My brother came to visit because his house lost power in a storm, and it sounds like it’ll be a couple days before it gets fixed. YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS….

This is a rhythm game. You have free left/right movement (and some parts let you move up and down, too), but collectibles are almost always arranged in straight lines on their tracks, which can make it annoying when you just barely overshoot/undershoot them. It’s as if most of the game was designed around Game & Watch style “tap to shift lanes” but was changed at the last minute. There are even times where there’s blue circles on the ground you need to run over to make turns, but there’s one level where a row of collectibles is placed on the lane beside the blue circle (and the camera is angled in a low-hanging isometric view, meaning you’ll have trouble seeing that it’s on a different lane until after you miss it and crash into the electric barrier). With Game & Watch controls, you could theoretically be able to notice this at the last second and just tap the button to shift lanes.

Honestly, the controls thing may just be me, but it can be hard to see where something in the distance will show up when it gets closer. Pretty much everything in the distance either spawns too close to the Vanishing Point to tell where it’ll be or is so small you won’t really see it ‘til it’s close. Thumper had a pretty clever way around this by having the path curve upward, extending past the top of the screen; that way, not only does the distance give stuff more time on-screen, but the height gives you more time to see which lane something is on (and it has Game & Watch controls, so you just tap a direction to switch lanes). With this game, the only time I felt it got this right was with the final level/boss; you can see it spawn the walls and slide them over to the track before they land and start coming towards you. The rest of the time, it’ll be hard to tell if the tree will go beside you or straight towards you until right before you crash.

Oh, but it’s totally okay because the game gives you the option to skip a segment if you die more than a few times. Seriously, though, I don’t get the recent trend of games trying to appeal to people who don’t want to play them; if you made a game and people kept complaining about a certain part, wouldn’t you want to try improving that part instead of just going “screw it” and making it optional?

Another regular occurrence is that the game will have a hexagon appear above your character along with a shrinking hexagonal outline, and you have to push a button when the outline matches the icon. Weirdly enough, this is the part of the game that goes out of its way to be lenient; you can push the button super-early, and it’ll still count (you’ll just get less points), and if you’re late, the game will heavily slow down and dim the background until your input. I wouldn’t be surprised if not pushing a button just caused the game to pause and sit there, but I didn’t try it.

One thing that separates this game from others in the rhythm genre is its gimmicks. A few levels have you shooting forward automatically, but it’s not really a SHMUP; all the enemies are still on their own lanes, and any that have retaliatory shots still affix them to the lanes as straight shots, giving them little distinction from the trees and walls from before. …Actually, I take that back; I don’t think the trees were affixed to the lanes. Sometimes, the game will suddenly shift to tube controls (inside and outside) and expect you to adapt within a second before you crash. There’s also a couple very-late-game segments where a crosshair suddenly appears on screen, and now you’re controlling that instead of your character. You still don’t get to shoot anything, though; that’s done automatically when you move the crosshair over an enemy.

The only time I felt the game justified its free-movement controls was with the second vector level: it’s a top down perspective, and all the hazards come in from the edges of the screen. Plus, they do so in varied patterns, which you’d want free movement to avoid. That was my favorite level, and it’s one that had little to do with the rest of the game (I guess the first vector level wasn’t that bad, either).

Overall, I’m not sure about this one. I can see its appeal, but to me, it’s just a gimmickier, not-as-good version of Thumper. Wait for a sale if you’re interested.