Bit.Trip Beat

Games that have a retro theme nowadays are becoming more and more common, and often, they are actually successful, like the case with Mega Man 9. Unlike Mega Man 9, this isn't an old and established franchise redone in pixelated graphics, but instead it's a "reimagination", as I like to call it, of Pong, the game that started it all. Like Mega Man 9, Bit.Trip Beat! is hard. Very hard.

Basically, instead of going competitive, as Pong did, this is a single player (or cooperative) game, wherein your bar is on the left side of the screen and barrages of square pixels come from the right side of the screen, and you must keep them from going off the left side of the screen. Each of them you hit successfully you will receive a set amount of points for, but as you hit more and more consecutively without missing one, you receive a multiplier for each one you get.

Along with being Pong inspired, the game has a pretty strong rhythmic feeling to it. When you hit the pixels back to the right side of the screen, you will hear amazing retro sounding beats.

The game consists of three levels, all of which are extremely difficult to finish. The three levels in the game are all very, very long. It would probably have been more smart to separate these three levels that approach 15 minutes into 20 or so levels. Since the levels are so excruciatingly long and difficult, you very well might not get the change to complete the game, maybe not even the first level. And to top it all off, at the end of every level, you'll have to face off against a boss.

One of the biggest problems about the game is the readability. The backgrounds in the game, which are very great looking, I might add, can look the same as the pixels that are flying towards you. When you have a huge red and yellow object floating through the middle of the screen and you have orange dots coming at you, you very well will not be able to see them very well. Also, the smaller and lighter colored blue pixels are just dumb, you can barely see them at all.

The game has no online functionality, offering no online co-op, competitive, or leaderboards. With a game based on points and getting the highest score you can possibility get, these seems rather odd.

Final Decision
Even though it's ridiculously frustrating and it's the kind of game that you'll just want to play for 10 or 20 minutes because if you lose the level, you're not gonna wanna go through all of the stuff you just had to do again. If the levels were separated differently the game could be a lot loss frustrating and difficult. Though, for the mere price of 600 Wii Points, this WiiWare game should satisfy you.