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Hooray for indie games! Seriously, independently developed games are creating a new kind of experience for gamers today. Also, give a big thanks to online services like Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and WiiWare for exposing these otherwise obscure gems to a mass audience. Now with that I'm going to tell you about a neat little game that was released during the music/rhythm genre craze.
Audiosurf, for those who don't know, is an addicting and colorful music/rhythm game that challenges the player to collect colored blocks on a fixed path that is created specifically for the music that you have stored on your computer's hard drive. The player selects a song from their computer, and the game will create a track that fits the type of song that is selected. If the song that is chosen is fast and intense, then the track will be designed to fall down a steep slope. The faster the song, the steeper the slope. If the song is slow and relaxing, the course will be designed to go up a slope. While flying through these courses, the player must collect different colored blocks, and match them up in different clusters to get points. Different colors offer different amounts of points. Colors that are on the cool side of the color spectrum (blue, purple) offer less points while colors on the warm side of the color spectrum (orange, red) offer the most points. Also, the type of song chosen will determine how often certain colors appear. Cooler colors appear more often in relaxing songs than warmer colors, and warmer colors appear more often than cooler colors in the faster songs. This whole experience could be defined as Guitar Hero or Rock Band meets Dr. Mario or Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine.
Unfortunately, there is not a lot of variety in terms of different modes to play. There is the standard mode that is described above, a co-op mode, (which can be played solo if you are feeling ambidextrous) or a mode called Mono. The Mono mode eliminates collecting specific colors, and requires the player to collect colored blocks and avoid gray blocks. If every gray block is avoided a special "stealth" bonus is awarded. Each mode has an easy, medium, and hard difficulty setting which adds more colors and changes the track to include corkscrews and other crazy formations. And last there is a mode called "Ironmode" that speeds up the track and takes out the shoulder in the tracks where players would normally use to avoid all of the blocks and collect power-ups.
Each character that is chosen has their own little ability that allows them to gain a little help when playing a course. One character has the ability to randomly rearrange all of the blocks collected in hopes of creating clusters. Another character can erase mistakes that player has made by left clicking and running into a block that he wants erased on his board.
Audiosurf is a truly unique game that shows the creative power of independent developers. It has limitless replay value thanks to allowing the use of your own music library, and by including a free-to-use service that frequently adds songs. With the only problem being a lack in variety among modes, Audiosurf is an extremely addicting and easily accessible music/rhythm game.
Final Verdict: 8.75/10
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