Symphony Review

Combining Tron-esque, wireframe graphics, a simplistic, arcade-shooter mechanic, and a soundtrack pulled directly from your own hard drive, Symphony is equal parts video game and screensaver. The concept here is that a “demon” has taken over your music, and you (represented by a sort of fighter-plane-type thingy) have to kill the infestation with a variety of weapons, song by individual song.

When you first start up Symphony, the game will search your hard drive for music files (although it does come with some sample music by default). It’ll then import the files you designate as wanting to play with (a time-consuming process, especially for those without powerful PCs and/or SSDs), and build game levels for each song. For all this loading, though, levels don’t seem to differ too much from each other, despite wildly different song types. Occasionally, you'll get different, or more powerful versions of the same enemies, but most of the time, levels are only distinguished from one another by the tempo at which the action happens and the background music.

Whether you go with one of Elgar’s Engima Variations or a cut from MF DOOM’s latest album, you’ll still get a top-down view of a monochrome (the single color shifts based on the “intensity” of the song at a given time) background. Wire frame enemies appear from the side and the top, generally in sync with the beat or if there's an "intensity" change in the song (i.e., there's more going on instrumentally at a given time), and they occasionally shoot at you. Depending on what difficulty level you’ve chosen – they go from “pianissimo” (easiest) to “fortissimo” – they’ll either shoot at you very rarely, or all the damn time.

Gameplay for the most part involves moving the mouse around to dodge enemies (your ship tracks your mouse move for move) and blowing up enemies. A few weapons, like missiles, are better held to mouse clicks, but for the most part you're just moving around. This makes the gameplay feel a little thin, which leads to it getting tiresome after multiple songs. After enough time it can get a little repetitive -- or at least that's how it might seem on paper. But something about Symphony’s gameplay is almost zen-like. You go into this zone as you play, where you experience the music and the gameplay as a single activity, and time just slides by.

Of course, some parts of Symphony's gameplay are genuinely repetitive, although not to a degree that it mars the overall impression much, given you play the game in short bursts. Enemies, for example, are pretty much all variations of a very few basic types. Your goal is to destroy them and collect the powerups and energy they drop to increase your score. You have to get to a certain score threshold to “beat” a level, which allows you to unlock a new weapon or power up for your ship. Then you can choose your ship’s loadout for the next song, mixing and matching weapons and powers to your liking, and even choosing whether you want them to auto-fire or to control when they go off. Since most levels are the same, it’s not really so much a question of choosing the right weapon for the job, but making sure you have a good balance of different kinds of weapons: missiles for the powerful enemies, auto-fire blasters for the low-end ones, and something in between for everything else.

One weird misstep is that Symphony seems to make the music itself quieter than the sound effects by default, requiring some tweaking to make sure you can actually hear your own personal soundtrack. Other than that, though, the game plays smooth and stable, and even allows you to log into an online leaderboard to compare your successes with others on a given song (yep, it tracks songs by artist and title from the ID3 tags).

Source : ign[dot]com