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Kickbeat: Special Edition Review
Bemani - or rhythm action - games are pretty thin on the ground these days, and that may partially be because they’re so difficult to get right. There’s a reason that the team at Harmonix - a studio responsible for a frankly unfeasible number of outright masterpieces - are so good at what they do, and that’s because they’re almost all musicians. The music side of things is (almost) as important as the video game side, and that’s exactly as it should be. What possessed the pinball wizards at Zen Studios to have a crack at such a tough nut is anyone’s guess, but their bid is a relatively decent one.
Originally released on the PS Vita and PS3, KickBeat gets off to an appalling start with a tutorial that takes fifteen long minutes to teach you a series of things that a five year old could learn in less than sixty seconds. It’s an antiquated waste of time, and would be worth skipping altogether if it didn’t contain some information that you absolutely needed to know. Fifteen years ago this would have been a boxed product, and a split A5 page would have allowed you to get started straight away.
You play as a character called Lee, and that’s as much of the “plot” as you need to pay attention to. Lee stands in a circle and is periodically attacked by henchmen from four directions, each one of them equating directly to a button on your control pad. When an enemy steps on an onscreen button, you press the coordinating button on your controller; the precise moment dictated visually by a brief surge of light. Chi power - which is basically a version of Guitar Hero’s Star Power multiplier - is earned by double tapping when an enemy steps up with a power-up icon appearing over his head.
So far, so straightforward, but one of the biggest problems here is that the soundtrack is teetering on the brink of being absolutely godawful. It’s a blend of tiresome Nu Metal and very cheesy trance, and not only don’t the two genres blend very well, there aren’t any great examples of either genre here; primarily (one suspects) because the budget didn’t allow Zen Studios to start forking out for half decent tunes. Music is obviously deeply subjective, but if you can, have a look at the track listing before you jump in. There is almost no point in playing a music game if you can’t stand the music you’re hearing.
The other big issue is that the button presses map to elements of the song completely at random; sometimes they’re mapped to drums, sometimes vocals, sometimes guitars and these changes are completely unannounced. This means that you either have to learn the song by playing it over and over again, or you have to watch the (stupidly busy) screen, looking for flashes of white light and basically playing a tepid round of monkey see, monkey do.
On the harder difficulty settings it’s also really difficult to see what exactly is going on. When you aren’t watching those enemies pacing around your buttons, you’re waiting for a light cue after they’ve stepped on a button, and those buttons can be masked by other henchmen strafing around the perimeter… and to cap all of that off, the background visuals are so bright, colourful and frenetic that would be hard to know what was happening even if the other issues weren’t present. This is a game that’s way, way too disorientating for its own good.
And the difference between two enemies stepping up to be hit at the same time, and two stepping up as a quick one-two beat, is way too small; so much smaller than such a thing should be in a game this lightweight and slight. That is one hell of a thing to train your eyes to see, and if you want to be able to do it, you’re going to have to really put the hours in.
When the game works it offers up some thoroughly reasonable entertainment. When you’re playing along to a drum solo or a bridge or a breakdown - when you know exactly where you are and what you’re doing - the game gifts you with a very small amount of that unique rush that well made rhythm action games can give you. But that just doesn’t happen anywhere near enough to make KickBeat 100% easy to recommend.
KickBeat is hard to dislike because it’s part of a genre that’s very hard to come by these days, and because that genre has produced more masterpieces, pound for pound, than arguably any other, it’s difficult not to admire this as a first attempt. It can’t compete with even mid-tier bemani, but it certainly isn’t bad. Try the demo. You may deem it to be worth a few quid.
6/10
Review By Chet Roivas
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