Symphony

This is another one of those games that I picked up on sale with a little bit of apprehension, but was pleased with the overall enjoyment of the game. It combines your music with a fast paced, challenging, customizeable, and enjoyable gameplay where you progress through an admittedly sketchy storyline. If you like music and frequently have a handful of minutes that isn't enough to invest in a "real" game, but too much to let idle, then this is a fantastic game for you. Caution, after about three songs, you will start to cry -- blinking is a gift. Don't over estimate it.

[h1]80 / 100[/h1] Fun little Shoot 'Em Up that uses your own music to generate the waves of incoming enemies. You only have a small play zone to maneuver, with enemies coming in from the sides & top of your screen making for some intense close combat game play. The responsivness of your ship with the mouse is great giving you minute control over your position & graphically the enemies & weapons fire is easy to distinguish even when there is a lot going on, on-screen. Each song completed will grant you a random weapons upgrade drop, with a chance of a rare drop. These can be purchased (& upgraded) to increase your firepower of the four weapons slots on your ship & you can even change the angle of fire for each slot to customise your layout further which is cool. This is needed as you progress up the difficulty levels & to kill the random bosses needed to complete the story mode. Scoring is combo based, so the more you can kill in sequence (with less enemies escaping), will grant higher scores but stay nimble as each death will cost you a score penalty. Each kill also drops a bonus '♫' to pickup, granting health, power-ups & score increases so you need to be quick & get them all before they disappear for the best scores. I found all but the top two difficulty levels relatively easy; each difficulty level unlocks after killing three bosses. This can take some time making the start of the game feel rather dull to grind out the first few bosses, but if you stick with it, it becomes far more enjoyable later. For me, I just got a little tipsy off a few ciders, cranked up the volume & enjoyed some of my favourite tracks which certainly helped make the initial grind pass by much quicker :p . Although your music generates the enemies, you don't really get a sense of any pattern to the beat which would have been nice. For example, sometimes it goes into 'hardcore mode' in parts of songs you wouldn't expect & this seems to increase in frequency the higher the difficulty you go. It's not a big issue though, as you do get the feeling of randomness in the waves so each run feels different. Regardless of the few shortcomings, if you love your music & your shoot 'em ups it is very easy to waste away a few hours in ♪ Symphony ♪ [i]liberating your music![/i] [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/TrueBlueReviews#curation]If you enjoyed reading this review, please follow [u]True Blue Reviews[/u] for more recommendations![/url]

Symphony is another way of enjoying your music. This addictive and engaging casual shooter uses your music to configure the levels which you play. The game on itself is not very long... the story mode, at least, but as long as you want to just shoot something without complications and good challenge (do not forget the point of having your music integrated in the game), this little jewel will make wonders, so the real life of symphony is as long as big is your music library. The mechanical is quite simple. You choose one song, and then, depending of its characteristics it throws to you to beat (and to strike you down mercilessly) one thing or other, and while you shoot and dodge cool lights you must collect inspiration points which raise your marker and at the same time repair your.... spaceship ? I bought it just for experimenting and i'm far beyond than pleased with it.

An absouletly fabulous game-- beautiful and well made-- easy to pick up, difficult to master... etc. There are a lot of things I could say about the experience that is Symphony, but it really is hard to put into words. If you're farmiliar with musical lingo, and fluent in reading sheet music, then this game will become one of the most entertaining and musically stimulating experiences. Have you noticed I've been refering to it as an experience? Well, I mean, this is one of the only titles I know in which you can import in speedcore techno and rock out while going through a horribly difficult bullet hell, and immediately swap over to something calm and classical while stil destroying interesting and yet heavily frustrating enemy types. Pros: Can import ALMOST any song and play it to your difficulty level Awesome menu music Fun upgrades and weapons Replayibility Auto fire options Cons: You cannot import songs longer than 10 minutes Can get painfully difficult Bosses are spontainious and impossible to predict their encounters Enemies can be unforgiving if you lose a ship part Upgrading ship parts gets really expensive Overall 8/10. Buy it if you like bullet hell shooters, or even just arcade style games.

It's innovative, but its polish as a bullet-hell game is questionable, and the music doesn’t integrate well with the gameplay. It almost feels like playing a bullet-hell game with random music in the background.

If you've got the music library the size of a postage stamp, this game is fine. But if, like me, you have closer to 100,000 songs in your library, this game is a headache that's not worth your time. I am already genuinely confused that this game needs to assign powerups to songs, but it's even more baffling that there isn't a proper search filter function, or just a basic "press the first letter of the name of the song you're looking for" in this thing. Even worse, if I accidentally hit the button to assign folders to search music from, I need to go through the process of looking through 100,000 tracks again - faster, but still time-consuming. Are you kidding me with this system? And icing on the cake, if you ever move your music library around, like, say, from your hard drive to an external one for absolutely understandable space reasons, the songs in the game just float around dead, informing you that they can't be found in their original sources anymore. You can still upload those same songs in the game, but they won't count, they're just duplicates now. Too many music games make the mistake of not having a proper filtering or search option, but this game went way and beyond making the process feel like a headache. If you have a big music library that you do not wish to start reorganizing just to appease the whims of this game, then avoid. For any reference to the developer: For god's sake, just let me pick a song from my library and play it.

Symphony has an interesing premise; similar to Audiosurf, the experience changes based on what kind of music you have on your hard drive. The game's framing device involves an interdimensional demon that consumes music, but this is really just an excuse for me to blow up little Vertex graphics space ships while I listen to Iron Maiden (Not that anyone should need an excuse for that kind of activity). At its heart, Symphony is basically a bullet-hell shooter. The ship is customizable, with four spaces for weapons and numerous different firing patterns to unlock and upgrade to even the playing field. Each song is deconstructed by the game and translated into patterns of enemies and intensity levels based on the changes in tempo and harmony. Unfortunately, a number of flaws continually gnaw at me while I play; firstly, several of the enemies can absorb an absolutely obnoxious amount of damage before breaking, meaning that the game's feature to aim weapons in different directions is largely an exercise in frustration. On just medium difficulty, even the fast-moving triangle shaped foes are hard to take down without several direct hits from high-powered weapons. Assuming you do manage to break several foes in a row, enemies swarm the screen in rhythmic patterns, each one in a wave flying in the same path. This means that picking up dropped notes for score means you have to fly into the next enemy in the wave, as it'll take the same path as the one you just shot down. Meanwhile, enemies entering the screen will fire projectiles that can be very hard to distinguish from the pulsing colors of the background. The game allows players to acquire copies of weapons they like and upgrade them for higher power, but then punishes the player for upgrading by penalizing your score while using stronger weapons. Higher difficulty levels allow for stronger weapons and a better score bonus, but the scaling is slanted sharply, with enemies gaining far more strength than the player. I'm still issuing a reccomendation, because Symphony still has a lot going for it in the creative department, but there some definite shortcomings that prospective players should be aware of.