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Audiosurf (PC)

• Developer:
• Publisher: Audiosurf
• Genre: Music & Dance
• Official Website: http://www.audio-surf.com
• Score: 4 of 5: Niche

Combine a rhythm game like Guitar Hero with the Puzzle League-inspired idea of matching three same colored blocks to clear a line, and you'll get Audiosurf. Add to the mix the ability to listen to your own music, which the game then translates into an audio track for you to "ride" along on as you match colors, and you get a game with infinite variety and replayability.

The game is as hard or as easy as you want it to be. You race in a futuristic ship on a track which can vary from almost a straight line to literally turning the track upside down. For those who want a nice, slow ride, the game offers "Mono" mode, a gametype in which it's your job to collect all the colored blocks as they appear on the track while avoiding the gray blocks. The colored blocks change in color according to the intensity of the music and it, along with the backgrounds, provide a vibrant atmosphere in which you may lose yourself. The main gametype is "Pointman": you collect colored blocks and match three of the same color to score points. "Hot" colors such as red and yellow yield more points that "cold" colors like blue and purple, and the song's intensity reflects which colors appear on the track.

Other modes include "Vegas", a gametype which lets you move into the shoulder of a track to shuffle your blocks already collected in an attempt to make matches. Gamers have to balance the ability between collecting blocks and mixing the ones they have. The gametype "Eraser" lets you get rid of all blocks collected of a certain color; "Pusher" lets you place a block one space to the left or right of where it is on the track. The game's only multiplayer is "Double Vision" mode, where two players share the track, one player controlling each ship, working on their respective sides of the track to create combos.

Since the game was developed by an independent company, it stands to reason that there may be technical problems. The first problem is the most apparent: the game doesn't always recognize the game title and song name, even if it appears when the file is played on a program like Windows Media Player or iTunes. This stems from an issue regarding how one would rip a CD's music onto a computer, and it can be resolved by letting iTunes rename your songs or by renaming them yourself. The second problem is cheating: anyone can rename any music file as something it's not and post their high score to the leaderboard, giving the appearance of achieving a high score on a song that wouldn't normally be possible. If you doubt a particular high score, there is an option to look at the physical track of the song on the leaderboard to see if it's different from song you played and report it if it looks like someone has cheated.

Still, these problems can be overlooked for the $10 price tag the game offers, and the inclusion of the Orange Box soundtrack as a starting set of songs make this a worthwhile purchase. It also doesn't take up much hard drive space, though that will likely change if you don't have a lot of songs on your hard drive. Audiosurf is a simple and fun game which offers a fresh perspective on the music gaming genre and lets gamers with different tastes in music experience the same game with surprisingly different results.

Mar 10, 2008 | 1 comments
Jeff Craven