Rhythm platform games are usually great fun for me. Beat Blitz puts its own spin on things by making it a one button game and creating some tricky brain challenges to wrap your head around. It’s a short stay but a decent one whilst it lasts.
With Beat Blitz you play as a round avatar that will roll forward through 2D abstract levels. Your single button press lets you jump and that’s all you need to know. Each song puts a variety of traps infront of you and the way how the level plays out will try and either make you jump too often or not enough. Spikes are easy and so are steps up and down. However when you combine these with slides, bounce pads and more importantly gravity switches – it can catch you out often. Levels are segmented into quarters and so if you get something wrong you go back to the 25% markers. You’ll want to aim for a clean run because that’s the only way to get an S+ rank but you’ll also want to collect all the stars on the way too. Each star cements that S+ rank but also plays the main melody to the song too. It’s a wonderful bit of audio and visual feedback to see and hear your song play out as you move forward.
Where Beat Blitz excels in its its clever level design. When all the elements are firing away on the harder tracks its like you are playing rhythmic pinball. Knowing when to jump and not to will take timing and memory. The down side is that with 12 handmade levels, if like me you completed each song first time, you’ll be finished in 25 minutes. There’s the challenge to S+ rank the songs which will take much longer but for me, I’ll have to pick those off in small patches to avoid fatigue. One thing I did enjoy though was how Beat Blitz uses graphical glitches and colour palettes to confuse you. Each 25 percentile mark switches the graphical style and every avatar you choose changes the level design around you too. Sometimes that stark graphical switcheroo is enough to catch you out mid flow.
Beat Blitz does what it does well. No frills but well made rhythm platforming. Whilst I’d have loved a few more tracks from its guttural chiptune/synthwave cross over soundtrack to play with, the game is cheap and priced appropriately. It should tide you over until Rhythm Quest is ready.
Review copy provided by developer. Beat Blitz is out on the 24th October on Steam.
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