BeatBucs is a pirate-themed rhythm dodge em up game that takes inspiration from flash titles with its graphical and music style. Sailing from level to level, you’ll need to avoid various attacks that are triggered either to the beat or to the main instrumental melody. There’s some potential with this short rhythm dodger, but a collection of things didn’t quite gel for me.
There are 10 levels in BeatBucs, each with its own level design and unique music. Each level has between 3 and 7 rows that the player can move between. These lanes will highlight red to the beat or melody of the music track, which signals that an attack will take place there in about a second. The player needs to switch to a new lane and avoid the attack. Get hit, and you’ll lose a heart, and once all three hearts are gone, it’s game over.
As the red (or sometimes yellow) lanes do not give much warning of an attack, and it doesn’t consistently match a musical pattern either, BeatBucs feels more like a memory game at times than a rhythm-based one. The first time you play a level, it’s to understand the layout of attacks. There are moments where attacks are structured that require you to always dodge a specific way to avoid follow-on attacks. That is unveiled through replaying levels and learning the patterns. It doesn’t take much brain power, though, as the tracks are largely very short. Some are under a minute, and almost all of them are under two minutes. A few tracks also contain large gaps of inactivity or long introductions, so the actual playtime shrinks down to a minute again. The songs, whilst varied in genre, are like MIDI tracks, but they are quantised to have a slightly mechanical rigidity to them. None are memorable, and BeatBucs works best when your movements sync to the melody. This doesn’t happen often enough, however, even if the red lanes and attacks are largely synced up.
With little replayability, clunky synergy, and a general rough-around-the-edges design, I didn’t particularly gel with BeatBucs. There is nothing technically wrong or bad with the game; it just feels more like a tech demo that is going to cost money. There’s potential for future finesse, but as it stands, this isn’t a game that is easy to recommend.
A copy of the game was provided by the developer. BeatBucs releases on PC on 26th October 2025.
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