Audiosurf

Ride your Music

If Patapon is too heavy on the drums, and Guitar Hero too focused on guitars, and Frequency too far in the past to remember much about, where are you going to turn to get your rhythm game kicks? What title will offer you the best selection of music tracks to zone out to? What game serves you your own music tastes to play with, and actually makes it all sound good by not cutting your favourite tracks up and forcing you to get good to hear them again?

Apparently, it's Audiosurf, a rhythm puzzler that has you drift and zip along whatever music you want in an attempt to hit the high scores. Let's find some tunes to surf.

Fun Times

Audiosurf doesn't look like your usual rhythm game, at least not to start with. The window that opens up looks more like a website, and an old one at that, the game itself loading in the background before you're able to start it up and pick from a number of characters and difficulty modes.

Characters? Difficulty? What for? What kind of game is this? Why yes, I would like to watch a tutorial video and play a tutorial level, thank you.

You're in control of a ship, sliding left and right along a ribbon of notes and beats represented by coloured blocks. Your job is to collect these blocks into groups of three or more, and will score points according to how many connected blocks there are in a group, as well as what colour blocks there are, using a rainbow scale where red is great and blue is the bare minimum.

The video showed me the basics and didn't really strike me as the next best thing for rhythm gaming, but once it was done I had the chance to play it for myself using my own music.

There was a time when I would have had music on my computer. Then Google Music came along, and I moved everything to it, where I promptly neglected to listen to any of it for large portions of its existence. The most recent thing I did with it was moving it all over to YouTube Music before Google shuts it down Google Music, and I won't be doing much listening to it there, either, because it's worse.

Anyway, the point is that I needed to search this PC for some audio files. As I'm playing Audiosurf through Steam, it's highlighted The Orange Box, so I might as well pick something from that.

Cute. Portal-inspired graphics for a Portal song. One that I can't really hear. Not sure why. Maybe I'm focusing on these blocks too much.

If you fly into a block you collect it in that lane, but groups can be formed across lanes if the blocks have been put in the right places along the track - and that's the key selling point behind Audiosurf. All of the ribbons of music you'll fly along are generated based on the music you give it, kind of like Vib Ribbon, only you've got a decent chance of being able to play it.

After a spot of "Still Alive", I was none the wiser on how to actually play Audiosurf. I knew the controls - move the mouse - but the strategy behind what blocks to go for and when for the high score was simply lost on me. I was collecting everything and hoping for the best, a tactic that certainly won't see you reaching the top of the leaderboards.

I played the one song available on the Audiosurf radio next, where I soon learned that collecting grey blocks was utterly stupid, don't do that, and that I had absolutely no idea how to get anything even vaguely close to a high score in this game.

These leaderboards may perhaps be skewed by cheating, I don't know for sure, but I basically 1.7billion points short of the top spot, in a game that is as "simple" as collecting blocks into groups.

If I'm to get on the leaderboards, I'll first need an account (which I can't be bothered to get), and will then need to find a song that so few other players have played that I'll be in with a chance. Rooting around my hard drive, I inexplicably find the OST to Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. No idea where I even got it from, but let's pick something from it and chill out.

Huzzah! Top of the leaderboards for the casual score, if I could be bothered to register an account to actually post it. I'm too casual for that. Strangely, though, it seems a couple of other players have beaten me to this song. It's not obscure enough. We'll have to dig deeper and come up with something else.

Frustrations

Going into the files for Oblivion, of all things, I also decide to switch up my choice of character. Each one has a special ability to mix the gameplay up, which serves to reinforce one thing: I have zero idea of how to actually play Audiosurf.

This ship could collect blocks and store them for later, allowing you to move a block from one lane to another, for example, to score a bunch of points now rather than waiting for them to hopefully score in future.

In my head, I understand this. Writing it down now I can see how it would make for gameplay. The game is about collecting blocks, you've now got two ways of collecting blocks, you're better at collecting blocks now, brilliant.

In my hands, even with controls that are little more than move mouse, click button, I am struggling to put it all together into something resembling points. I am flying down these songs collecting blocks because they're there, with no thought as to how I'm going to group them together. The puzzle aspect of the game - the game itself, effectively - doesn't happen when I'm playing it, or rather it happens by chance as I collect just the right block at the right moment.

The last casual mode character introduces an extra ship, and each one can only fly on its half of the track, one controlled with the keyboard, the other with the mouse. Ideal for two players working together, or one player who wants to show off, in my hands it was the same Audiosurf as before, but with another ship.

That is to say, it wasn't making sense to me. 

But if you want the high scores, install Oblivion and use those tracks.

Final Word

While Audiosurf played quite well and allows you to enjoy your own music without the need to unlock anything or struggle, I simply couldn't get the hang of the game itself at all. I had this conflict of "collect all the stuff" and "collect the right stuff, in the right place, at the right time", and couldn't really do either.

Would it come with practise or the right choice in music? Of course it would. Do I want it to? No, not really. It may have impressive generated visuals and offer endless possibility, but at the end of the day I'm not having fun with what I don't understand, and if I want a game to go along with my musical tastes, it's probably not going to be a rhythm game.

I said that Patapon was the kind of game that game me what I assume rhythm games like Audiosurf give others, and when you get that right, yes, it does feel cool. But here, while I can actually hear some music (unlike Guitar Hero), it almost gets in the way of the game, as though the rhythm isn't important.

I'm too musically inept to unravel what I'm trying to say here. If you watch Audiosurf, it will generally look rather nice. When you hear about how it generates gameplay based on what music you give it, it sounds like a neat little game. When you get down to play it... well, either you're like me and you'll wonder what the point is or what's going on, or you'll find yourself heading into the zone and chilling out to your favourites.

I guess if you like music and/or rhythm games you should check it out for the tech behind it. The gameplay on top of it isn't doing anything for me, though.

Fun Facts

A version of this game exists for the Microsoft Zune HD. Yeah. Take that, Apple...

Audiosurf, developed by Invisible Handlebar, first released in 2008.

Version played: PC, 2008.