Symphony is an arcade style shooting game, similar to Galaga. Players control a ship, fire upon enemies and stay alive by not getting hit. Pretty basic stuff. The twist here is the levels are all designed around music – specifically your music.
I loaded up Symphony, and it asked to search through my computer and check my MP3 collection. I was eager to play, not sit and wait while the game sorted through 15,000 MP3 files. This took way too long. There are a couple of songs pre-loaded onto the game, which should have been sufficient to get started. I sat and waited for several minutes not playing. The included in-game music should have been the tutorial level instead of waiting for my music to get scanned.
Alright, fine, it took a while, but I got to playing. By default I have my computer’s volume down low. As I played Symphony I wanted to turn the volume up. There are buttons on my computer that are tied to performing such an act. They were rendered ineffective. This was frustrating. I decided to “window” the game so as to be able to get to my virtual desktop easily and then control the volume. The windowed presentation of Symphony was marginal at best and I couldn’t get out of it. This was particularly frustrating.
Playing Symphony is another matter. While there are some technical issues with regards to how the game acts on the “back end” the “front end”, or the gameplay itself, is quite good. You just have to get through the rough bits to get to it.
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Enemies come at the player in waves based on the music in each track. Something like The Ramones with a constant steady driving beat can lead to what feels like a constant parade of attack (that is mercifully short). A song with a lot of variation in tempo with crescendos will alter accordingly and have the enemies appear in a similar fashion.
Weapons on the ship are not only upgradable, but each song will hold a new item to use after successfully beating that level. With four directionally adjustable weapons available, players can work with a variety of configurations to suit play style. After playing through a few songs, different weapons become available.
Songs may hold special items and weapons to unlock, but simply playing through them won’t automatically make them available. There are score targets to reach. Thankfully the initial difficulty levels are the easier ones. Many songs will have multiple difficulty levels ranging from “pianissimo” to “fortissimo” and beyond (go look it up). There are power-ups in each level, you gain points for doing well, there are bonuses available, and you lose points for crashing. It’s pretty standard in that regards, but it fells much less so with the variety of difficulty levels and weapons. use four subwoofers in Blur’s “Song 2” and see what happens. Go ahead.
Oh, and here’s a fun trick – put in some Kronos Quartet and Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi’s soundtrack. You’re welcome.
There’s a bit of a story in Symphony about a demon taking over the player’s music, which seems silly, and it is. This does, however, afford some boss battles and a goal to work toward.
And I want to acknowledge the visuals. There’s a very cool “retro” feel to the look of Symphony, but don’t mistake that for being cheap. Plenty of visual effects are used to breathe life into the pixelated graphics.
Symphony is a very fun arcade shooter. Getting past a few presentational issues rewards players with a very fun game that will offer up what could be a limitless supply of new levels.