Soundfall

The (unfortunately short) cutscenes are the best part of the game. Honestly, maybe the only good part of the game. Kinda seems like the project would have been better if it wasn't a game at all, and they just stuck to animation. There are some very strange design choices that are at serious odds with one another and despite the time I've put into the game, I can't recommend it to pretty much anyone. The devs don't really seem to know what they wanted out of their gameplay loop. You're encouraged to go off the main path to open chests and get more loot, but very few of the maps are forgiving enough on timing to actually run the extra ground without the song running over, which automatically gives you the worst rating possible for a map. And the loot from the end-mission chest is supposedly determined by your performance (I'm not sure I buy that, maybe it's a scalar but the RNG aspect is very unforgiving and some of my best runs have not felt very rewarding), so even if you get a few extra chests out of it lowering your score to do so also actively penalizes you. I did not obsessively use the dash mechanic for mobility, so it's possible that system was designed with that in mind... but that's pretty unforgiving for people who aren't great at rhythm games. I generally enjoy a good rhythm game, which is why I bought this to play with friends, but I'm not great and adding that many unnecessary actions to the gameplay loop would certainly have caused me to lose the chain or miss notes far more. On the note of friends, this game is honestly a hot mess when played in multiplayer. My friends and I did not last long on our joint play-through, and had a much better (but still fundamentally flawed) experience playing solo and just hanging out with each other in chat. The way the game anchors your cameras to one another can seriously screw up gameplay when the camera fights you, and then the more players you have the more of a mess the screen becomes with people crossing paths and filling the screen with bullet spam. It was pretty much unplayable for a casual group. The entire beat and metronome system just doesn't feel very good, either. There's technically a pulsing cursor in front of your character, but the metronome interface at the bottom of the screen is the only default way to figure out how different some areas and songs can be from one another. I did eventually figure out that I could turn on an audible metronome in the settings, and that helped so much that I wondered why it wasn't on by default. More than that, though, a rhythm game really needs to be consistent and this game just isn't. Having to calibrate latency and such is fine, but it shouldn't feel like some maps you need to be a little early and some maps you need to be a little late. Seems to be a performance thing, I think, because the arena/horde maps were the worst affected... and no, it's not a problem with my device, my PC handily exceeds the game's recommended specs. It's just not as well-optimized and buttery-smooth as a rhythm game really needs to be. I've noticed in my brief skim through the reviews that many negative ones say the songs are super forgettable. I don't entirely agree with that point as a criticism on the game, it's down to taste. There are a lot of songs I'm quite meh on in the game, but there are some that I genuinely liked, too. No rhythm game is realistically going to be 100% bangers for everyone who experiences it. And there are plenty of better criticisms against the game. All-in-all, it says an awful lot about the game that an achievement which is just a few hours into the game has been reached by only 10% of players. I honestly don't quite understand how this game has overall positive reviews, when it's evidently a very small percentage of its players that actually gives it too much of a chance and gets very far with it. A lot of the reviews have so little playtime, like barely over the two hours necessary to deny possible refunds, that I feel pretty vindicated in saying the game makes an okay first impression, but lacks the polish or depth to actually hold the average player's attention. I said in my initial review (don't know if it flags that this has been edited and extended, but it has) that I was going to at least finish the story and farm the easier achievements, since I like to keep my average achievement completion high. That's another aspect of their design that I fundamentally disagree with, since a good number of their achievements are just grindaholic/busywork meant to artificially extend their playtime. I'm the kind of player they get a partial bite from... but 95% completion is good enough that the last few aren't worth anything but disdain even from an achievement ***** like me.

Soundfall is a hidden gem, there's no saying otherwise: Enjoyable gameplay, a unique combat gimmick (that being timing all of your attacks and abilities to the beat), and an amazing soundtrack that introduced me to so many underrated musicians. I genuinely love this game and really hope that it's popularity and recognition only increases in the future. That being said, there are still some things I don't really like about this game; the levels are all too similar to one another within the 'worlds', there's no fancy characteristics that make each level stand out, the design of each level is pretty much the same through each world, the way each level is structured gets old pretty quickly, and I was kinda hoping for more of those very well-animated cutscenes- it's not like there's too little though. To conclude, this game is arguably one of the better games of its kind. There are a few things that need to be improved- but It's not like they actively get in the way of gameplay. Still though, I'm happy with what I got, thank you!

I like the concept? The music-based names and worldbuilding are cute but I've found myself skipping all the dialogue, sorry! That might just be me though, I don't have much patience for storytelling of this kind unless it's really engaging. I feel like the gameplay would be a lot more interesting if it was *less* fast. I think the breakneck speed of the metronome doesn't make it hard, it just removes all the strategy. You fire and dash SO fast that you don't really have time to think about it. And you don't need to either! I genuinely feel like it would play better if it was every *other* beat. I think you could then make it harder *and* more interesting by making it more necessary to react to the enemy attacks and behaviours. I thought it would get a bit more interesting when you have to avoid things like enemies with shockwaves, moving vision cones and turrets spraying bullets everywhere later on but trying to navigate bullet-hell situations with the 3-beat dash system (you have to do dash-dash-<notdash> over 4/4 music!) at such high speeds is just not happening and I end up just brute forcing my way through everything. Maybe after enough hours of playing this you can get into a rhythm and see the matrix and actually care about avoiding damage, but certainly for the first two zones of the game it doesn't matter at all and you can just spam attacks. Speaking of which: I'd just delete the loot system entirely as well as the levelling up. It discourages thoughtful gameplay and encourages grinding and spamming. It means enemies don't take a consistent number of hits or deal a consistent amount of damage. Definitely cool to have different loadouts and weapons that behave differently, but all the loot, gear levels and stats make the game worse. There are some good tracks in this but for about 30% of them I found it very hard to 'hear' the beat and some tracks have quiet sections where you can't hear the beat at all. Especially noticeable in the forest. The animation is REALLY excellent, both in the cutscenes and environments. Absolutely stunning.

I got it on 90% sale, thinking oh, it looks cute, and I like music... little did I know the addiction that would come, the songs are fantastic, and the progression is great even for casual players, I didn't expect THAT much from such a game, new favorite game achievement unlocked.

As others have said, the concept is pretty interesting, and the music ranges from average to interesting, but everything else is unimpressive, poorly executed and does little to make it stand out from other looter-shooter games. Your character's attacks and general moveset are pretty much stock twin-stick shooter abilities that don't get influenced much by equipment except for statistics. The maps are generated in a way that makes them all feel hardly distinguishable, and enemies/encounters are very samey and repetitive as well; where I was expecting (and saw in the cutscene) a big boss at the end of the first world, I got a mess of mooks that carpeted the map in shots and made it almost impossible to dodge. Admittedly, adding tougher enemy patterns could jack up the difficulty more than intended combined with the rhythm gimmick (like how Necrodancer's combination of roguelike and rhythm combines the toughest aspects of both), but still. Levels have a bunch of sidepaths and breakables, but you get harshly punished for letting the song loop, discouraging you from doing anything other than rushing to the exit. And while the main gimmick is shooting/moving to the beat, some of the songs (especially higher-BPM ones like that boss fight) make it needlessly difficult or almost impossible to track and keep the beat. There seems to be some serious issues with the timing calibration as well; I was fine with the default timing, but after I went through calibration, suddenly going with the rhythm got me nothing but off-beats until I reset it.

Rating: 5/10 [Average/Boring]

Needs a fishing minigame.