SUBSØNIC

the aperture is a terrible boss other than that, amazing game

I wanted to like SUBSONIC, man. I really did. I mean, this game is practically [i]tailor made[/i] to my interests. A twin-stick shooter that I can sic my whole music library on? For only [i]five bucks[/i]?! Surely you're kidding, that's a steal! SUBSONIC is a fairly simple, by the numbers twin-stick exactly as the trailers suggest; shoot enemies, dodge bullets, collect power-ups, try not to die, aim for a high score. You can choose to play single tracks, or “packs” of royalty-free music courtesy of Pixabay. While I can understand having to use free music for a project like this, and can excuse the lower overall quality, there had to have been a better selection than “Reels Phonk Beat” and “Rollin (Dark Dubstep Trap)”. And while you can import your own music — more on that later — the packs appear to be the intended way to play. Bosses and several enemies only appear during pack-based play, and the score-inflating challenge modifiers can only be used in that mode. I’d be more forgiving of this if the three packs felt distinct, but aside from the boss of each they’re mostly indistinguishable. The gameplay is passable at best; you get a wave-firing gun, where each wave expands until it travels a certain distance or hits a certain number of enemies/projectiles. This, combined with the later power-up system, results in your weapon feeling either too weak to put down even the simplest enemies, or strong enough that you can sweep the entire screen by spinning your firing stick with basically nothing in between. The bosses aren’t great; the Megalith is a good warmup damage sponge that’s easy enough to read, but The Aperture and Dante fill the screen with so many distortions and particle effects it becomes impossible to tell what’s going on. This is especially true of The Aperture which, even after several attempts, I’m still not entirely sure how to deal with aside from “sit at point blank and pump bullets into it until it dies or you die first”. I should probably note that damage feedback in this game isn’t great; there’s a subtle spark effect that’s easily lost if you leave the motion settings on the default. While it would be one thing if every enemy went down in one hit like Geometry Wars, many enemies can tank several hits, which can make it difficult to tell if something is about to go down; not a great thing when there’s already so much going on at once in this game. And while there are options to set the difficulty to the game’s own equivalent of Easy-Medium-Hard, the only measurable difference I found was that Hard didn’t give you continues. And there were more enemies. During a song, can collect temporary upgrades that are dropped by larger enemies and are lost at the end of the song; they’re not very interesting, but getting a solid run of Fire Rate, Damage, and Pierce Surge usually makes the difference between SUBSONIC being so easy you fall asleep at the wheel, and struggling to cut through even smaller enemies as their bullets eat your shots. You also get a Soundcheck before each song — permanent item upgrades in the flavors of Common (perks that can build into something useful), Rare (highly useful perks that can carry you in later stages and break the game outright), and Epic (gimmicky, build-defining doodads that are highly liable to kill you). Though this makes a degree of sense when playing through the level packs, if you’re playing a single song you’re expected to pick one from a random selection of three (well, six if you re-roll); why? Why can’t I just pick a loadout for the song, or even just pick a Soundcheck of my own accord at that point? Why offer the Soundcheck at all when playing a single song? But the worst of the lot are the Draw upgrades during the song; these massively throw the pace of the game and never feel impactful enough to be worth it except for the Golden Hour, a unique score boost that is, for some reason, a luck-based item pull. On the part of all the high score chasers in the audience [i]in the game about chasing high scores; [b]WHY?[/b][/i] My score's order of magnitude should have nothing to do with whether RNGesus feels like playing ball today. But the main attraction as far as I’m concerned — the reason I bought this game — is the ability to import your own songs; and, to SUBSONIC’s credit, this works, but I can’t say it works [i]well[/i]. I tried a variety of different artists and genres with this feature, and I've noticed that basically every track played the same way. The only times I was able to notice a strong beat sync were on tracks that practically had their own metronome somewhere on-stage (such as [i]Drift[/i] by Sierra On-line, or [i]Everything About You[/i] by Ugly Kid Joe); in most other cases, it was a bit ambiguous. In fact, tracks that were more [I]ambient[/i] resulted in very difficult stages; you would expect songs like [i]Black Rose[/i] by VOLBEAT or [i]CURSEBREAKER X Theme[/I] by EQUIP to generate fast, difficult stages that demand your utmost focus, but these tended to be fairly sedate. In comparison, tracks like [i]Motorway[/i] by Fearofdark (a misty-eyed jazz-fusion track) and [i]Deep Sea Dream[/i] by CD (hazy, dreamy vaporwave) resulted in ridiculous swarms of enemies at low BPM which cuts your fire-rate to nearly nothing. If you want a real challenge from SUBSONIC, put away the EDM and pull out your orchestral selection. Not to mention the process of importing songs is finicky; no attempt to read track metadata at all. All you get is a title and optionally a band name. And if you flub it up on import, or if you do a batch import, you can’t edit song titles or artists without completely re-importing the track. Grr, inconvenience! There are also a lot of little things about the gameplay that I’d like to mention; power-ups can easily drop outside the arena where you can’t collect them. The arena transformations make little sense and are incredibly jarring when they happen with essentially no warning — which is every time. Several Soundcheck and Draw upgrades don’t feel useful and, again, many Epic Soundchecks are liable to kill you or otherwise aren’t worth the risk to take. MP4 import doesn’t work despite the Steam page saying it should. The "Blink!" powerup is incredibly disorienting and makes it too easy to lose your character on the screen even after you learn how it works. Curses in general add nothing to the game; either they don’t have an appreciable effect, or they’re "Inverted!", which may very well kill you instantly. Teleport is simply a non-consensual Blink; they might as well both be Curses. Tracking accuracy makes no sense in a survival twin-stick; not only do I have no idea how the game is measuring it, I’m not sure why there are two feats tied to near-perfect accuracy. Oh, and if you set Motion Intensity to 0, it breaks the “tail” feature entirely along with a lot of visual effects. Ooh, right. Your ship has a damaging tail. It does basically nothing but you’ll occasionally get a free kill with it, I guess. Sometimes it’s longer than usual. I don’t know, man. Despite all this, I deeply encourage the developer to keep working on SUBSONIC, if only to fix some of the technical issues before moving on to their next game. Maybe even put some more meat on its bones. But in its current state, I’d say even five dollars is too much.