Review: Audiosurf

Holy macaroni! What if suddenly, your Windows Media Player or iTunes visualizer came to life?!? All those strange spirally lines and colors, strobes, all flashing and inducing epilepsy and pointlessness suddenly became a video game?!?

---

Well then, you'd get Audiosurf! It's like WipeOut, without the stressful break-necking speeds, but with all the fancy colors and lights, and most importantly, with your music collection. The game has you racing down a procedurally created track made out of the rhythm and melody of your music tracks. Want to take a smooth, easy drive with John Mayer's No Such Thing? Or want to go crazy and speedy with Dragonforce's Through the Fire and the Flames? Well you can. In fact, the game's hook is that you can play any music track that exists in the entire universe (provided it is DRM-free, of course).

The objective is to score points by hitting blocks as you hurtle/crawl down a race track that swerves, and bumps according to the various high and low points in a song. Avoid the grey blocks, and hit the colored ones. It's as simple as that, and then if you're good enough, you upload it on to a worldwide leader-board, and you can have bragging rights.

The fun comes in playing all your favorite songs, and not being limited by lame tracklists as those put out by Guitar Hero. But unlike the gazillion-dollars generating latter famous music game, Audiosurf doesn't require as much skill in the way of finger dexterity, but more of lightning fast reactions. The fun also comes in the light shows the software puts on uniquely for each individual song you choose. There's a variety of race vehicles to choose from which essentially adds a little variation to the game's fundamentals, like cars that can save blocks to line up for points later, or shooting grey blocks, etc. Yes, you can tell that I'm struggling to make this sound at all exciting.

Which brings me to a strong concern. The game works well when played in short 3-4 minute sessions, on a whim, in between other more important gaming titles, or at break from work. And when you want to LOOK, not just listen to your music. But beyond that, the game has little sustainable value. Sure you can tell your friends that you rode the Dragonforce wave and scored some serious points on Audiosurf, but then some other dude with a console can easily say he did the same on Guitar Hero Expert, and the crowd will go nuts for that. This game's not big enough for people to care about, whether you score highly or not. So what's the game left with, other than you entertaining and playing by your lonesome self.

The graphics are pretty nifty, and flashy. Watching bursts of light and fireworks, or green maelstroms brewing in the pitch black outer-space background as you go over a hill or take a dip is surprisingly most soothing on the eyes. It is also good that the game can run well on any system. In fact, I highly recommend this title even to those who can't tell a difference between a keyboard and a Wii remote. It's a really simple game to pick up, harking back to the ol' days of racing games which were just wire-frame minimalist tracks and a square representing a car.

Also, Audiosurf's got a sweet deal with Valve in that they've got the entire Orange Box soundtrack (i.e. Portal's genius "Still Alive") thrown in, so you can hear GLaDoS go "this is a triumph" whilst you put pedal to metaphorical metal. But only if you are a fan of Valve's games anyway. If not, you can always play Britney Spear's Toxic, and it'd be just as fun... I think - I have not tried with that song personally.

All in all, a smart idea, deft execution, and very attractive package. Great in short bursts. But honestly, how much of this will you play before you'd rather pick up a plastic guitar and pretend you're Joe Satriani? At least that game makes you LOOK like you're doing something productive.