Recent reviews by Ken

coziest game of 2024

Can this retro medley turn teenage gamer angst into a compelling narrative? No, not really. Pretty game though.

I love music games and I love shooters but Symphony failed to be engaging on either fronts leading to a pretty disappointing game. The huge hitbox on your own ship, compounded with the relatively small stage makes it overly difficult to avoid being hit especially at higher difficulty. Some enemies have pretty terrible telegraphing and can turn on a dime and take you by surprise. Some projectiles, most notably the laser spewing squares, can be really hard to see and can cause disheartening OHKOs. The stages can also become a boring slog especially with longer songs that are over 5 minutes. I found that songs lasting from 2-3 minutes to provide a sustained franticness that is somewhat fun, but hampered due to previously mentioned issues.

The upgrade system is fairly interesting, allowing players to unlock weapons that can be found in every song to customize their ship. However the novelty quickly wears off as you begin to unlock the same weapons constantly. The story that is presented in the game is laughably bad and really had no business being in the game. The highscore tables are painfully empty too, mostly due to the low popularity of the game.

If you want a better experience with a your own music + shooter combo, try out Beat Hazard instead. It's not a terrific game, and I believe a lot more could be gotten out of the medium, but at least the enjoyment you will get from it will far outlast Symphony.

Imagine taking the very core of a 4X game and simmer it down to the simplest form possible. Now imagine something simpler. What you get is an easy to pick up arcadey strategy game that seems more suited for mobile platforms than on the PC. Each game takes about a couple of minutes at most, providing frantic action that is more often than not surprisingly enjoyable. Each stage provides a unique twist that keeps gameplay engaging and the addition of having a slew of different difficulty levels that are interchangable on the fly will keep players from feeling that the game is too easy or too challenging. The controls is the biggest downside to the game as I found it really hard to deselect planets and selecting ships that are in transit. While its not game breaking, the control issues are probably what is going to keep me from continuing to play the game past the initial play through.

There isn't much to talk about outside of gameplay. You will definitely not be playing this game for the story but it does the job in setting the levels up. The music is very much listenable and ended up being the biggest surprise for me. The addition of highscores is a plus but a very small one as highscore lists can be fairly barren without many friends who own the game to compete with.

It's a solid game to pick up on the cheap, especially if you want a very casual strategy game. Perhaps the game will stick to you and provide you with lots of replayability, but I suspect one will get about a couple of hours of enjoyment out of it.