Melody's Escape 2

Aesthetically, I think I still prefer the first game, but the core gameplay is a good as it's ever been, with some improvements to audio analysis. Lovely bundled music from aeseaes, a duo I had never heard of before, and which provides a nice change of pace from the more energetic electronic. Excited to see what's to come!

I liked the original Melody's Escape a lot, and I think this one is even better. The visuals are colorful and engaging, and the algorithm used to convert songs into note-laden tracks works quite well and feels natural and intuitive for the most part. To keep every track from looking the same, songs may feature slower sections where Melody walks and catches notes in her hand, or sections where she flies quickly just above the ground, adding a bit of visual variety. There are also a few customization options, mostly to change the way Melody looks. I do have a few gripes, though. - The way songs are converted into tracks often seems to follow a predictable pattern. For instance, many songs will have you pressing ABA, directional input, XAX, directional input, YXY, directional input, BYB, directional input, and so on, so that your right thumb is constantly pairing buttons in a clockwise motion. It's actually exceedingly rare to get Y and A (or X and B) consecutively. It would have been nice to see more variation in how the algorithm generates notes. - The screen will freeze for a moment in the middle of a song, making it very easy to miss the next note. This isn't random, and tends to happen the first time I miss a note, go into "flying" mode, or make a "jump" in a play session. It won't happen again under those circumstances in the same session, but the next time I play I'll usually have the freezing occur again. - One of the achievements necessitates playing 500 (!) different songs, which seems like an unreasonably large number. I did eventually get it, but only after playing this game on and off for several years. None of those gripes are dealbreakers, though, and I had a lot of fun with Melody's Escape 2. I can't really speak for the music included with the game (which I never played), but this game is a great way to experience my favorite songs from my CD collection. Recommended.

This game needs more visibility for sure, so review time here we go: + It's one of the very few rhythm games that doesn't trigger sensory overload for me by introducing many disco colours or backgrounds. Aka the readability is pretty good even on higher difficulties. + There's literally a custom setting for difficulty where you can pick 2-4-8 buttons combined with other things depending on your own pace/needs. + The song generator is great and consistently outputs good maps. I've tried with gaming OST (toby fox and FF14), tried with songs that shift a lot in intensity, and some super old German anime intros. All of them were done really nicely, takes about 3-4 seconds for those. Only thing it seems to struggle with is if lyrics fade out into few slower words and it seemingly can't decide if it wants to follow the singing or the instruments now. Usually me and those games fall short if I can't find maps matching my nerdy/niche music, or I need to rely on osu people to map something. + A lot of QoL in the options. - Difficulty of hard could indeed be a little tighter. Coming from osu at around 3-4 stars difficulty I find the approach speed/bpm isn't too high, or perhaps that's just my taste in music I guess. - Maps being created by an algorithm does mean that they all end up feeling same-y at times. If there was (as recommended in another review) the option to manually finetune songs after they're created for a workshop (or external website if copyright is a concern) it'd be the perfect game.

At the time of this review, I have played around 20 hours of the first Melody's Escape and about 3 hours of this game. In all good faith, I want to be clear that I think the original Melody's Escape is a better game than this one. While the graphics are worse, the art style has an iconic feel to it. The first game has many more settings and options for how YOU want to play the game. By all means, it is one of my favorite rhythm games of all time. But this review is for Melody's Escape 2, not Melody's Escape. So here are all of my thoughts: This game is pretty. I wouldn't say it is dropdead gorgeous, but it is very pretty. Importing songs is incredibly fast and easy. The concept is very easy to pick up and play. Just throw in a song, and press the corresponding buttons as they appear. Yet there are many quirks that bother me about this game. The first thing that really confused me was the timing for when you're supposed to hit the note. This isn't one of those rhythm games where you are matching a note to a track, your character is just running on top of the directions. My instinct was that I was supposed to hit the corresponding note when my character either stepped on the note or stepped on the very middle of the note. However, the perfect timing is actually when your character steps on the VERY FAR EDGE of the note. There is no clear indication of this and it took trial and error after turning on a hidden setting to reveal if you were too soon/too late. This indicator is a big improvement over the first game, which only tells you if a timing was "good" or "great" or "perfect". Another gripe I have with the game is that it's simply too easy for a seasoned rhythm game player. Even on the hardest difficulty, I can't enter a "flow state" because the notes are just too sparse. If the FOV was higher, perhaps they could have increased the amount of notes-per-section-of-track to compensate for this... but as is, some songs just get too cramped to fit all of the notes and somehow they still come too slowly for a rhythm game player. My other gripe is with the control scheme on the hardest difficulty. This game has two kinds of notes: bubbles and boxes. The bubbles are controlled with WASD and the boxes are controlled by arrow keys. Unfortunately in Melody's Escape 2, which wasn't quite the case in the first game, WASD is easily 3-5 times more frequent than the arrow keys. I find my fingers start to cramp, wishing that the arrow keys were the bubbles and WASD was the boxes. Lastly... there are times when the notes after an obstacle may be nearly impossible to see before they need to be hit. This is quite rare, though, and I haven't yet seen any that are truly impossible... but I wouldn't be surprised if they exist. TLDR; If I have all of these complaints, though, why do I recommend this game? Because it's great! You get to play your own music as a rhythm game and it comes with a lovely visualizer of a girl running to the intensity of the music. If that sounds appealing to you, then you should try it out :)

Хорошая вещь, не хуже первой части. По сравнению с первой как будто бы несколько лучше генерация пользовательских треков. Очень непривычно 3D после 2D в первой части, мне субъективно ближе первая часть с 2D графикой, но это уже вкусовщина. Во второй части очень нравится окружение в виде равнины с травой, красиво прям. Прикольно сделали различные варианты внешности протагонистки, варьируются причёски и одежда.

Melody's Escape 2 delivers what it promises, and does so in a really solid quality.

Verry impressive how well well this works.

Обожаю ритм игры Это та игра, которую я мечтал встретить на странице рекомендаций Музыка из трейлера продала мне это великолепие с первых секунд Разрабам удачи, а мне терпения

Je n'aime pas les jeux de rythme, et pourtant j'adore Melody Escape, avec les animations la gratification de réussir et immédiate, et si on se rate, la partie ne s'arrête pas, non, la punition est bien plus subtile, on doit voir Melody se ramasser la gueule à cause de notre erreur, ce qui personnellement me motive encore plus à m'améliorer. J'avais acheté le 2 à sa sortie, j'ai assez déçu, mais après trois ans de patch il est maintenant excellent. Mais je ne laisse pas pour autant le 1 de coté, ils sont tout les deux très différents et ont chacun leur charme. Je n'y ai pas des centaines d'heure, mais ça reste pourtant un de mes jeux de coeur, même si j'y joue par courte session, c'est toujours un moment agréable.

A big improvement from the original game in every way. The music analysis algorithm makes the gameplay noticeably more fluid, though it can still be finicky in some genres. If you enjoyed the previous Melody's Escape, this is an all around upgrade.