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- Empty Clip Studios
- Empty Clip Studios
- Empty Clip Studios
- Empty Clip Studios
Symphony (2012)
Released On: Aug 6, 2012
75
7.5
Where to Buy
Where to Buy
All Platforms
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 13 Critic Reviews
75
62% Positive
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
38% Mixed
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 13 Critic Reviews
75
62% Positive
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
38% Mixed
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Although the concept of Symphony is simple, it is one of the most fun and addicting experiences I've had in a good while. Much of the enjoyment comes from the title's ability to incorporate personal music files. Great controls, fun upgrades and a level count that is matched by the number of MP3 files in your collection, Symphony offers a fantastic thrill for a great price.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 54 User Ratings
7.5
65% Positive
35 Ratings
35 Ratings
24% Mixed
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
11% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 54 User Ratings
7.5
65% Positive
35 Ratings
35 Ratings
24% Mixed
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
11% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
Anyone praising Beat Hazard forget about it instantly and go pick this one up! Symphony is an amazing game really, I just can't stop playing it. And with a few thousand songs from various soundtracks through game music to my favourite metal bands, this title will keep me occupied for quite some time. Beat Hazard is seriously boring compared to Symphony. Symphony has a lot of cool ideas, a little story background and a far better drive. You'll always want to play just one more song :)
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PC
It's a unique and fun shooter boasting a far more vibrant color palette and better default soundtrack than Beat Hazard. Vertical shooter fans will adore it, as will those with extensive music collections.
Symphony is an exciting mouse-controlled shooter that delivers a dynamic way to enjoy your favorite music.
I expected more from Symphony. Compared with colorful spectacles like Child of Eden or Gridrunner Revolution this music shooter seems blend. It's nice to see the action develop to your personal soundtrack though…
More variety in the graphics and gameplay modes would have helped, but for those who want to listen to music on a long flight, for example, Symphony provides an excellent way to enhance that experience and get a little gaming satisfaction on the way.
In its current form Symphony looks more like a beta version than finished game, but it's worth to check in three month whether the lump of coal has turned into a diamond yet. [10/2012, p.72]
I'm a fan of music games, so I bought this game the day it was released. It is beautiful, simple and a great way to re-experience your music. My only pet peeve with it was that it failed to recognize my iTunes library at first, and it took me a bit of time to figure out I had to download the latest version of Quick Time to get it to work. The game play experience is clean, simple and fun. As you progress through the levels of difficulty, you also get progressively deeper interactions with enemies that warp or change the music in different ways until you kill them. The ship's progression mechanic and the ability to unlock a multitude of weapon and customize your ship accordingly kept my interest in the game's mechanic going, but ultimately - it is the experience of playing a cool game on top of your favorite music that draws me back to it. For the price-point it's at - I highly recommend this game. It feels cleaner and better than Beat Hazard, and it provides a different and novel visual experience.
If - like me - you have a large song library of tunes you love, this is a great way to re-experience and rediscover your music ;).
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PC
While this is a great game in concept, in implementation, it stumbles. The procedural game setup can always be a double-edged sword, since, even if you "never get the same layout twice" by randomizing the stages, if all the stages just consist of the same 6 things over and over, then if you've seen one, you've really seen it all. Symphony has not just too few enemies to stay entertaining, it has the same small number of enemies flying in the same small number of patterns over and over again. In fact, there are so few patterns of enemy flight paths that you frequently find ships overlapping!
There is another major problem in the game, in that, apparently fearing that they might make some songs too hard or others too easy, they decided to give the player infinite lives, a ship so huge you can't possibly dodge anything, but make it take tons of hits and regenerate with every enemy killed (including by ramming your ship into it), so there's basically no skill to the game at all, you just play by buying up more expensive weapons for your ship to be able to handle higher levels that give you more cash to upgrade your weapons enough to handle the next highest level.
In general, I think how much you like this game depends on how much you've played it. It's fun for the first few hours, but notably, only 0.5% of players ever actually played the game for 12 hours. That, right there, shows exactly the problem in the game. It just doesn't have enough variety to keep people coming back past playing their favorite 20 songs or so.
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PC
This could have easily been as big (and better) than Audiosurf. Unfortunately, the ridiculously clunky implementation of leaderboards (which is really what these kind of games are mostly about - at least to me) and overall very bad interface keep it from being that.
It looks like it was designed for mobile platforms and there was NO optimization for PC gaming whatsoever. HUGE text and mouse input only (and on a general note: one cannot store weapon loadouts. It's tremendous fun having to swap all those weapons depending on what difficulty one chooses...). But worse than that, you can't see anywhere which songs were already played by others, you have to let the game analyze a whole song (which takes about 20 seconds) and then you still have to click a button just to check whether there are leaderboards for that particular song. Good luck finding one. Aside from the songs that come with the game and those that are discussed on the GOG forums I have not found a single one so far. And... the fact that there may not be a huge diversity of songs that have been played by people (I can't say for sure because I don't have the time to let the game analyze 100 songs just to check that) wouldn't even be so bad if they would either at least show in the song list which songs have leaderboards or have a catalog somewhere, even if it is just on their website. SOMETHING, damn it!
They should've ditched the whole story aspect (which I find just annoying aside from the somewhat interesting boss battles) and concentrated on the things mentioned above instead. It could have been so great because while I like the interface of Audiosurf, I don't really like the gameplay of it. With Symphony, I would LOVE the basic gameplay but without proper leaderboards it's just useless. So in a way, my score is somewhat generous. But... it does look and play very well and I see all the potential that it has. It seems such a waste because it seems to me that implementing those things I mentioned probably would just take them 5% of the time that it took to create this whole game. And it could catapult it from nice but useless to cult status.
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PC
Interesting concept with lots of major design flaws. How much you enjoy the game depends on how much you loved your music collection. Honestly, beside looking at the cool colors and effects on screen the game is a bit pointless. Enemies ships always comes out at the same spot forcing you to stay at the bottom of the screen and only move up to collect points and power up. It's pretty much the exact same thing for every sound. Also, the lack of random or shuffle feature makes absolutely no sense. Don't waste your money, just put on a headphone and enjoy your music.
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PC
Nice game for the first hour, then you will notice that it's always the same and the levels are very similar to each other. You could disable the music and put a random track in the background and feel no difference.
After the Mezzo-piano difficulty, Mezzo-forte and so on are completely impossible to beat 100% for the 95% of the songs: plenty of enemies, small arena and a big collision box due to the large ship.
Not mentioning the "cannon balls" fired by the enemies ships that can't be seen when the arena became red (on black background) since they're red or black.
The story is useless for this type of game and unattractive, the Bosses are easy and only of 5 types. There should be a way to "deactivate" the story mode if I do not want to be interrupted when I'm playing since it doesn't allow you to record a score on the leaderboard because of the extra points you get for the Boss.
6,99
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PC
Summary Your music is under attack, you must liberate it! A mysterious entity is absorbing and corrupting your music before your very eyes. You must battle through your own song collection, discover items, customize your ship and fight boss enemies to liberate the Symphony of Souls and reclaim your music!...
Platforms:
- PC
Initial Release Date: Aug 6, 2012
Developer:
- Empty Clip Studios
Publisher: Empty Clip Studios
Genres:
