Beat Hazard is a music visualisation top-down arcade shoot ’em up (SHMUP), and it was well received on Xbox Live in 2009. What made the game stand out from the crowd of visualisation games was the simple feature of allowing a player to use music from their own library.
Beat Hazard was recently released for PC, and is available through the usual digital distributors such as Direct2Drive. Steam is currently the cheaper option as the game is discounted from the standard US$9.99 (±75) price tag to US$7.49 (±R55) until Thursday.
The game uses a dual analog control system, with the left analog stick controlling movement, and the right directing offensive projectiles. As a result, you will probably want a dual analog controller of some sort to play this game, although a mouse and keyboard will suffice.
Graphically, the game delivers fully. The player’s spacecraft may appear somewhat bland at first, but that’s soon taken care of when the seizure inducing lightshow of combat begins. Having selected your music track, the game kicks off with slightly muted sound, but things soon change as the tempo increases and power-ups are collected. Collecting and combining power-ups eventually grants the awe-inspiring Beat Hazard and Super Bomb weapons.
Ships begin to appear and attack to the groove of the music, and all the while various visualisation effects (disguised as explosions and projectiles) strobe colourfully, keeping you on your toes. There is enough variety in enemies and their tactics, and some impressive bosses to conquer, keeping the gameplay challenging.
A survival mode made it into the PC version, which challenges the player to last through an entire album playthrough. The game comes with a “kicking rock album” to get you started. For the obsessive compulsive types, the Steam version has 25 achievements to strive for and leader boards on which to reign supreme.
Rather disappointingly, it would appear that the 2 player local co-op mode didn’t make it into the PC version, but having faith in the relentless drive of indie developers to please their fans, it’s a feature that will hopefully get patched in at a later stage, or possibly even expanded into online co-op.
There aren’t many music visualisation games that give you the choice of your own tunes, and get it right – maintaining a balanced gameplay experience despite the randomness of the music based mechanic of the game. Beat Hazard pulls it off superbly though, and now PC gamers can enjoy it for a very reasonable price.
