Ever wanted to paint the town red? Or blue? Or green? THQ’s Beat City will let you do just that.
A creative twist on traditional rhythm-based music games, Beat City encourages players to complete challenges to restore color to the world of the titular city. Dame Isolde Minor and her Cacophony Corporation have sucked the music out of Beat City, rendering its population gray and boring. Your job, as a happy headphone wearing alien and his speaker-headed friend, is to bring life– and color, and happiness – back by bringing the funk.
Beat City has an appropriately funky chiptunes soundtrack to score its quest. The graphics are flat and bold, embodying the spirit of graffiti without aping the style. It takes its coloring and environment seriously, as everything you do affects the world; the better you are at mimicking the rhythm, the more colorful the environment becomes. You add everything from smiling flowers to pink clouds to birthday hats and sailboats to any given challenge, rewarding your prowess by blinding you with happy color.
Beat City has an easy-to-learn interface, using taps, swipes and presses. There are 20 rhythm-based mini-games, all grouped around saving Beat City from Cacophony Corporation. The controls are easy to learn and each mini-game is prefaced with a tutorial that won’t let you proceed until you learn the timing for each game. The games themselves are pretty creative; you get to tap out a heartbeat in the first minigame, rap to a giant conducting gorilla in the second, shoot ice cream out of an elephant’s nose in the third. It’s a really creative way to make gamers continuously tap a screen, and proves that a creative coating can save the music video game genre from blandness.
Since I’m not the most precise gamer, the timing issues for certain challenges made me a little crazy – tapping the kid who was going to explode if he didn’t pee, for instance, was maddening. Pee-pee pants notwithstanding, I had fun grooving with the game. I just wish the level of the challenges weren’t so random: the challenge after that one was much easier and that made me feel like the developers were mucking with me. Better graduation of challenges next time, please.
It’s out for the DS. Check it – if you’ve got the music in you.
