Kill the Music is a rather lackluster roguelite that can be fun at times, but it has a lot of core flaws that make it really unenjoyable.
Gameplay is simple. One map, enemies spawn, you attack automatically. Pressing the attack button to the beat increases the effectiveness of your attacks, same with dodging. Some enemies shoot projectiles, some charge, some are rotating beam turrets. There's almost no real variety in terms of enemy appearance, attack patterns, health, or anything. The game also spams enemies at you, but it's just enough to where it doesn't feel meticulous but also not enough to where it feels like a real horde. Somehow they hit the sweet spot where both of those things are true and it makes killing enemies feel really lackluster.
The ways you can kill them aren't really that exciting either. Weapons have a few categories and they barely change between them. In fact they're so similar that if you keep one after restarting a run it will say you kept Guitar 3, or Drums 2, etc. The map doesn't change, the soundtrack (while it sounds great) has far too few songs for this type of game, higher difficulties hardly change the gameplay, it's all so lacking in variety.
You can upgrade yourself by choosing a harder stage, but the stage difficulty is usually just killing a larger number of enemies rather than actual difficulty. They won't even spawn in faster at higher levels. You can upgrade your weapons/instruments after completing a level, but half the time the upgrades are useless to you. You might see three upgrades that all require you to be at max health for them to function, meanwhile you cannot for the life of you find an upgrade that lets you [i] heal. [/i] Sometimes the upgrades it gives you to choose from LITERALLY cannot even be used. It will say in the upgrade description that you need another upgrade to make this one work, and that upgrade is not guaranteed to spawn before the one that requires it. Not to mention that upgrades given to you can be duplicates. Imagine if you played Slay the Spire 2, won a fight, and the three card choices you got at the end of the fight were all the exact same card. That can happen in this game.
Did I mention the visual noise? It is a massive struggle to be able to tell what is happening on screen at any given time. Your attacks, enemies, enemy attacks, and the multicolored environment make it hard to tell what you're hitting and why you're getting hit. The video on this Steam Store page does not do this point justice, it gets EXTREMELY hard to see things, and honestly it gives me a genuine headache. I had to take breaks in between runs to just rest my eyes.
The story is nice enough, but all you get is a short visual novel cutscene after beating a new "absurdity" difficulty. Hardly a fitting reward for slogging through 15+ waves.
I tried to like the game, I did. But it not only doesn't impress, it actively prevents itself from being great through some really bizarre design choices. Sadly, I don't recommend this.
