Audiosurf: F-Zero Meets Lumines

Two of my favorite types of games are music games and twitchy-reflex games, the latter of which I feel deserves its own genre. When I say music games I don’t mean strictly games with music peripherals; I mean anything from DDR to Electroplankton.

I’ll be the first to try any game that revolves around music or uses music as one of its main themes like in Meteos and Chibi-Robo. And everyone should know how much I love games that rely on reflexes and quick thinking. So what do you get when you combine these two?

Audiosurf

This game, which 4cr forumite Neeks brought to my attention, is like a cross between F-Zero and Lumines and involves you going down highways made from your own music files. The developer, Invisible Handlebar, says that it supports CD, MP3, iTunes, M4A, WMA, or OGG files to create the highways in the game.

The basic gameplay involves you moving down these highways, hitting these cars (which represent different parts of the song) and trying to get the same-colored cars to cluster together. There are also at least three different vehicles you can use which all have different gameplay that goes from just reflexes to a more puzzle-like game.

Ninja Mono Craft – The fastest of the three, the gameplay strictly relies on dodging the grey walls and getting the single colored cars.

Pusher Craft – Still fairly speedy, but now you have multiple car colors which you have to worry about. Also, instead of just stacking the cars, you can press the left and right mouse buttons to push the cars into different stacks.

Pointer Craft – Slowest of the three, but the most puzzle-like. Now you can grab the cars and put them in any stack you want, so it’s more about strategy than reflexes.

All the modes look fun in their own way, but I think I’ll prefer the Ninja Mono over the others. The only bad thing about the game is that it’s not out yet. The official website says it’ll be released sometime in February. Until then, you can just try playing Guitar Hero, Tetris, and Wipeout at the same time and it might give you a similar feel.

[Edit] After playing the demo (You can only play the tutorial) that Blueberry_Pie posted, I can confirm that this game is indeed awesome. It’s hard to describe, but once you play it with a song you love, it’s really cool. The songs don’t just decide where to place the cars, but they design the entire tracks so you are literally moving along with the music. It really is a cool experience and I am looking very forward to the release. Also, in the demo it shows eleven different modes across three difficulties, some of them repeating like Pointman to Pointman Pro to Pointman Elite.