This was my barrier of entry. As someone who put around a combined 1k hours in the Souls games, it wasn’t until I treated the game differently than Souls did I finally start to make progress. Same thing happened with the aggressive, faster pace of Bloodborne.
When I worked returns in retail, we had to write why the product was being returned. My favorite was a vacuum cleaner because “It doesn’t suck.”
Very early, aprox. 1 hour of playing (also somewhat inebriated), impressions.
First thought was that I love seeing more heavy metal representation in rhythm games. I feel outside of the old Guitar Hero and Rock Band series, rock and metal have been underrepresented in the rhythm games I have known of.
Second, despite not having VR at the moment and using a controller, the controls felt good. There are 4 lanes, and I’m using an XBox layout knock off controller at the moment for my PC, and the keys are D-Pad left, down right for the left side of the track and X, B, A for the right side of the track. That means the D-pad down and right overlap with X and A. That worked out really great in trying to play on controller and also made it feel like what I imagine properly playing drums is like with needing your arms to be independant, and also synchornized and also all over the place to hit the thing you need to hit. For reference here, I have never played actual songs on the drums before, but I have always been interested in the muscisionship side of them.
My final thought of the game is that while it seems like it would be fun to play on a new medium of a controller or in VR with wands, the track list (admitedly played on the difficulty 2 of 3, whatever that is called in this game) seemed like, as a veteran of expert mode in Guitar Hero/Rock Band, an absolutely simple thing to crush with the guitar controller, even adding in the necesscity to strum. I have played other games (shoutout out to Metronomicon on PC) where I changed the control bindings on the keyboard to just mimic a Guitar Hero/Rock Band guitar layout and that massively boosted my performance.
Overall, I will be checking this game out more once I get ahold of a VR headset because I think it will be super fun to play in VR. If I were skilled enough in rhythm games and shooting for score, I think I would just remap the keys to F1234 and hold my keyboard like a guitar to get highscores easily.
This says it doesn’t require VR. I am lucky in this case, and I am about to get gifted a hand-me-down VR set from a friend who is upgrading in a few weeks, so I will get to try it out in VR.
That being said, the track list so far looks awesome. I am a long-time metalhead, so seeing Blind Guardian, Nightwish, and Dragonforce is super exciting to me.
Downloading the demo now to see how it plays without VR, but will be trying it in VR in the future once I finally have a PC VR headset. Currently I only have a PSVR1 and Beat Saber, which doesn’t get much use because of there being so many wires on it and cats who want to chew on those wires.
Edit: (Purely from a personal musical preference here) From a metalhead and just loving the music perspective, after playing a bit and looking more at the tracklist/DLC (and also after my early first impression reply below) I am hopefull for this to continue because I want more Blind Guardian and others. I am familiar with Epica and Symphony X and want more of them in here. I have been recently exposed to Alestorm and Gloryhammer and want more of them too. Been intriged by Sabotan for quite a long while and really have no good reason to have not been pursuing their music further like I should have been since I’ve heard of them (going to rectify this right after I post this), and this game gives me hope that more of these bands that I love will make it into rhtyhm games to gain more exposure, and I will continue to find new awesome \m/ things to listen to.
Wanted to follow up on this because I’ve been having such a good time with it. I’m two hours in and I finally beat all the non-remixed tracks on Unbeatable, mostly C ratings across the board. Mirror gave me a really hard time with the amount of long note lane switches and the series of quick beats. I tried the Proper Rhythmn remix and it destroyed me. It also has a long series of quick beats and I’m having a hard time starting it so I fail immediately. A practice mode would really help so I can play this section repeatedly to get the hang of it, I hope they include one in the full release.
One thing I don’t like is that when you fail a track that you’ve never completed before, the track list doesn’t have any indication of this because it just shows your highest score. Other than just remembering (which there aren’t a ton of tracks yet), the best way I was able to determine a song had yet to be completed successfully was the score just seemed too low and the percentage of notes hit way too high for it. Once they’ve all been completed one time this will no longer be an issue of course, but it would be nice.
Other than that I am having a blast. The music is great and all original. I downloaded the soundtrack and have been rocking out to it at work which has helped with learning the rhythm patterns too. Worn Out Tapes sounds like it’s going to be rough and a ton of fun to play in the full release, I can’t wait.
Anyone else been sticking with this demo?
I will definitely be checking this out and then simultaneously regret and not regret the decision.
Before the Echo it’s only $5 USD! Not even discounted.
Before the Echo.
Older and a little grindy, but man… this game introduced me to Ronald Jenkees who does the majority of the soundtrack. I still actively listen to this soundtrack 10 years later.
Game play is fun too, switching between tracks to attack, defend or heal as needed but you need to time it right so that you don’t miss out on crucial defends or it will kill you.
Lots of rpg elements in this game too.
In a similar style, I’d recommend Metronomicon. I think this is a better video game overall, but there’s no Ronald Jenkees so I feel it’s a toss up and both are worth playing.
What a blast from the past! I found this site shortly after it started while using Stumble Upon back in the day. I sent a few secrets in myself but have never seen them published. I believe this was only supposed to be a year long social experiment that did so well the guy just kept it going. I remember looking forward to the weekly updates all the time.
I bought the first book, it’s still on my shelf.
The band All American Rejects also wrote a song about this project.
I haven’t seen the trailer or played the game myself, but what if what you saw was a small fraction of the experience that is attainable? Wouldn’t that be amazing?
The trailer still has to have enough to get people interested, and if it’s well made with generous amounts of content it should still keep you amazed and interested.
Again, I don’t actually know, but it is on my radar and I have heard good things about this game, so I feel inclined towards the positive outlook in this circumstance.
Lurker checking in
I’ve posted 1/5th as many times as my 11 years on reddit in less than a week on lemmy.
Am I winning?
The NASA side is what bothered me. I really enjoyed the rest of the episode.
When David’s family was killed… why wasn’t there any real response from NASA? Bring him home, change personnel? Anything? You have this ship being maintained for 6(?) years by only 2 people, and one has had a massively horrible event impact his life and he’s just supposed to keep trucking away for years. The only human interaction is seeing his partner once a week or if an emergency happens?
I don’t even remember if there was an attempt to justify it, but considering the lack of response, the rest of the episode feels like a natural playout of events.
If “Sitting Near Larry” was a genuine and honest show, I’d watch the hell out of it.