I am both a developer and a competitive shmup player and have been playing Beat Hazard since its first incarnation. I was hooked with BH1 and BH2. Emraced the seizures and supported the dev (aka Starg or Steve Hunt) by buying BH3 in Early Access, providing bug reports & constructive suggestions and criticism. Since BH2 and BH3 are very similar except for BH3's few new features and many missing old features, my reviews for these two games will also be very similar.

TLDR: BH2 is more claustrophobic compared to the original Beat Hazard but still better than Beat Hazard 3 in many aspects. You can read my BH3 review for details. If you want to sample the Beat Hazard experience then get BH2 when it's dirt cheap and stay away from BH3 until its numerous bugs & inconveniences are ironed out (that might take at least a couple of years - or an eternity - given the dev's incompetence and unwillingness to listen to constructive feedback). I recommend LucK's Legendary Modules guide if you are willing to give BH2 a try.

* You will be bombarded with so many multipliers, flying dollar bills, enemy bullets, asteroids, hard-to-distinguish weapon pickups, etc. on top of blinding strobe effects. Some of those bullets are nigh-indestructible red photons and well-hidden underneath other objects until it's too late to do anything about them. Furthermore, you will be shot by enemies that are out of display. This problem was directly copy-pasted into Beat Hazard 3 code and the dev thinks these are issues that can be fixed much later (probably after he ports his latest buggy mess BH3 to other platforms).

* The price of peasant (non-Elite) ships skyrocket (about 10x) when you have more than $100,000 in your BH2 wallet (this comes without any increase in ship quality). There is no need to buy any of these ships since the Elite ships rewarded via the Daily & Lightning Challenges are better in almost every way. You need to be patient with the Challenges though because of the reasons stated below. Alternatively, you could pick better ships from the Steam Workshop (I've submitted 5 of my ship designs for BH2) or create your own for free. Unfortunately, the specs for the Workshop ships you can create were nerfed so you can't create 6-beam monsters anymore.

* You will have no need for money after you buy all the upgrades / perks. So those flying dollar bills becomes annoying & dangerous visual clutter that covers up more important stuff that you need to watch out for. Unfortunately there is no option to disable these useless space dollars and I don't think the dev will ever fix this. I have about $2 million and have no use for it. Any takers?

* The "Community Challenge" songs are supposedly selected randomly from the songs listened to by players. They are usually explicit and sometimes graphic (sexually or otherwise) songs. You'll have to listen to that unfiltered filth if you want to get Elite ships (if you are lucky and the game doesn't glitch) or mute the music but that defeats the purpose in a rhythm game. In any case, no sane adult would want to expose children to this.

* Recently, both BH2 and BH3 have been crashing constantly (mostly because of the "Community Challenges" feature that is supposed to reward you Elite ships but they usually don't work because of the ACRCloud's artificial stupidity and even when they do work sometimes you don't even get your hard-earned reward).

* The delete song record feature doesn't work at all. If you edit / correct the song tags after scanning them in BH2, the only way to get them recognized by BH2 is to clear your music library and rescan it. If you have a big library then this will take a lot of time away from your gameplay since the dev couldn't make this happen in the background.

* Do you need to switch from using gamepad to mouse & keyboard in game? Well, you have to quit the game and restart it because you can't do it from Options like you would expect from a modern game. Also the gamepad option lacks some functionality (like deleting modules or adding friends) compared to the keyboard-mouse option.

* The game records everything you do & songs you listen to in the game on a remote server. There is no way to opt out of this other than disconnecting from Internet. If you disconnect, you'll get a completely different User ID and since everything is tied to the user ID, basically your progress is reset (you keep the ships in the hangar though).

* The dev even collects your e-mail address with the excuse of notifying you if someone beats your score. No, thanks!

* BH2/3 promotes pillaging medieval murderers aka "Cru$aders" in a space shmup w/o any plotline.

* Beat Hazard as a series has a score multiplier mechanic that forces you to play in a style that is very unnatural / counter-intuitive for a shmup game if you want to get those "super high scores". Basically, you have to delay killing your enemies (especially bosses and mini-bosses) as much as possible to collect multipliers from Daredevil & Survivor bonuses and low-grade enemies, asteroids, enemy bullets.

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The dev is an ungrateful incompetent toxic individual who deletes posts & bans people like me that try to report bugs & make constructive criticism / suggestions. Otherwise, I could have recommended BH1 and BH2.