Time to defend Symphonia in this high-paced rhythmic dungeon crawler combines looter-shooter action with rhythm-based gameplay. Sounds interesting? Well, it is; hear me out! So move over to Sound of Music; time to get your gear on!
I listen to a lot of music, so a game like this, in the style of Crypt of the Necrodancer, but with Borderlandsesque looter-shooter vibes? Sounds right up my alley. This game should have me personally hooked for hours on end on paper. I’ve played many rhythm games all my childhood; I played a few instruments myself and listened to from hip-hop to rock, classical music, and everything in between. So fire up the anime cutscene, and let’s get into the game!
Beats Per Minute
For some basic understanding about music: Music is composed on a BPM (Beats per minute); it’s the tempo and a fundamental aspect of music if you want it to be coherent. Tempo is the foundation on which we can inherently calculate where notes are. Still luckily, we all have an internal clock that allows us to feel the rhythm so that we don’t have to count continuously while playing or listening. This is important to this game because the entire gameplay is related to it.
You’re playing a map in most rhythm games like Guitar Hero or OSU. The map represents dots on the screen, which you have to click/press/play in time with the music. These games are a lot of fun because you’re following an instrument rather than simply following the bpm. When the guitar plays a note, there’s a visual representation of that note on the screen, and it comes to you so that you can react to it and press the correct button to be accurate in your timing. This is where Soundfall becomes a chore. All songs play the same way, just at different speeds.
Soundfall Gameplay
Okay, but what about the rest of the gameplay. This wouldn’t be fair for me to stop there, so I have to talk about the enemies you have to fight. There are roughly ten enemy types off the top of my head. That’s it. That’s the game. You get some weird pokemon-like beings, a large gator, and some pawns/sharpshooters. You don’t get progressively more enemies past the third or fourth zone. This is even worse when you consider that the last level in a zone isn’t a boss. You fight the same stuff you’ve been fighting for hours,… a lot more of them. You get to fight a single boss after finishing the 5th zone, and I imagine a second when you finish the 10th zone. That’s about it.
So, all up to speed? When you play Soundfall, you hop through a series of zones, with each section focussing on a particular style of music. Sounds cool, right? Yeh, however, a significant issue that arises where zones section that variety. So, you have the volcano zone where it’s JUST metal and power metal. A lush green zone that focuses on Indie Pop songs, etc. There is nothing else, and if you’re like me, I try to change my playlists between Metal, Indie, Rock, Pop, Hip-Hop, etc., so that I don’t get bored by just ‘one’ genre. By playing through the game like it’s intended, you spend a while playing songs you do not have any interest in – but luckily, a very nifty producer who also played this game came up with a solution!
But before we jump to the conclusion, let’s talk a bit more about the musical choices. Next to the staleness of genres, some of the songs have quiet periods where the beat is pretty much indistinguishable, or they’ll have vocals that drown out the bass to the point where you don’t have a good sense of when to shoot. And coupled with this is the even weirder decision to make many weapons fire multiple rounds or make sound effects that don’t match the beat. It’s funny – it feels like Rhythm Game 101 that your attacks should make a single identifiable sound that acts as a way of reinforcing the moment. But here, it’s the opposite, with gun sounds clashing directly with the music to make it extremely easy to get thrown off. I honestly found myself skipping all but the sniper weapon because it was the only one that didn’t do this. An odd choice that actively makes the game much worse for no noticeable benefit.
Solutions!
You can mute the music! Yes, you read that right, and I’m not even going to mince my words: If you genuinely want to go through a song because of an issue you have with it, muting it gives you a clear advantage. This goes for songs you might even enjoy! Soundfall is, at its core, such a basic game that the music matters way less than its name implies. And he was correct – I usually play review games with headphones (or one earbud), and when I took it away to listen to the program my wife was watching, I gained better scores—Hu, what about that.
Remember when I mentioned looter-shooter? Well, Borderlands had some weird weapons, some good, some worse. Well, Soundfall has even worse weapons. To elaborate, the drop rate for quality is absurdly low. You’ll only get uncommon and sometimes rare, but epic and legendary are rare. This would be fine if the legendary you get at the item level, 35, weren’t outclassed by an uncommon weapon of item level 43. There are a few different “types” of guns, but they all play relatively the same way. There are some prefixes and suffixes that change some attributes. Like lightning makes it, your attacks create a chain of lightning which hurts other mobs, you have a fire that burns for four beats, blue slows enemies down, purple applies a sticky bomb, green heals you, you get the gist of it.
My favorite aspect to complain about is the affixes “Rhythmic” and “Arrhythmic” because I’m a very arrhythmic person myself (or so I’m told). A blaster with the rhythmic attribute makes your bullets hurt 25% more if they’re on beat, while arrhythmic makes it, so you’re penalized 25% less for shooting offbeat. Which… okay. In my honest opinion, since you’re shoving the max possible difficulty in my face constantly, despite me wanting to play on moderate because your loot system is broken, it feels to me like you wanted to make a challenging game where the goal is to play perfectly, I respect that. After all, this is the core philosophy of every rhythm game ever made; You press the button on the beat. So then why would you design things in this game to reward slightly for being accurate and have half the guns be less punishing instead? It’s frustrating when you don’t bother checking past the affix to know if the weapon is worth looking at.
Conclusion
It’s frustrating because, as I said, there’s a lot to like about this game. But right now, it’s irritating for me in many spots because of the odd music choices and extremely frustrating weapon design. I’m no expert in these sorts of games, but I could comfortably progress in Crypt of the Necrodancer, Thumper, etc. Here, I feel like I’m constantly being thrown off by my act of firing, which sucks. Maybe I’m the only one with this problem, but for me, it was a dealbreaker, unfortunately. The developers wanted to make some music first and then a videogame second. There’s a reason Crypt of the Necromancer is a beat-heavy game – and the same goes for why Osu uses map-centered gameplay. Soundfall could have been more, but sadly falls apart – even though the concept is interesting.
6.5/10
Tested on the Nintendo Switch.
