This looks exactly like the game idea I had growing up. I was really disappointed that the closest I got to such an idea was stuff like Alter Echo and Samurai Champloo (the latter of which was okay, but not quite what I hoped it would be).
Uh, that said, now that there are games like BPM and this, it’s not doing as much for me couple of decades ago. It just doesn’t look that interesting. Or maybe it’s because its personality reminds me too much of Sunset Overdrive.
Oddly enough, the games that always come to my mind first when I think of “rhythm action game” are Bujingai and Shinobi (PS2) for some reason.
someone really likes the “no really! by the studio you like that you wouldn’t expect to stoop to this!” copy, it’s almost exact from the trailer for grounded a few years ago
I would be really psyched if the music didn’t bore me
yeah again i just can’t believe how patronizing this whole thing is considering they got enough studio buy-in to have at least all of the animations and probably a significant number of mechanical interactions based on some underlying beat tracked by the game but couldn’t be assed to have eighth notes appear outside of some slomo quicktime event bs
is it just an industry thing where there only ever exists enough enthusiasm for this kind of thing to get greenlit but not without using the absolute worst music for it?? i feel like there have been a number of these kinds of games and they’ve always had the most aggressively mediocre music, every single one of them
I’ve been reading these comments all day at work, and feeling suspicious toward the uniform negativity. But I finally watched the trailer and, yeah, this looks seriously lame for multiple reasons.
this reminds me of how whenever anyone asks Bill Hader to name his inspirations he always comes up with a phenomenal list of deep cuts of really great & interesting movies, and then everything Bill Hader actually does in his career is aggressivelly unfunny and unappealing to me
In the testing I did with this type of combat, eighth notes and polyrhythms were a huge step up in difficulty and something that lost almost everyone.
A couple experiments we tried:
Player can layer 4/4/, 3/4, and 6/8 rhythms, each a different (additive) track. Player goal was to maintain the maximum number of rhythms they felt comfortable with in the combat as difficult as possible. Result: only the musicians and myself and the lead designer (both drummers) ever turned on more than one track. Conclusion: ha, no. (This was the best version)
Player can opt in to one of 4/4, 3/4, and 6/8 signatures. We saw about a third the success of the 4/4 signature on the other two. Conclusion: loping time signatures were really hard for most people to do while using only partial attention. We’d need a strong motivation to convince people to pick anything but the 4/4. Variant: 4/4, 3/4, and 2/4 tracks. 2/4 had better results, still problematic.
All tracks are 4/4, but with time signature changes player can opt in to. Player can bump track to a ‘higher tier’, resulting in a time signature change. Goal was that players would learn each song as a ladder of increasing execution difficulty. Result: better, but not the success rate or ease of use we were hoping for. Players had too much difficulty moving from the first segment to the next. We would expect the higher tiers to be almost unused.
honestly on paper I’d be into the general concept. the aesthetic is lame but what really sinks this for me is how aggressively mediocre and generic the music in these trailers is. really if it even sounded like a burger king commercial from 1992 that would be a step up from whatever this is.
