I have long held an affinity for music procedural generation games. Audiosurf is probably my most-played game of all time (or perhaps second only to rFactor). Whenever a game lets me use my music collection to play the game, I’m ready and raring to go. Beat Vortex is a game that has been in early access for over six months, which turns your music into a walled tunnel to fly down. Along the way, you’ll need to steer your ship to collect floating crystals and stay away from the walls. It’s a simple idea, with some nifty features, but it also comes with a few health warnings in its current early access state.
My favourite thing about Beat Vortex isn’t the gameplay itself, but the nuanced approach to procedural generation. There are sliders for speed and intensity that move from 0 to 2.5, and whilst you may have easy, medium, hard, and intense descriptive markers, there are a lot of points of variation as you slide the pro-gen slider to wherever you want it to be. That means you can have a very intense tunnel with lots of jagged edges, twists and turns, but also fly slowly, or you could have a smooth, easy tunnel and bomb through at pace. Any combination is available, with nuance from a very, very easy to an easy-ish tunnel within a single description. It’s a great idea that goes beyond the simple three versions of a track.
Once in-game, you’ll move the ship around with the left analogue stick and rotate the tunnel itself with the right stick. After an hour of play, this still hadn’t clicked for me because it doesn’t feel like the ship is turning in a 3D space at any point. It feels more like I’m travelling down a 2D plane like a retro motorway racing game, and the controls feel a bit disconnected from what I see on screen. The movement is a little slow to respond to initial stick movement, but it does feel largely consistent. What isn’t consistent is the collision detection. As the game gets more intense, the tunnel walls become more angular and jagged, jutting out and creating narrow spaces. Sometimes it visually looks like you clip the walls and will respawn with no issue. Elsewhere, it looks like you’ve missed the walls, but respawn anyway, as you were close to the jutting-out edge.
The tunnel walls are far more consistent than the crystal (echo shards are their official name) pickups, which, at the time of writing, are frankly broken. If you fly through them, maybe one in three will register as collected. If you fly slightly underneath them and miss them entirely, about half of them will be collected. It is utterly maddening, and because the points attributed to crystal collection feel quite arbitrary, I found myself eventually ignoring crystals altogether. This needs huge work during the early access period. It feels like the bones and structure haven’t quite set into place yet, which makes it tricky to recommend.
A word on the music procedural generation. It seems very percussive and bass-dependent, and clearly geared towards understanding electronic music over anything else. That is fine, but how it translates into more intense tunnels isn’t always clear. Sometimes, you’ll see jagged edges when there are percussive trills and fills, and if there’s a large energy shift, sometimes that will trigger a twist or turn. Outside of that, the tunnel doesn’t immediately react to the sonic waves of music in an obvious way.
I can see some potential in Beat Vortex, but it definitely needs to refine its fundamentals to make it a compelling game in the future. The early access period has been quiet, too, with the initial targets for launch missed and no updates for a while. Hopefully, this isn’t going to be abandoned, as I could see this picking up a small, core audience. I can’t see that audience onboard until the collision detection issues are fixed, though. Keep an eye on it.
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