Developer: 2 players
Publisher: Nekki GmbH
Platforms: PC, iOS, Android, Windows Phone
Tested on: PC
Beat Da Beat – Review
Beat driven games have always found their way into the hearts of many, as well as bullet hell games. Beat Da Beat is trying to combine these two genres into a crazy mashup with awesome music and challenging gameplay. It features a filled screen of bullets with awesome music, accompanied with diversity, quite a few levels and different difficulty levels for the casual to the hardcore game.
Story
You were having a romantic picnic under moonlight with your girlfriend, ready to get even more romantic when suddenly someone disturbs you. A UFO suddenly comes flying in and they’re trying to steal her! Of course you can’t let that happen and do your best to fend off the aliens, but alas, the big alien chief leaves his ship and you’re left powerless. He takes your girlfriend and leaves you biting the dust, your job is to get in your space ship and fight your way to her in order to be joined together again.
The story really isn’t that deep or long in Beat Da Beat, it simply provides some sort of setting for the game. It’s kind of funny as well, which fits perfectly with the other funny moments the game has. However, once you beat the game, you’re simply staring at a black screen with a “skip” button, maybe this is intentional or maybe the game just bugged out very time, but this isn’t that bad since you’re not going to come to Beat Da Beat for the story.
Graphics
Beat Da Beat is fully made with a pixel-art style. It’s not like your everyday AAA-game graphics, but it does bring a lot of charm to the game. As a lot of shoot’em ups and bullet hell games were arcade games back in the day, it kind of reminds you to those old games, finished with a modern touch. It also features a lot of flashy effects, which can be quite bad for people that have epilepsy, which is why the game even has an epilepsy warning.
Sound
The music in Beat Da Beat is simply awesome. It’s a rhythm driven bullet hell game which features great Dubstep tracks, what more is there to want? The tracks fit perfectly together with the game and are very pleasant to listen to, on top of that they’re actually quite catchy as well. The gameplay is also perfectly synchronized with the music on all difficulties, making it a pleasure to play and replay every time. Beat Da Beat’s sound effects are quite nice as well, so there’s nothing to complain about sound wise at all.
Gameplay
Beat Da Beat is an all out beat-driven bullet hell shoot’em up. Basically a lot of words to say that everything is controlled by the beat of the music and there’s going to be a lot of bullets. It’s fairly simple to play, yet extremely hard to master. You simply move your ship with your mouse and it will automatically shoot for you. You can left click for a bomb which kills everything on screen and right click for your active skill if you have one, since some ships have a passive skill which is always applied. The game also features a quite quick tutorial, but it’s good enough to get you going. It explains what powerups you can collect, where your weakness is, what enemy bullets are and more, very basic stuff.
However, once you start, things aren’t quite that basic anymore. Even on easy difficulty, someone who plays the game for the first time will have to watch out a lot, because some things happen quite fast and bosses can be pretty challenging to say the least. In total, there are four difficulty levels: casual, normal, hard and badass. These are pretty much perfect representations of what’s going to happen to you. Casual is quite easy, while badass is just one big bullet hell requiring you to stay on your feet at all times.
Beat Da Beat features eight zones in total. Each time you’ll have a normal zone with a boss afterwards, so in total there’s four normal zones and four bosses, each with a very unique skillset and approach as how to kill them. Each of the zones have their own music, types of enemies and more. Every zone is completely different than the one before, which makes the game very unique and versatile.
You also have different space ships at your disposal. In total, there are ten unique space ships, each with a completely different play style. Most of them can be unlocked with coins that you get from killing enemies, but some of them can only be unlocked after beating the game on a certain difficulty level. Ships can also be upgraded to have more health, hold more bombs and do more damage. These upgrades will be vital if you want to survive on the hardest difficulty level.
Once you beat the game on the hardest difficulty, there’s still plenty to do because the last ship you get unlocks an amazing challenge which will require skill and patience, but what the challenge is will be up to you to discover. However, what would be a really big addition is in-game leaderboards. The game does seem to feature Steam Leaderboards, but it doesn’t look like they want to be found.
Conclusion
Beat Da Beat is a perfect addition to the “Bullet Hell” genre. It starts of quite easy, but once you play on the highest difficulty setting, you’ll be sweating quite a bit in order to not get killed. It features great music, awesome gameplay, a lot of variety and a lot of fun. It could however use in-game leaderboards for the competitive players and for some reason the ending cinematic is just a black screen with a skip button.
Beat Da Beat - Review,
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