Symphony: Gaming Dissonance

A demon is taking over your music in the hopes of, something...
It was apparently evil though, and involved music...

Symphony 
PC 


I'm not going to lie I was looking forward to this game, a lot. Perhaps that's why I felt so disappointed in it. Or perhaps it's just a truly awful game. I will say one thing, it was at least bad enough that I forgot to post my original review of it last week. That says something, that says, at the very least, that this game was bad enough that I purposefully tried to forget about it. It says this game was so bad I uninstalled it, and had to reinstall it to grab some screens from it. That statement says many, many things, but "good" is certainly not one of them. But I digress, Symphony, is a music based shooter. Similar to games like Beat Hazard, and Audiosurf, Symphony uses the music in your computers library to build the levels. Unlike Beat Hazard or Audiosurf, though, Symphony is not a railed button-pushing rhythm game or arena shooter. Symphony is an amalgamation of several genres we've seen before, including arena shooters, single-button shooters, music-rhythm shooters, railed shooters, etc. (See what I did there?). Shooting is the name of the game in Symphony, and while this should have been a real blast, and could be with the right tweeks, as is Symphony falls flat.

This appears to be intuitive, but take my word, it's a bad start. 

My first complaint with Symphony is the menus. These menus are set up to look like they'd be a breeze to get through, but should you find yourself double clicking the wrong music folder, and whoa be unto you finding your way back. I don't know how to describe it better than that. It's set up to reflect what computer drives and music/audio folders are available, but my first time playing I actually found it a bit disorienting. While the menus should have been straight forward I found them instead annoying and confusing. Which is mind-boggling considering how they have them set up. Looking at how they're labeled, that didn't have to happen, and honestly a little time spent tweaking these menus would likely save annoyance and confusion, but seeing as the game is already out, it's a bit late for that. Also, I thought it may have just been my sleep deprived brain struggling with these menus, so I had my roommate go through these while I watched. He was wide awake and fully alert, and he had the same issues I did. To be fair once you use them, and figure them out, they're really not bad, but they shouldn't be a problem at all, especially not on the first time. I could tell I was off to a bad start from this, well this and the song analyzing...

I've been wanting to play a game where I could use Pimslur's Norwegian for Beginners as the background music, and now I can! My life is complete.

Ah, the first time setup. Always a bother when you're setting up a PC, or a game system, and an understandable annoyance, except that is when it's completely unnecessary. The game warns you that it will be a bit of a wait while it attempts to analyze all of the audio on your computer, and boy were the developers not kidding about this one. After ten or so minutes as I waited on the couch I fell asleep. I don't know how long it took, but my roommate woke me up a half hour after my last recollection of checking the clock, so it was probably a bit less than thirty minutes, but I doubt it could have been much less than that. Here's why I find that especially annoying: it seriously added every MP3 available on my system, regardless of what it was. This was due to the confusing dialogue box that popped up that was brief, and unclear in its direction. Instead of prompting you to scan specific folders, it prompts the gamer to scan an entire drive. You can set it to scan only a specific folder, but as I said, the promptings to do so aren't very clear. Again, to be fair, that was my first time booting it up, so maybe it wasn't too bad, however with over four thousand available tracks on the drive I keep my music in this was ridiculous. Also it doesn't seem necessary to have to scan them all in advance. Similar games like Beat Hazard have gone around such annoyances as this by letting you access the folder in-game. While BH does scan your folders to find the audio, you can choose each level on the fly, and skip long loading times, which is nice, and something Symphony could have learned from. Second, refreshing the tracks upon reboot is silly. I say this because Symphony checks your selected folders/drives upon restarting. While it's much quicker than the initial load, it still takes long enough to be annoying. Finally once you actually play the track it analyzes it again! Why?! As I've already stated this could be done in-game and on the fly, like in Beat Hazard. Why scan the songs when you are going to rescan them again anyway? This makes absolutely no sense to me and is a huge waste of time. Considering the game is called Symphony the menu design and setup seem very poorly orchestrated.

That screencap shows the games visual beauty.
I just wish the gameplay matched it.

I know what you must be thinking, "but the gameplay is good, right?" If you thought the menus sounded bad, wait until you see it in motion. While Symphony is undoubtedly one of the most visually stunning games I've seen in years, the gameplay is sorely lacking. The player is stuck on a square field, not a terribly uncommon feature for an arena shooter, however, you are limited in your movement even within this field. The ship you control cannot go completely back to the bottom of the field despite it looking open, nor can the player move past the pulsing equalizer at the front. While I fully expected the front of the screen to be blocked I was shocked to find that I could not progress into the lower twenty percent of the arena. There was no line or marker delineating it, and it was never defined as an inaccessible area, which I still find very confusing. This had interesting consequences on the gameplay, and changed much of my gameplay strategy. This wouldn't be a bad feature at all if Symphony was more than a one button game. That's right, Symphony is a single-button shooter. Commonly found on tablets and handheld devices, single button mechanics are great when used correctly, on a PC however, with a mouse, keyboard, and controllers available it grows stale quickly. Hence my gripe about the backcourt grows worse; if I can only shoot one direction, and if I can't cover the entire screen, the game quickly becomes an exercise in frustration.

Another feature of Symphony that makes the lack of screen space noticeable is the poorly designed enemy movements. The enemies, which vary in number according to the time of musical beats, almost always come in from two spots on either side of the screen. Even when I had a hard time covering the area available to me, it was easy to predict when and where the next wave of enemies would appear. This quickly ended up making the game easier than I expected, and therefore more boring than I expected as well. It turned my initial frustration into pure boredom, with no in-between. In fact after I got bored playing the game, I just started wrecking my ship into enemies directly over and over and over. Interestingly I never used all my lives up or had to start the level over. Something that I also found really disappointing. Either I was earning enough points crashing into enemies that I was building up extra life/health to keep going, or you can't lose. Neither of those things add to the challenge of the game, and without challenge what's the point in playing? 

This looks far more hectic than it really is. I was able to screencap it
 with no interruption in gameplay, something I normally find difficult. 

Finally the weapons and ship/system upgrade system is ridiculous. It requires you to first gather enough music notes, called Inspiration Points, to see the item, but then you need to earn a totally different set of points, called Kudos Points to actually unlock them. Let me reiterate that, you don't unlock the ability to use an item, you unlock the ability to know that an item is available to be unlocked. That may be the second worst system of item unlocking of all time. I don't know what the worst is, but I'm willing to say that there is perhaps a worse unlock system out there somewhere; I just haven't discovered it yet. On this one aspect of the game it really seems like Empty Clip (the developer) was trying to do something creative and new. As much as I'd like to give them credit for trying it just didn't work out. Not that it matters much, as the weapons I unlocked weren't very useful, and you have limited space to place them. Not to mention the fact they also only fire on the beats. Now I haven't unlocked everything in the game, and there may be upgrades that are awesome, and improve the game that I'm unaware of, but I'm doubting that's possible considering the games single-button control scheme, and predictable gameplay. 

The Symphony of Souls. Sounds relaxing, unless it's actually made of souls that is...

The one area I will give Symphony credit is in its storyline. The story in Symphony is actually pretty cool, a demon/monster of sorts is attempting to invade our dimension through the power of music, and you have to stop him/her/it by "freeing" your music from his/her/its grasp. This was a new spin on the rhythm-shooter genre, and one that was welcome, I only wish it had been better implemented. In-game cutscenes, for the most part, cannot be skipped (or maybe I wasn't trying hard enough, I don't know, it was the only aspect I was enjoying). While this is fine the first time through a game, when I had to reinstall Symphony I found it irritating, and yet another area where the game could be improved. The included music was also not too bad, but not really stuff I'd personally listen to on a regular basis, and honestly most of it felt very similar to each other, making the included tracks feel bland, and without substance. While I'm sure most people will like the music included I felt more variety could have been sought out and/or implemented. I understand the point is to use your own music, but it's also nice to have something new to play to as well. It is a music game after all, and a good selection of tracks is always welcome in any game. 

All in all I give Symphony 1.75 out of 5 stars, and I may be too generous in that. It only received the score it did because I found the game visually stunning and beautiful enough to keep going for longer than I should have. While it certainly feels like the developer reached for the stars with this one, they landed in the trees. I don't recommend buying this game or playing it unless major changes are implemented, or if a sequel comes out that improves on the original, and you want to see what it was all about. As I said, I have respect for Empty Clip in that they tried to do something different, but it just feels like they either didn't do enough, or were scared to take it far enough. I wish them better luck next time though, as they have proved they can make a beautiful looking game, even when it doesn't stand up in any other areas. 

Until next time, Game On