Recent reviews by oops

Don't care about gamepad controls, game plays great as DJMAX-style 8b (6bfx) on keyboard.
Also might be the only PC rhythm game that has more interesting gimmicks than occasional slowdowns.
Hoping it will gain some steam and will get more songs in the future.

I have no idea how good is the educational content because I haven't been able to stick with it because of horrid interface.

1. Text does not scale and looks tiny on 1440p screen
2. No way to rebind controls
3. Most annoyingly, no way to turn off the music. I really like Lifeformed's music, but I don't want it blasting full volume when my goal is to learn some vocabulary.

Core gameplay is good, everything else is a big headscratcher. Top five stinkers about the game:

1. Stupid amount of grind. There are some "free" music packs you can buy via in-game currency, but the amount you get each play is miniscule. To buy one pack of three songs, you need to play ~50 charts. What goal does having this grind accomplish, other than pissing off players? You can't even buy this in-game currency to speed that up, so it's not like you create annoyance to suck more money out of players.

(Don't tell me that you can get more by playing multiplayer mode; it's dead, and I'm too lazy to find people online to coordinate getting into matches)

2. Wacca pack, the only DLC I'm actually interested in buying, is stupidly overpriced. I get that these are the songs people might be more interested in buying, but when DLCs of comparable price in other games can give you up to two times more songs this just makes me want to wait on a sale.

3. Perfect judgment window is 2x wider on the easiest difficulty. I get the intention of making perfect scores more approachable, but this should be a toggleable option. Right now, this devalues easier charts - in, say, EZ2ON I can play easier charts in order to train my poor accuracy skills; and in this game perfecting every single chart of the easiest difficulty would be just an exercise in tedium because of wide perfect window.

4. Dan course attempts also eat in-game currency, the same one that's used for grinding "free" packs. Again, why? This feels like something devs implemented for free-to-play mobile version and now too stubborn to take out for premium Steam release because they don't want to remove their precious mechanics they spent their time implementing.

5. Note type exclusive to Switch release. The note type actually looks fun, but I'm not going to pay for the same game for the second time, especially given the grind issue.

It's a solid game, but level design on hard difficulty (called "high obstacle density" for some reason) is absolutely atrocious; level 3-6 from the main campaign and last level of Runner3 EP being the prime examples. The most enjoyment you get not from actually playing the game, but finally finishing another level so that you'll never have to touch it again.

It's also nice that you get to play retro challenges with checkpoints, if only to find out that they're even less enjoyable and you haven't missed out on anything failing out of them in the original game. (I'm also pretty sure that Retro Challenge 1-5 is bugged and not actually possible to perfect on hard difficulty)

Re: developer's response to suggestion to switch to medium, I actually did, and it did not improve things in the slightest. The most annoying part about the atrocious design of retro challenges aren't even obstacles, it's jump timing and having to prepare the jump off the stairs way in advance. The last level is awful regardless whether you play it on medium or hard.

Thumbs down just because the keyboards bindings are not configurable (no, not everyone wants to use WASD/arrows for directions).

If you're a rhythm game aficionado, this one is not worth it (maybe only as a curiosity). It obviously has decent effort put into it, but the game does not play well.

The first main problem is that the game does not seem to have scroll velocity customisation, and the bonus levels are quite dense where the problem is noticeable.

The second main problem is the level structure: instead of having fixed sequence of notes you have to hit (like in almost every other rhythm game), this game has looping sections, and you finish the level by hitting a preset amount of notes correctly. Also, sometimes at random point of a music track you can encounter an enemy which would change the played tune and chart, and will do it quite abruptly.

The game also has overly drawn-out cut-scenes with jokes that just don't land. Luckily, you can skip those.

Definitely brings up flaws of ADOFAI to the forefront

Fun gimmicks are way less fun when missing a key will make you restart from the checkpoint, and listening to the same track again and again starting abruptly in some random spot in the middle of the song is extremely jarring and annoying; Mawaru chart felt to me not as a fun collection of mini-rhythm games but as an annoying chore I was happy to be done with.

(I've actually realised the main thing I hate about ADOFAI in general while playing this DLC - this "instant fail + checkpoint" structure together with the fact that quitting a level will force you to restart from the beginning and not from the latest checkpoint triggers the most intense sunk cost feeling I've ever got from any video game whatsoever)

Visibility gimmicks (fog, blue signs on top of the track) are now hands down the most annoying thing in this game

Music is good though, the joke about entering the name was funny and story does not get in the way

It's a 4k game and it works, but I just don't see what would be a reason to play this one. Like, this game seems to support importing osu!mania maps which is cool, but why would you import the maps instead, you know, playing them in osu? It's not like there are some superior features here. The differences are: "bonus points" button (similar to DJMax "fever"), punishing key presses not corresponding to notes and absence of judgements. I guess there are probably someone who might care about some of those things, but most likely not in the combination available in this particular game.

There are some builtin songs, but there are not that many of them, and each one has only one chart. I imagine this would hardly be a reason to get it either.

Really enjoyable game up until the bonus levels, where charting seems to take a nosedive based on the first two I've played: constant spam of annoying speed changes that catch you off-guard and also destroy all the visual sense of flow. In "Le Train", there's also dense stream of notes going upward being obscured by the judgement text that you can't turn off which makes it even less fun.

I'll try to play it a bit more, but without practice mode to set your start and end points playing it further would likely be just an exercise in frustration. Fun game to spend a couple of hours though.

For core rhythm game players this will be a curiosity at best, and most likely not an interesting/pleasant one. There are two core mechanics: follow a white trail with left controller stick, and shoot enemies by locking in with the right stick and trigger button to perform the shot.

Both of those are badly implemented: the trail takes sharp turns way too often and requires precise stick position; those two properties do not play well as you can imagine. Shooting is supposed to be "rhythm" part: you have to pull the trigger on beat; but there is no visual indicator and most of the time it's not clear by the music alone.

The game has unlock system which boils down to requiring to get 4/5 stars on a track in order to unlock the next one most of the time, together with really silly 3-hit health system it means that you have to play the same three-four tracks for a while until you get used to the finicky mechanics (or just give up on a game after on a couple of tries like I've did, which I wholeheartedly recommend: I've already spend money on this game but I don't want to spend time on it as well)