A nice toy, but not really a full game
Audiosurf is a game that takes either mp3's on your computer, or music from internet radio sites, and translates them for you into a track of varying obstacles and speed. You can choose different levels of difficulty and different ships in order to change the gameplay. In each track, you collect varying colors of blocks, with larger clusters gaining more points.
While this idea sounds good in theory, in practice it boils down to a fairly repetitive and shallow game. The rhythm and speed of any particular song doesn't seem to impact the track that dramatically, and there is essentially no other gameplay outside of travelling in a straight line with shifts to the left and right to collect blocks. After a couple songs in a few different genres, you quickly realize that almost every level plays exactly the same, making it seem inferior even to early NES games.
Audiosurf has a fairly good presentation, with many bright colors and a clean interface. The track has a smooth look, and this aesthetic makes it easy to play for long periods of time if you were playing off the radio or a playlist. There's not much in terms of sound effects however.
The only thing saving Audiosurf from failure is its innovation in being able to take songs and dynamically generating a level out of them. Dynamically generated content in games is a fairly new and not very well done feature, and while Audiosurf also fails to execute it in a convincing way, it doesn't fall flat either.
Audiosurf gains big ups for innovation and presentation, however the core of the game is simply not solid enough to merit it as an excellent game. Even for its price, there are quite a number of other games you could get that are much better.
