Audiosurf PC Game Review

Audiosurf is an interesting indie PC game with a nice premise, it takes your favorite music and uses it to generate a race track, which you then play through, going faster at high energy points in the song, and going slower in the more mellow sections all the while being showered in sparkles of bright color. I'm not saying you'd have to be soulless hollow shell of a human being not to like this game, but if you don't like this game, then you're probably not going to heaven.

Gameplay:

Pretty much as described, choose your favorite song and race through it whilst collecting blocks of similar colors to accumulate points. The blocks of color thing somewhat annoyed me, mostly because I don't care for leaping around the track like a frothy mouthed terrier, but it is rather integral to the Audiosurf system for proving your dexterity and general gaming excellence by accumulating points, which can be uploaded to an online scoreboard, where you will be validated as a human being.

There is a vast range of ships you can race your music with and each of them have different abilities and make the block collecting experience a little bit different. It's all very interesting if you care about collecting blocks, which I don't, but which most players probably will because that is sort of the point of the game. Me? I just like the sensation of moving through brightly lit tunnels of color whilst music pounds in my ears.

Graphics:

You can choose different 'themes' for your game, however the default theme involves masses of white screen punctuated by spiky neon stress ball designs. It hurts your eyes, hurts your brain, and after a few games you end up staggering away from the keyboard feeling slightly drunk.

It's a little befuddling why the developer chose to release the white theme as the base when it is most certainly the least player friendly of all the themes, but change that sucker to grey and you'll be able to play without having an epileptic experience.

You'll also want to change the graphic detail to 'Premium' to experience the entire psychedelic potential of this game. (Again, the game appears to ship with the graphic detail set to a mere 'High', it's almost like they wanted to sell the game short. Why? We may never know.)

Music:

If you don't like the music you're listening to this game, then that's largely your own fault. In your face, gamers!

Should You Buy This Game?

I bought this game for $5 bucks on a Steam Sale, and I can definitely say that it is better than having your application for leave summarily turned down by a pig faced woman in HR. Take from that what you will.