Whitehead
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While the world of PC gaming may be in "disarray" for those still turning out big beefy blokey shooters, for those who like to take their gaming with just a dash of indie spirit and bedroom coder verve the PC is in pretty good shape. In large part this is down to digital distribution nozzles like Steam, which allow smaller developers to get their games into our grasping paws without the need to jump through the traditional publishing hoops.
So it is for Audiosurf, which made us say nice things when it paraded around in a metaphorical swimsuit at the gamesy beauty pageant we call Independent Games Festival. We only looked at it one month ago, and yet here's the game - ready and waiting to be downloaded by anyone with USD 9.95 (or your local equivalent). So big whoops and kisses for digital distribution, and a cheeky pat on the bottom for Dylan Fitterer, the talented programmer responsible.
As those who've been paying attention will know, Audiosurf is a bit like Rez. And a bit like Amplitude. And a bit like Tetris. And a bit like Vib Ribbon. Yet rather than coming across as a gruesome mash-up of other people's ideas, it cleverly takes the best ideas from each and turns them into something that's both instantly familiar and enjoyably fresh all at the same time.
Double Vision mode requires one player on the keyboard, one on the mouse. It can be done solo, but only be ambidextrous freaks.
You control a vehicle speeding along an undulating track. There are three lanes, each populated by colour-coded blocks that reach the bottom of the screen in time to the music. Shoulder lanes on either side are free from blocks, allowing you to catch your breath. Superimposed on the track is a grid, seven squares down by three across. Any blocks you hit appear in the grid relative to their location. So if you pick up a red block in the right hand lane, it goes into the right-hand column of the grid. The aim is to match blocks in groups of three, which removes them from the grid and makes room for more. Allow any column to overflow, and the blocks are destroyed leaving you unable to pick up any more for a short time. Confused? Just watch a quick video and it'll become clear.
Your score depends on how many blocks you chain together, and the colour of the blocks in question. Hot reds and yellows earn the highest points per block, with blues and purples worth less. There are also score modifiers, from simple x4 multipliers to percentage bonuses for completing the course with an empty grid, or for hitting most of the red and yellow blocks along the way. It's pitched at just the right level of moreish addiction, so there's always an itching temptation to go back and see if you can improve your totals.
Audiosurf's greatest trick is that the actual content and pace of the game is completely up to the player, since it uses your MP3 collection to generate its tracks. Faster, more intense music results in terrifying downhill rushes, comparable to expert-level Guitar Hero, with blocks galore. A more chilled out musical selection will find you gently travelling uphill, with plenty of time to plan your strategy.
Mono mode, played with a crisp and clean ambient soundscape. Aaah. None more chilled.
Unlike other rhythm games, there's no penalty for missing blocks or mucking things up. Whatever you do, you'll reach the end of every song you play - you just won't get a great score. This rather neatly leaves it up to you to decide how you want to play. If you're not fussed about being the most hardcore arcade daddy in town, the game is happy to let you find your own level of amusement without punishment.
If you want a ferocious challenge, however, there are also different ships across three difficulty levels, which mix up the gameplay in fun ways. The Vegas has the ability to shuffle the blocks on your grid into winning combinations, should you coast along the shoulder lanes for a short time. The Eraser can delete all the blocks of the next colour you hit. Control is via mouse or arrow keys, with the keyboard option shunting you from one lane to another while the mouse allows for smooth motion across the track. As the additional abilities are only available on the mouse buttons, this can lead to some awkwardness if you prefer the key method.
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DanWhitehead
20/02/08 @ 12:11
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I seriously considered giving it an 8, but I just feel it needs a more coherent and organised front end for it to become a truly cohesive gaming experience. Once you've tried all the modes and played all your favourite tracks, it needs more than just a leaderboard to give it long term appeal.
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PearOfAnguish
20/02/08 @ 12:16
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I had to stop playing this, it was intruding on my dreams and I couldn't listen to music while working because I'd be moving the mouse with the beat. It's hypnotic.
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With all the problems Audiosurf is having right now I agree with the 7/10. In time, when all the announced features will have been included, it might be worth 8/10 - and remember - this is Eurogamer and 7/10 is a very good score although it translates badly to those rating syndication sites.
I follow the Audiosurf forums and the problems people are having massive problems with the game - not minor things, but catastrophic crashes, huge performance issues (I had such an issue as well, until I installed all possible hotfixes and changed my drivers to some outlandish beta version =) etc. By the way - the blocks aren't generated according to rhythm. Audiosurf analyzes sounds in all tone ranges and assigns a block to each spike - hence you can play tracks that have no rhythm at all, because audiosurf will "adapt" to detect any instrument it is given. Sadly this behavior makes some people think that the synchronization is bad because they don't realize that they are seeing many instruments at once. P.S. Upcoming features will most likely include MusicBrainz support, so that the songs aren't recognized by their tags, but an audio fingerprint and cross-referenced with a global DB. :-D Another thing is that Audiosurf DOESN'T assign each tone its respective lane - the lanes seem to be more or less random, just laid out so that the song is playable (e.g. no "walls of blocks"). The same is true for colored blocks - the color is random, but warmer colors are more likely to appear in faster sections of the song. This behavior is different to most music/rhythm games because Audiosurf doesn't try to simulate playing an instrument, dancing, singing etc. - it just uses the music to generate levels for its main "match three" mechanic.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 20/02/08 @ 12:28
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Freelancepolice
20/02/08 @ 12:36
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No mention of the 360 controllage, for shame it's hands down the best way to control it imo. Rumble too
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No mention of the 360 controllage, for shame it's hands down the best way to control it imo. Rumble too
For me it's the mouse control that does the trick. You might not be able to change e.g. from shoulder to shoulder, but the control is much smoother, so you can easily squeeze through cascading sections if you catch the rhythm and can pull of cool snaking-maneuvers. =) |
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I think this is the quickest I've ever gone from playing a demo to buying the game. Absolutely love it at the moment, playing with a big grin on my face lots of the time, and the fact that I've put 10+ hours into it already means there's no question I'm getting my money's worth.
I also would have thought this worthy of an 8, but I'm not about to complain - this is one of those games that will vary massively in appeal from person to person. However, I'd say if you are a big music fan you almost can't help falling for it. edit: the game really shines with classical music as there's so much variation and intensity, and Led Zep's Dazed & Confused was a mental, terrifying ride. Of course finding the right music to create awesome tracks is at least half the fun with this game.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 20/02/08 @ 12:56
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coach_mcguirk
20/02/08 @ 13:35
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Totally fair review and score.
The game itself is great, but the presentation is pretty terrible. I feel bad about slamming it, seeing as it has been made by a team of a handful of people, but some of the presentation problems are things that would be easy to get right. Still really enjoying it though. |
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Mentalist(air)
20/02/08 @ 13:36
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I loaded up Sign O' The Times, and the level turned purple. Coincidence, or terrifying sentience?
Or programmer joke? if (strcmp( id3Tag.artist, "Prince") == 0) bPurpleOverride = TRUE; |
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DanWhitehead
20/02/08 @ 13:44
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I must admit, for a fiver, I'd have gone to the 8.
I can certainly see your point, but I try to avoid letting that sort of thing affect the score too much. Once you get into the sub-fiver realm, you can start to forgive a lot of things which makes the whole concept of numerical scores fairly redundant. The mark is for the software itself, while the benefits of the price are covered in the text. That's the best way I've found of handling it. My take on it remains that there's definitely an 8/10 game here, but it needs a few more patches and tweaks to get there. At the moment it's a fantastic piece of technical design, loaded with potential, but it's lacking the connective tissue that would make it a must-have game. Kind of like the difference between Narbacular Drop and Portal. EDIT: And, yes, I wish I'd thought of that comparison while writing the review.
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most recently on 20/02/08 @ 13:45
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asphaltcowboy
20/02/08 @ 13:56
+1
"I must admit, for a fiver, I'd have gone to the 8."
OMG! The Gillen is dirty! I knew all along you were corrupt! |
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BremXJones
20/02/08 @ 14:15
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asphaltcowboy: For a bag of chips and a can of tizer, I'm anybody's.
KG
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most recently on 20/02/08 @ 14:15
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PearOfAnguish
20/02/08 @ 14:42
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Prodigy tracks work very nicely, Breathe and Fuel My Fire are quite mental. Trashy Eurodance makes for some fun rides as well, tried it on semi-pro with some Basshunter and got destroyed.
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DanWhitehead
20/02/08 @ 15:10
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I tried playing along to the stand-up comedy of Patton Oswalt. That was...interesting.
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DanWhitehead
20/02/08 @ 15:57
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It didn't lose a point because of the front end. It's just that at the moment it feels like a very impressive technical achievement in search of a more complete gameplay model, and the lack of front end features - the ability to organise and compile your favourite tunes, for instance - is a part of that.
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Tzetrik - read my post (the longer one) above. Audiosurf doesn't detect just the beats and it doesn't place or color the blocks according to the tone. That's why you can get the impression the the song is out of sync. If you concentrate at one instrument at a time (the guitar, the drums, the vocals etc.) and look at JUST the blocks that are in sync with that instrument, then you'll understand that Audiosurf analyzes the tracks perfectly. There's no way it wouldn't, since at its basic functionality it just takes the spikes at all frequencies and places a random block (higher probability for "warmer" colors dring fast sections) at the very moment they occur.
The impression that the blocks are out of sync comes from the fact that you have a multi-track song squashed into three lanes. This isn't rock band where each instrument got a separate track.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 20/02/08 @ 16:44
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It just doesnt work - but obviously it's easy enough to fool people into thinking it does. I am sorry, but the irony is almost overwhelming. :) It's not working as simple as you think it is, which obviously fools you into thinking it doesn't work. Play it some more. You might find that especially if you're good at a track, the coloured blocks are often tightly integrated into the track as a whole, not necessarily the bass. Snap up a whole collection of coloured blocks which are close to each other, and it might be in perfect sync with, say, the saxophone solo taking place at that moment. edit: Um, reading the post above mine, I am not really saying anything new.
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most recently on 20/02/08 @ 16:57
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So it doesnt work on tempo - Well thats kinda the first thing I'd want to be syncd to game events, otherwise it feels like the game is constantly accelerating and decelerating, when the music is not. If a song is a constant tempo thoughout, surely the track speed should also be constant.
If it ignores tempo in this way, how do you define "fast sections"? Do you just mean greater volume of freq spikes in timescale? That doesnt mean its faster, you could play a slow part of a song and still get loads of reds because of the instrumentation. Also, using frequencies is all very well, but there's no frequency analysis algorithm in the world that can isolate any one instrument or a voice completely - so unless you're playing something very basic, you'll always get overspill from other instruments that are supposed to be in other lanes. So saying freq A uses lane A, is wrong. It doesnt. It sometimes, might do. If this is the case, why have 3 lanes at all? Edit: just re-read a previous post - yeah this isnt the case, my bad. Track are just random. Woohoo For me, it just feels far too random. I have nothing against random games, and in some ways it's quite clever - but it certainly isnt the genius peice of art that everyone is saying it is.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 20/02/08 @ 17:11
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Tzetrik - you still don't understand. The rhythm IS synced to the speed the track moves forward and to the "bumps" on the track. The blocks are just synchronized to the frequency spikes.
Do you just mean greater volume of freq spikes in timescale? No - a greater volume of spikes in timescale on the lower frequencies that are usually responsible for e.g. the bass, ergo the rhythm. Try some classical music - the track is very dense, yet it usually doesn't move along very quickly. However, Audiosurf does seem to adapt to the loudness and the frequencies of the given track, so a song without deep tones might still be very fast because of the spikes at the lowest detected frequency. Also, using frequencies is all very well, but there's no frequency analysis algorithm in the world that can isolate any one instrument or a voice completely - so unless you're playing something very basic, you'll always get overspill from other instruments that are supposed to be in other lanes. So saying freq A uses lane A, is wrong. It doesnt. It sometimes, might do. If this is the case, why have 3 lanes at all? Precisely! You think that the song is out of sync because it Audiosurf doesn't differentiate between instruments - it doesn't even assign a track to a frequency. The only thing that is in sync is the distance of the blocks from each other, not the lane they are on. Why do you have 3 lanes? Because it's a game of "match three" - it doesn't try to simulate playing an instrument like other music/rhythm games - the generated levels are meant to be playable, not be a perfect transcription of the music. That's just like a visualization in a music player - you can't reproduce the music just by watching some dynamically generated fractals, although they have been based on an analysis of the track. The only "vice" of the system is that more often than not it chooses to place several blocks in a row for a single tone, instead of placing a "long note". Test Audiosurf on this "track": http://rapidshare.com/files/92993863/1Kh... It's a pure 1 KHz tone. In a normal rhythm/music game you would expect to see one long block of one color in one lane. This is NOT how Audiosurf interprets it, though. You'll see that the track is CROWDED with blocks of different colors appearing in different lanes and the only constant is the pace at which the track is moving forward and the distance between the blocks (sometimes there seems to be a gap but that's an illusion caused by "long blocks" - there might be a random variable somewhere as well) - you'll note that there are also no bumps whatsoever. The track DOES curve around, however, and some people predict that that's some "floating function" that just does random stuff when there's no variable input. Some people just don't get it - Audiosurf is not another Guitar Hero/Rock Band/Dance Dance Revolution/Singstar clone, although the block-sollecting mechanism might make it appear that way. It features music-based gameplay and it features some colored blocks but that's where the similarities end.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 20/02/08 @ 17:25
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ElectricDemon
20/02/08 @ 17:27
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This is a pretty cool concept. Unfortunately my PC is utter balls.
Reckon there's any chance of an XBLA version? Surely not that difficult, just use Custom soundtracks on the HD/streamed from the PC? |
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It just doesnt work - but obviously it's easy enough to fool people into thinking it does.
Seems to me like you don't actually know what it's meant to be doing. The score made be baulk but having managed to make myself click the little EG Scoring Policy link, and read the reviewers comments I can see his logic. But come on man, Ł6! |
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This is a pretty cool concept. Unfortunately my PC is utter balls.
It must be. I don't even have a graphics card (onboard GFX instead) and I can still kick it up past the basic graphics settings :P I reckon it's quite likely to turn up on XBLA, it seems to have been pretty successful so far. Just a matter of getting it through all the official channels, which I understand can be a bit of a complicated process on Live Arcade.
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most recently on 20/02/08 @ 17:32
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ElectricDemon
20/02/08 @ 17:37
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Well, I haven't looked at the specs, I'm just assuming, given all the nice lights, heh
I have onboard graphics too. Put it this way, I get framerate prblems with simples stuff like Zoo Tycoon and Age Of Mythology =P |
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Seems to me like you don't actually know what it's meant to be doing.
Precisely! I have the impression that most people criticizing Audiosurf's track analysis do so under false assumptions that, naturally, lead to false conclusions. This isn't a game like a Guitar Hero and it doesn't pretend to emulate this type of gameplay. It's a music game that works in a different way and that's what we call innovation in gameplay mechanics although it seems that unfamiliar things are just too difficult to comprehend for some people. =) It's like saying that Portal sucks because it just has a portal gun and next to no enemies at all and you want it to have machine-guns and rocket launchers and huge alien monsters like certain other FPS-es. ;-) |
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It must be. I don't even have a graphics card (onboard GFX instead) and I can still kick it up past the basic graphics settings :P
It might be the famous performance drop. This is most likely a bug in the game. I had fps drops to like 30 fps on every graphical setting although I have a GF8800 GTX and a Core2Duo running @ 3.2 GHz... Of course some people automatically said that it's Vista's fault (people are always eager to jump to early conclusions and criticize a system they don't know much about ;-) but I managed to solve the problem by installing some hotfixes and most important of all the newest non-WHQL beta drivers (although I already had the newest beta drivers from the official site =). |
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I guess my ciritism is with the overall design, not how its implemented.
Tzetrik - you still don't understand. No, I understand what's going on. Trust me, I have a ..lot.. of experience with music games :P I just - don't understand why its so interesting! Simplified - Its randomly shooting blocks at you based on detected frequencies in a waveform. Really - gameplay wise or technically, what is so great about this? To me at least (and its just my opinion, Im entitled to it) it doesnt feel like you are riding the music - which is the selling point of the game. When so much is, as you've already admitted, random - you're not riding music at all. What is musical in a game when you take something that has order, and make something random out of it? To feel like you are riding / surfing the music (and not just a bunch of frequencies that could be anything - noise, speech, whatever), I just reckon there are better ways of representing MUSIC- tempo is the big thing that throws me off. This isn't a game like a Guitar Hero and it doesn't pretend to emulate this type of gameplay. Then why have the visual similarities? If its the analytical brain you say it is, why not do anything other than the guitar hero / amplitude note road? I've been longing for a game that can do what this says it can, a procedurally generated game based on audio input would be ace, but this is bland. It just feels like the 3 in a row element was tacked on the end to solve the fact that it doesnt work like guitar hero. /seriously considers not pressing the speak your brain button. Ah heck.. |
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Ehm - not everything is random. You contradict yourself "it shoots blocks randomly based on detected waveforms" - so it's not random, it's based on the waveform. Like I said the blocks are perfectly synced with the frequency spikes and these aren't some intangible things but loud sounds in the song - no matter if it's the guitar or some guy screaming around. =)
Another thing that is synced is the speed at which you're moving and the bumps on the road which act kinda like the equalizer visualization in music players. Well - I'm sorry to hear that you don't like the concept. I guess there are some people who love to listen to music with various visualizations (and Audiosurf is basically that - an interactive visualization) - I know I do - and there are others who'd rather read the notes. =) I think the visual similarities to Guitar Hero & co. are a result of the game's evolution - especially the visual style, rather than a remnant of its failure to emulate "true" music games. I've seen screenshots of early prototypes and at first the game was about a dude on a surfboard trying to avoid cars (which are now blocks) on a road. =) Also, the road doesn't represent any kind of amplitude, like I said before - it's just a road with three lanes so you have some space to move around and the blocks are highly stylized cars (hence the game talks about "traffic density" when analyzing a track). =) To feel like you are riding / surfing the music (and not just a bunch of frequencies that could be anything - noise, speech, whatever) I for my part am very glad that I'm able to "surf" anything - even sounds that are not music. I posted the test-tone and although it's horrible to listen to, it's a very challenging "track". You know - the game is called "Audiosurf", not "Musicsurf" or "Guitarsurf" or "Beatsurf" etc. and that might be a hint at the game's concept. =) The thing is that you seem to be very conservative when it comes to music transcription. Many musical genres, especially electronic ones, are really hard to describe in anything other than waveforms and frequencies. It's no coincidence that the free songs that come with Audiosurf are electronic. I myself play around with composing music e.g. in Fruity Loops (now called FL Studio) and all the filters, special effects etc. are done with altering waveforms so I may have a special fondness for this type of music representation. =) Alas - there's no point in convincing you that Audiosurf is good because that clearly is a subjective opinion - just like mine. I only wanted to straighten out the misconceptions and we both can now simply agree to disagree about liking the premise or the overall design, as you called it, of the game. P.S. I like other music games as well - because I'm a PC gamer I haven't played Guitar Hero much, though. I got used to Frets on Fire, its clone, long before the Windows version of GHIII came out and even bought myself an XBox USB guitar controller to be able to use it on my PC. :-D I don't think that being a fan of OTHER music-based games excludes finding Audiosurf attractive - it uses a different approach to music-based gameplay and that, for me, is a breeze of fresh air in a genre that gets more and more cramped with samey titles.
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most recently on 20/02/08 @ 20:33
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monkie_king
20/02/08 @ 20:32
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This looks nice. How many megahertzes does it need? And do you have to have a DirectX?
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