Recent reviews by Ash

I purchased this game after seeing a quick video of a boss level and instantly loving what I had seen. Upon playing, I loved the experience even more. Just Shapes & Beats has an amazing soundtrack and super-fun gameplay, with a decent amount of difficulty, but nothing crazy. Though some little parts may feel a bit bullet-hell-like, overall, the game is well-paced and ridiculously fun.

The way the Bezerk Studio produced and paced the campaign, with its surprisingly gripping and heartfelt story for one without words and nearly only featuring characters comprised of basic shapes is something to be remembered for sure. Saying this, however, I do feel like there needs to be a bit more content to pad the campaign out further, as it is easily beaten within a couple of hours. There isn't really any real replay value to the campaign itself, but you can get a fair amount out of earning achievements and playing multiplayer.

By playing multiplayer in challenge mode, you vote on songs to play out of a list of a given three songs twice and then you face a boss together. You can revive each other and there's Beat Points that you earn by doing certain things like playing with new people, passing checkpoints before others, staying on the right-hand side of the screen more, staying alive at the end of the song etc. These points I found a bit confusing as you don't actually spend them, but they're just essentially a sort-of score. This score goes towards unlocking a handful of further songs upon passing certain thresholds, but again this doesn't add too much more content and a few people have seen this as a grind.

Another thing to add is that the bundle for this game features a selection of tracks as MP3s and not further in-game content. The friends that I play this game with did not know this until I pointed it out to them.

All-in-all, Just Shapes & Beats feels polished and smooth, with entertaining, music-driven gameplay, a stellar tracklist, fabulous animations and a gripping, albeit short story. I do hope that the game is going to remain more than a novelty, but I worry about the longevity of it. The potential future ability to play custom tracks may provide this, but it is a rather tricky situation where copyright is concerned and I'm not sure how likely it will actually be.

I love the idea, I love the tracklist, I love the gameplay. I just wish there was a fair bit more of it.