Audio Infection

As a music enthusiast in general and as someone who loved playing games like AudioSurf, Beat Hazard & Swarmlake, I found this game appealing. I played without VR equipment, and that's, besides using either the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, perfectly possible! The game offers a handful of visually pleasing areas where you start listening to (your own = possible) music, and try not to get infected; e.g. the lower your accuracy and/or level of mastery, the more damage you will take, and the more infected your audio gets = lower music levels, but the enemies and their battle sounds will then take over the place. So you'd better listen to some garbage music, or you will get annoyed if you fail at shooting ;properly! Speaking of which, the game offers 4 types of weapons and there's a royal credit bonus you can initially use to level up your gear already. Now, this was a nice present, but actually also more of a necessity; while having bullets/minigun @ the max. level 4, the rockets @ max. level 4 and the bombs @ max. level 2 (a bit more OP by default), not being able to catch up with all the enemies occurred frequently. The visuals to these weapons and ammo also are a bit standard and actually also tell you you're a bit underpowered at times, but of course this is also music-dependent. Besides, you're basically immortal, and can 'only' get an infection rate of 100% ... facing a score sheet with damage etc. results at the end. So, previously is nicely compensated, although I want to praise the one and only [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2152651641]Laser weapon[/url] here: visually stunning, and this weapon (@ max. level 2) just seems right! There's a recharge/cooldown period for it, but it overall works great for all types of enemies, and you can definitely be considered OP while facing some of the tougher bosses. In the end, it was nice to try out all kinds of weapons and make it both a relaxing experience — focusing more on the music — and more of a challenge with some of the less interesting weapons. The bosses for this game are nicely designed, and I'd like to mention the vicious Venom Viper and The Core in particular, the latter for the ideas behind it (a vicious gift you need to un:box). Overall I can say it was a nice experience, but at least in non-VR, I had basically seen everything after a few hours. But this was actually the same with audio-driven game AudioSurf, which I later picked up for some more challenges and I've used it as a visualizer a lot! Since you can play with your own music, it's always worth picking up again to see what it does with the variation of enemies in the levels, and since the game has had some major updates, you can now also use auto-shooting, so why not use it as an auto-play visualizer?! 7.5/10 — some really neat ideas around the 'Infection'-theme and for someone usually not into Shooters and not that much into Shoot 'Em Up, I liked it because of [the 3 previously mentioned games]. It's a few hours of content for me, but that might be because I haven't played in VR mode. The game also has a max. price tag of €0,79, so I can't complain at all.