Audiosurf

Metachronos overall score = 8.2 / 10

Positive
- Gameplay is simple yet addictive
- Provides an all-new way to enjoy your music
- Online leaderboards give meaning to your high scores
- This game is a steal for $10

Negative
- Lacks different game modes
- Has some technical issues
- Tracks don't always match the songs very well

Audiosurf can best be described as a cross between the futuristic racer Wipeout and Harmonix's first music game, Frequency. Rather than play a simulated instrument, you use either the keyboard or mouse to move a futuristic craft left and right on a moving, floating track. Each track is unique because it's generated by analyzing the music that you've chosen for that particular track. You can pick any MP3, M4A, or WMA file (among a few other formats) that doesn't use digital rights management. Slow parts of songs go uphill and the track moves slowly, while faster song segments go downhill and the track moves extremely fast. There's no doubt that faster songs are the most exciting and the best for points, but part of the fun with Audiosurf is to see what kind of track a particular song will generate, so slow songs still have a place in the game.



The main objective of Audiosurf is to score lots and lots of points, which are earned by running into the different colored blocks that fill the different lanes of the track. As you collect a block, it falls into the 21-block, 3-by-7 board in front of your craft. If three or more of any color blocks that you've collected touch one another they're considered a cluster and disappear. The more blocks you have in a cluster, the more points that cluster is worth. You'll also earn more points for clusters that are made up of "hot" colors such as red and yellow, which are worth more than colors like blue and purple, but are also less plentiful.

The visual presentation in Audiosurf is simple, with tracks appearing as little more than wire frames and sparsely populated backgrounds with minimal effects, but the uncomplicated visual design gets the job done. Graphic detail, resolution, and antialiasing can all be bumped up to slightly improve the graphics, but you'll need a pretty powerful machine to do so, or else the game's frame rate will chug and stutter. Audiosurf is a very good game that gives you an all-new way to enjoy your music. Granted, Audiosurf does have some technical issues and the lack of alternate play modes is disappointing, but few other rhythm/music games can provide so much entertainment for such a low price.