Recent reviews by memes

OOTP as a series has been one of the most detailed and thought out sports management simulators on the market for years, nothing even comes close.

"Spreadsheet Simulator" as my friends call it, seems like the one thing I can just sink time into and love every hour.

Tron meets Burnout meets Crash Bandicoot Racing. Amazing fun, really immersive, and worth every penny you have!

iOS & Android port, but don't let this take away from the game.
For a few bucks this is actually a lot of fun as a time filler/waster. If you've got fast reactions it's sort of a doddle, and I've got every achievement within 20 minutes of opening the game, without knowing what they were.

If you want a relaxed, yet intense game with an alright soundtrack, here's your game.

To those who are not aware, music based games have moved on from Guitar Hero/Rockband clones, and have taken aspects from loads of different games, adding rhythm based mechanics over these. For PC gamers, this pot is starting to fill nicely, with games such as Audiosurf and Beat Hazard, who take ideas from old games like Asteroids and Wipeout. Kickbeat combines two genres that haven’t really had the same success as the earlier examples; the Music Fighting genre.

In its simplest terms, Kickbeat requires you to hit 4 buttons in rhythm to generic ninja soldiers coming towards you, all of which is in time to a piece of music. The variety in enemies is pretty poor, but as a game with 4 buttons, it would be difficult to see how they could improve this without changing mechanics.

The story mode of music games is often non-existent; look at the BIT.TRIP games, and tell me that any discernible story is given. Kickbeat tries to remedy this with a set of licensed tracks that come with the game, by artists like Pendulum and Marilyn Manson. Even with their best efforts, the story is just a thin film over the “complete these five tracks to unlock some more” system.

From the perspective of Kickbeat being a fighting game… you’re gonna be disappointed. The game’s mechanics are the same as you will find in DDR, or any other dance mat game. The true fun you’ll find in Kickbeat comes from the fact that you can “fight” to your own tracks.

Yup. In the same vain as many of these music based games, due to not everyone having the same taste in tracks, you can import your own music into the game, and play the same way you can with the included tracks; although it takes a bit of setting up. Unfortunately, there seems to be effectively no detection algorithm used in Kickbeat to find BPM, or track intensity, instead relying on the “tap a button to the beat of the track” before you can play. Due to the game requiring lots of accuracy, it is incredibly annoying when the game is offsetting every beat by a fraction of a second compared to the music you’re hearing. The scale used to change when each beat happens is arbitrary, meaning you’re really using trial and error to see if the two tracks line up.

Kickbeat Promo 3So far it seems that all I’ve said has been pessimistic, but this game’s real quality comes from how, when you’ve spent your time making sure the game matches up sound and visuals, and you’ve learned all the small annoying traits each mechanic has, and you find yourself in a sort of “zone” the game feels great, the music matches the dynamics of the enemies perfectly, and you can just play and play for hours on end…
Until you try playing it on anything other than the lowest difficulty.

The way the game shows you which button you should press is confusing as hell for the first few levels. The enemies circle around you for a few beats before attacking you, when you need to counter them. This means that you need to remember which order they entered your “inner circle” and how long ago that was, to counter them perfectly. When you try playing on harder difficulties, this becomes nigh on impossible, especially as you have to sometimes hit three buttons simultaneously, or take 3 hits on your health.

I’m not the best at fighting games, or precision rhythm games, but I’d say from the perspective of the average gamer, Kickbeat is a hassle to set up, has no useful story mode, and no multiplayer function.
Yet despite all this, I love it. Kickbeat has made me reach into my music library, and find some hidden gems that match the aesthetic perfectly. The game is effectively never ending, as any music you can play on your PC, you can play on your screen.

Rating: 7/10 - A huge amount of fun, if you’re happy to have an almost finished rhythm game, and have a LARGE library to play through.