BIT.TRIP CORE

If you like extremely challenging rhythm games, this might be up your alley, but I don't personally find the gameplay to be fun - the entire game is played with a single mechanic of directing your arrow in one of four cardinal directions, and then hitting an activation ("strum") button like the space bar to "hit" the musical note blocks that are coming across the bars of each direction. It's sort of like if you were trying to play guitar hero, but with the tabulature mixed up like the windows pipe screen saver. Notes cross back and forth across the bars, or change directions, or speed up and slow down without warning. It's an interesting challenge but the game is extremely unforgiving, and does not have a challenge mode. Additionally, it's visually confusing, with very flashy, cartoon-like background elements that make it very hard to focus on the game pieces. If you do badly enough, you end up in "negative mode" which is all black and white, and you have to score better to get back out of negative mode and keep progressing, but I'd rather just play the whole game in negative mode, it's so hard to see what's going on sometimes with all the neon and stuff.

I've got 65h clocked on the WiiWare version of this game, so it's fair to say this is one of my favourite entries in the BIT.TRIP series! Great to have this on PC now where I can play it in full HD and let those incredible colours properly sear my eyeballs! The thumping soundtrack is great, and getting a perfect or near perfect score is soooooooooo satisfying! This game is pretty tough, and if you're not interested in pattern learning it's probably not for you, but it's one of my favourite rhythm action games I've ever played!