Hey once again, Time Wasters! This week I jumped on the chance to play a rhythm based game that’s been sitting there waiting for me to install it for a while now, and am I ever glad I did.
One of your typical play styles for PC music games, Symphony didn’t differ that much from some others I’ve played. The object of the game is to guide your ship between enemies, destroying everything that comes to kill you during the course of the song you have playing in the background. Succeed, and your songs will unlock weapons and you can use the points you earn to buy them. Fail’actually, you can’t fail, so never mind.
No, the inability to fail is not a bad thing, not in this game, because there’s plenty of dying to be had if you suck. And trust me, on the harder difficulties you’ll be dying quite a bit if you can’t keep track of everything. Besides, if you’re listening to one of your favorite songs, would you want to be cut off in the middle of it just because you couldn’t see one of the many shiny objects coming at your face? I didn’t think so.
Let me back up for a second since I keep mentioning the music. Yes, Symphony has its own music, but it also has one of those must-include features of music games for nowadays : letting you put your own music in to play to. In fact, one of this game’s shining moments for me was when fighting against ‘The Demon’ while playing Stan Bush’s The Touch from the 1980s Transformers Movie. It was like I had defeated Unicron himself, so points to this game for that!
About this Demon character, this is what gave this game a little more edge than other games of its type. Unlike previous titles, this game has a plot. It’s a small plot, but a plot nonetheless. According to this game, some unknown entity is trying to get into our world by using music as its gateway. During the process, it captures composers and turns them into lesser demons that you have to destroy in order to gain back pieces of the five pages of Symphony. You can imagine my amusement when The Beatles were out to kill me.
All that stuff I’ve mentioned above is where this game succeeds, and really, it succeeds in just about everything. The only complaints I have are small aesthetic issues, one of which is notorious in all games like this one: the fact that there’s so much color and lights, that sometimes it’s hard to see attacks coming at you. I’m not going to fault it too much for that since, like I said, all games like this have it. The only other things were slight lag issues and not being able to clearly tell how low the life of my ship was. Other than that, I’ve got nothing.
Symphony displays a stunning performance that earns it 4 GiN Gems out of 5!