AudioSurf Preview February 11,2008 - AudioSurf is a game that seems to be taking the gaming community by storm.  Its concept is a brilliant one: combine elements of a racing game with those of a puzzle game and set them to any music you’d like to listen to.  It blends elements from classic games like F-Zero and Klax, and it has the ability to generate levels based on the music you feed it.  This generating of levels based on your input has been done long ago by Vib Ribbon, but it’s something that should just be done more often. 

The game does a good job of easing you into the flow of things.  You’ll get a Tutorial that explains the basic goal of the game, and it will give you hints on what to do as you play.  It starts off simple enough – match three colored blocks together in any pattern as long as there are three touching.  As you play the game, it will start mixing in other colors for you to match.  It then becomes a matter of deciding which blocks to hit and which ones to let pass.  Letting blocks pass can be a good thing too, since there are blocks which will not make matches with any others.  Learning which ones to snag and which ones to let slide is the key, and it’s something that is vastly different for every single song you play.  A piece of smooth Jazz music will give you a nice smooth and easy going run, but plugging in something hard and heavy like Dragonforce’s Fury Of The Storm will yield one mother of a rollercoaster.  In essence, how difficult the game will be is not only determined by the setting you’re playing on, but by the style of music you pick. 

This is AudioSurf’s brilliance; it has the potential to have literally millions of different levels, because there are millions of different songs.  As you progress through the game you will unlock new characters which will give you special abilities, like being able to shunt blocks to the side.  The variety in characters and music means that it will be possible to play any song in vastly different ways.  So there should be no shortage of replay value. 

From a presentation standpoint AudioSurf may look simple at first, but there are many subtle details that start to stand out after a while.  The swirling backgrounds and the highway that bumps along to the beat of the music start to give you the feeling that the game is going for pure style rather than trying to be a technical tour-de-force.  AudioSurf does have its share of cool technology, but it’s mostly under the hood.  It’s that technology that generates levels for you, and manages to do a remarkably good job of it. 

To keep you playing, AudioSurf has an online scoreboard which will keep track of the best scores for every song.  The size of the database involved to make this happen must be immense.  It’s quite a bold undertaking, which will hopefully work out well. 

AudioSurf is scheduled for release on the 15^th of February.  It will be available on Steam for a mere $8.95.  So far, it looks like money well spent.

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