With the runaway success of the Guitar Hero games and Rock Band this past holiday season, we're now finally seeing music/rhythm games really go mainstream. You're not just pressing buttons on a game controller, and you're not doing any of that silly-looking foot stomping that Dance Dance Revolution asks you to do. But one problem with all of these games is that you simply cannot choose your own music. Sure, there's a pretty big selection of rock tracks in the recent guitar games and electronic music was getting a lot of representation in Rock Band creator Harmonix' past games Frequency and Amplitude, but there's still no way to take a track and put it into these games short of hacks that often don't work on non-modded game consoles.
And along comes Audiosurf, a new PC rhythm game that makes you do a little less button pressing but is also able to take your music in many file formats and create a playfield out of it. In it, you'll control a little spaceship on a futuristic "highway" with either your keyboard or a mouse. The beats and instruments in the music are converted into what the game calls Cars, but really they're blocks on a three-lane road that your spaceship must either hit or avoid (depending on the gameplay mode you're in) for points.
The basis of all this is that you've got a store of blocks you're picking up - each of the three lanes has up to seven blocks that can be stored. Whenever you get three blocks of the same color touching each other either up-down or left-right, those blocks disappear and you'll gain points. Bigger chunks of same-color blocks get you larger points, and the blocks with warm colors are worth more - red's worth more points than yellow, which itself is worth more than green, and then to blue. The problem comes when the music speeds up and things start coming at you faster, and you start picking up blocks haphazardly that don't connect to each other. Depending on the difficulty you're playing on, overflowing your store of blocks on a single row without a combo can cause you to either lose points or be "dead" and completely unable to score for a few precious seconds. There's no way to truly lose in Audiosurf, as your score is the only measure of your success.
The number of gameplay options available in the current beta test for Audiosurf is already impressive, as there are quite a few ways to play - in Mono mode there are only gray blocks and a single color of blocks, and you've got to avoid the gray ones while picking up the colored ones. In Pusher mode, you can shove a block to your left or right when you pick it up, and in other modes you can actually move a block that you pick up and drop it in the lane you want. Some modes let you shuffle your stored blocks around by staying in a "shoulder" that is on either side of the highway (which is also nice since you can escape tough sections of blocks you don't want), and others let you jump over blocks. Other additions are the powerups you can snag that can sort your stored blocks for maximum points, change all your stored blocks to one color, toss a few new blocks into your store, and a lot more. So far, there are quite a few ways to play the game, including Freeride mode where the game isn't actually played - you can move the ship around, but it's designed to simply be watched and enjoyed while you listen to the music.
There's even a cooperative mode where one player can use the mouse and another can use the keyboard, and the three-lane highway becomes four. Then each player gets two lanes and must work together for maximum score. If you're feeling really saucy, you can play both at the same time, which adds yet another level of challenge. But one of the best parts of Audiosurf is the online scoring system. The game can rank your score on a song (it uses ID tags of your songs to figure out which is which, and it's pretty good at figuring out mangled filenames and such) and start giving people scores based on that song. This means that every track becomes a unique level to play on. And in case your music is so obscure that you don't have tracks in common with other people, Audiosurf does allow you to download a small selection of tracks directly to play. It remains to be seen what kind of music gets on here, as mainstream stuff would probably incite the ire of the RIAA, but it's still a lot of fun all playing the same track and trying to beat each other's scores.
Audiosurf has an interesting way of processing music, too. If you're starting a track the game's never seen before then it will spend a few seconds to create the level for you, and you can actually see where the easy and tough parts will be before you start. The level will thump to the beat of the music and the blocks will hit to the beat fairly well, and the actual highway itself will twist, wind, and even corkscrew as you go. Playing the game would be pretty boring if the block pattern was too predictable, so you'll find that block placement does get mixed around here and there. Still, it's an incredible experience to hear that build-up of a good song that breaks into loud, fast paced action both in your ears and on the screen. Put simply, the more you love your music, the more you'll love this game. Even choosing different genres of music gets you entirely different experiences, as classical tracks will be very frantic during their fast parts then soothing when they slow down. Dance music's more constant beat usually gives a more consistent experience with a few really tough parts , while acoustic guitar often turns into a leisurely stroll. Rock can sometimes be all over the place depending on how Audiosurf interprets the instruments.
The graphics in Audiosurf remind me a lot of a more dynamic version of Harmonix' Amplitude, but you can turn up the game's resolution and antialiasing settings (if your PC can handle it) for a much sharper presentation. There are some basic detail settings you can turn on and off, as well as a couple of color filters and options to change block colors - good for those with any kind of colorblindness. The graphics are generally simplistic and clean, but when your music hits its most intense moments, there will be dozens of blocks coming at you at once and you'll forget about the graphics entirely. The game's handling of music is pretty good; it can take .mp3 and .ogg music files, unprotected Windows Media or iTunes music, and audio CDs directly. The game is not terribly user-friendly when browsing your music, but it does include a quick link to the My Music folder in Windows where most users are likely storing most of their music.
Audiosurf is still in a limited stage of beta testing, but the game is already very playable and the online scoring system is working really well with only a couple of minor hiccups. If there's one thing I would like to see in the final game, it'd be a way to configure how Audiosurf actually parses a song into its track of beats, but that would make the online scoring much more complex, as the game would have to track them all separately for a given song. Plus, the different gameplay modes already differentiate how a single track can be played well enough. Even as the game stands now, it's a lot of fun, and unless some kind of catastrophe happens in this game's final weeks of development, this looks it will be one of the best independent games made in a long time. Audiosurf currently has no pricing as of yet but it will almost certainly cost actual money (although I imagine something in the range of $20-$30 would be a good bet), and it's set for a release some time in February.
