PC Reviews

Symphony Review

Published

August 11, 2012

So Symphony is a music based game, but at the same time it’s not. I know that since it’s a music game probably the first thing that will click in people’s head is Audiosurf so just erase that though because this is nothing like that. The game kicks things off with a demon who has captured the symphony of souls and you need to fight his demon underlings who are holding pieces of it in your music. There are 5 pages of the symphony you’ll need to collect and there’s no way to tell how close you are to finding a demon who has a page; you’ll basically have to keep playing different songs until one shows up but it’s never more than a few. It’s not really something to care about and the demon fights are incredibly boring. It’s nice that they would try to incorporate a story but it ends up feeling half-assed and forgettable.

Symphony
Developer: Empty Clip Studios
Price: $9.99
Platform: PC (reviewed)
A copy of Symphony was supplied to us by GoG

Like I said before the game is nothing like Audiosurf and I only mention this because each person I’ve talked to about the game have said “Oh sweet I love stuff like Audiosurf”. Symphony is a bit closer to Beat Hazard just from a gameplay point and also because, like Beat Hazard, you have no clue what the hell is going on once the music gets crazy. Symphony is definitely a music game but rhythm doesn’t really feel like it’s a part of the actual gameplay since your shooting, the level, and the enemies didn’t really seem like they were being affected by the beats. I did notice that some enemies would *sort of* twist and turn to the beat, certain weapons, and your movement speed seemed to be affected by the intensity of a song but that’s it. As the intensity of songs increases you’ll see the level change in color from a calm blue, to purple, and finally a hot red with the equalizer bouncing along with the music. You’ll find a small selection of songs available to you right at the start but the game is made for importing your own tracks which might take a while depending on how large your music folder is. After the game analyzes the folder once it won’t have to do it ever again except for when you load up a song which takes barely 10 seconds for it to analyze.

As you play the game you’ll notice the enemies come down at you in a sort of Space Invaders style. Your ship is confined to a tight grid area and you’ll see the baddies trickle down from either the sides or from the top of the grid behind the equalizer. These enemies will drop golden musical notes upon death that’s called influence, this is your currency for purchasing new weapons or upgrades. You’ll also find pick-ups like speed boost or bombs. There’s another form of currency called Kudos that is acquired by simply getting influence; the most influence you get in a level the more kudos you’re rewarded at the end of a game. Whenever you finish a song you’ll “unlock” that songs weapon or pick-up that will then be available for purchase. There are a good amount of items from what I’ve seen but it does suck to keep finding the same damn weapon multiple times. On one hand this works well since if you unlock the shotgun for example you can only equip it on one of the four parts of your ship; if you want to put it on another part you’re going to have to find another shotgun weapon. Upgrades for the same weapon aren’t shared through multiple copies and I really would’ve liked to have a filter for songs that I have weapons unlocked in. I will say that lots of the weapons I unlocked felt useless compared to my default blasters and there’s no way to tell what it is that you’re really getting until you purchase it. Sure, seeing shotgun is descriptive enough but the subwoofer weapon behaved totally different from what I was expecting.

So there a ship editor but it’s very basic. All you’ll do here is decide what weapons you want equipped in your four slots and what direction you want them to fire in. One thing I absolutely love about the ship editor is how you can set weapons on either mouse button or on autofire. An interesting mechanic in the ship builder is that the more powerful weapons you equip on your ship the smaller your multiplier will get. It’s another neat part of the game that makes you think about going for the weaker guns with a higher multiplier, or beef up your ship in exchange for a piss poor multiplier.

One of my main issues with the game is the fact that regular enemies (I’ll refer to them as goons from now on) can fire at you. There is always so much going on, more so if you play fast music, that you’ll almost never notice when they fire a shot at you especially when the intensity of the song increases which turns the stage red (their bullets are red). I get that you have infinite lives and can repair yourself by picking up influence, but it’s still incredibly infuriating when one of those goons manages to sucker shoot you and takes you out in a single hit that leaves you having to wait 5 seconds to come back. Symphony isn’t like other shooters in its genre where you have to watch the enemies to dodge their shots, it’s insane to keep track of anything in this game with the visual overload of colors and effects. I’m fine with the bigger enemies coming in and attacking you, that makes sense in both a logical and design view. The goons should be there to build up influence, give you a reason to move around since some goons will ram you, and to keep everything a little less overwhelming. This way I’m free to concentrate so that when I see the bigger guys showing up I think “OK these are the dangerous ones so I should watch out for them while making sure not to get rammed by the goons”. It’s just a really annoying thing that leads to way too many deaths that it needs to.

Visually the game is amazing with an onslaught of colors and explosions hitting you. Basically imagine what Geometry Wars would look like if it were mixed with Beat Hazard, or you could just look at these screenshots. The animations are also super smooth with the only issue being that there seems to be some sort of weird framerate issue with the ship. I found my ship skipping across (teleporting would probably describe it better) the screen when the screen got hectic. I’m running a pretty good rig so I was pretty confused why that’d be happening to me so I dropped everything to low and even knocked the resolution down quite a bit. To my dismay the problem persisted so I’m left to assume it’s an issue with the game and not my computer, especially after I lent a friend my GoG account to test out the game himself and he had the same issue (he’s running a monster computer). The music the game comes with is decent enough, I’m not a big fan of any of the tracks but they do the job of showing off the game. It’s basically a small collection of indie bands that would cost the developers next to nothing to license for their game. The real magic comes from importing your own music.

The Final Word
Some odd skipping issues and annoying enemies stop Symphony from being my Audiosurf replacement, but if you can get around those things then you’re in for a treat with this game.