A great, quirky addition to your generative music game collection
Sound Shapes is one of those fairly rare music games that, instead of having the player recreate music directly a la Guitar Hero, has the player doing something completely different while intertwining the audio throughout the experience. Meshing the audio so intricately with the visuals and gameplay results in an intensely engaging tour de force for the senses. Games like Rez HD, Everyday Shooter, and Audiosurf are great examples of this phenomenon in practice.
Sound Shapes takes that formula and applies it to the platforming genre, and aside from the occasional curious design decision, does so to great effect.
In Sound Shapes you play as a little ball with one tiny eyeball/birthmark/whatever. Come to think of it, it’s not unlike those little bouncy balls in music videos that hop from one word to the next as the song’s lyrics are displayed on screen. You roll around the various environments, collect notes to add to the musical score, and try to make it to the exit unscathed. This is made easier by the fact that you are surrounded by a glob of adhesive sludge that allows you to stick to certain walls and ceilings. You roll along at a rather mellow speed, but at any time you can hit R1 and your velocity increases dramatically, at the cost of losing your sticky goopiness.
And that’s pretty much it as far as the gameplay is concerned. The game teaches you its fundamental basics the same way we teach children. Light-colored things are safe; red-colored things will hurt you. The originality and variety come in the form of the environments and obstacles you encounter along the way.
The tunes provided for each world, or record, are presented by artists such as Sword & Sworcery composer Jim Guthrie, electronic musician Deadmau5, and mainstream rock band Beck. Practically everything that happens in a level is tied to the music in some way. Moving platforms do so to the beat. When you bounce off the head of one of the few enemies you’ll encounter, the sound effect is strangely musical. In the Sword & Sworcery-themed levels the pixelated stick figure office workers slurp their coffee in time to the melody, and as you roll over file cabinets and server banks, they visibly and audibly cascade in a pleasing string of wind chime notes.
Every round note you collect adds a layer to the soundtrack. In this way, you actually build the background score yourself depending on how many notes you reach. After five or six screens worth, you’ll be delightfully platforming to a full-on beat box house party. The Beck themed levels that close out the campaign were actually my favorites. I won’t ruin it here, but these three stages are where the game’s creativity is at its peak. The developers not only made levels that worked surprisingly well with Beck’s traditionally trippy, less DJ-inspired music, but also experimented with lyrics in some unique, interesting ways that fit well with the rest of the game.
My only real criticism for the main campaign concerns occasional stripping away of certain musical elements when transitioning between screens within a level. It doesn’t occur too often, and you may not notice it right away, but the first time you spend several screens building up a funky soundtrack, only to move to the next screen and have most of the layers you’ve just collected removed, it’s jarring, disappointing, and you won’t be able to not notice when it happens again. More than once I just sat there at the end of a screen, both because I enjoyed the visual and musical splendor I had put together, but also because I knew that as soon as I moved a screen over I would essentially have to build the song back up again.
The stages and music get more complex as you progress. A few of the Deadmau5 levels in particular got pretty fiendish at times. But Sound Shapes merely wants to provide a challenge, not actively keep you from finishing it. It’s quite liberal with the respawn points. It's not uncommon for some of the more taxing levels to have two, three, or even four respawn points within one screen. The main campaign as a whole is not overly difficult, and with a relatively short length, can be finished in just a few hours.
Once you complete the campaign, you get to mess around with the level editor, user-created levels, and Death Mode.
Death Mode, sadly, does not consist of harder versions of the main campaign levels. Rather, they are one-screen stages where you are tasked with collecting a certain number of randomly-placed notes within a given time constraint. The game states that Death Mode just may melt your face. The trials are indeed difficult, but the frustrating part is that since the notes randomly appear in different locations, your success depends less on skill and more on whether or not you're lucky enough to have the notes spawn in close proximity to each other. Death Mode didn't melt my face, but it sure as hell melted my patience.
The level editor and user-created levels have more potential. Making a level is a simple matter of placing objects unlocked by completing campaign levels on the screen. When you buy Sound Shapes, you get a copy for PS3 and a copy for Vita for one price. The games are essentially identical, aside from the Vita making use of its touch screen functionality for menus and to manipulate objects in the level editor. For this, the Vita gets the edge here.
Most of the user-created levels so far weren't exactly blowing me away. Of course there are the obligatory "Mario Bros Theme" and "Zelda Theme" levels, but due to the limited nature of the beats and notes you have at your disposal, and the fact that there's only a single note track to work with, these versions of songs you know and love end up being abstract at best, totally unrecognizable at worst. However, I did manage to find a few non-themed levels that were lengthy and well laid out. I'm sure that given time some budding game musicians can make some truly epic levels.
Lastly, this is one of the first Vita/PS3 games that supports cross-play functionality, allowing you to save your game to the cloud on one system and pick it back up with the same level of progress on the other. This is a great feature, and Sony should support it as much as it can. I had no problems syncing the game on my Vita, but when I would attempt the same on PS3 my efforts were met with inconsistency. Often I would have to try several times to cloud-sync my PS3 game before it would successfully do so. I eventually got it to work, but it was irritating enough to make me play the majority of the time on the Vita.
The aggravating death mode and occasional abrupt change-ups of the music within levels are unfortunate, but fail to detract from the pleasure of the beat-platforming Sound Shapes provides. When this game is on, it's on. Aside from the PS3 cloud-sync issues, it looks and performs great on both platforms. The fact that you're getting both copies for the price of one seals the deal. This is a great, quirky addition to your generative music game collection.
