Is that an LSD relapse? No, that's Audiosurf
Audiosurf is a game in which you control a craft, racing along a track created by a song of your choosing. It is a media player cum puzzle game. The game creates a track based on any song in your collection or, if you choose, you can play songs from a CD. The game also comes with the soundtrack to Valve's The Orange Box, including the legendary "Still Alive" the end song from Portal, by Jonathon Coulton. In addition to this, there is a feature called "Audiosurf Radio" which allows you to play featured tracks by independent artists, as well as the "Audiosurf Overture", these change on a weekly basis.
The aim of the game is to match coloured blocks that are racing towards you, which you have to catch in a grid at the bottom of the screen. If you match 3 blocks of the same colour, they dissappear, gaining you points, along the lines of other match-3 puzzle games. There are also power-ups, which change the colours of blocks in your grid, and which give you several blocks of a colour. As the music gets more intense, the game throws you downhill, when it's more relaxed, you go slowly uphill.
The game has three difficulty settings: "Casual", "Pro", and "Elite". Each song has a leaderboard, on which you can compete with other players on a song, each song has three leaderboards, one for each difficulty, so you're only competing against players on the same difficulty.
There are a variety of craft to choose from each of which changes the game:
"Mono" "Mono Pro" and "Ninja Mono" each only have one colour hence the name, but also have grey blocks to contend with, which other craft do not.
"Vegas" which allows you to shuffle the grid, matching up blocks of the same colour.
And "Eraser" which allows you to remove one colour from the grid.
The game also includes an "Ironmode" in which the game ends if any of the columns in the grid are overfilled. Enabling Ironmode also removes the shoulder lanes, which lowers the chance of avoiding unwanted colours or greys.
When the song is louder and faster, the colours change from cool colours to hot colours which are worth more.Each track is unique, and in conjunction with the large amount of characters and Ironmode, this makes it a very replayable game. In my opinion it is a very enjoyable game, well worth the 9.99 it is on Steam.
How long will the game last? Well, it depends on how much you love music, if you adore music, and are always listening to it, it will last you a very long time, if you only listen to music while you're doing something else, then you probably won't like this game as much.
