Review - Beat Hazard Ultra

Beat Hazard Ultra is more a tool for the enhancement of the music listening experience than a game in the traditional sense. That sounds mega wanky and pretentious, but it’s not at all. Essentially it is a 2D spaceship-based shooter in which the levels are generated from the music on your PS3’s hard drive. The enemies are harder and more frequent in a particularly fast or loud part of the track, but easier to kill and smaller in numbers at a more quiet or slow section. The level lasts as long as the song you have selected, and you are tasked with shooting down these music-powered enemy spaceships in the most psychedelic fireworks display of eye sex possible.

For the music-loving gamer this is a perfect crossover of hardcore bullet-hell action and your own music. I mean, surely zoning out listening to music whilst staring at pretty flashing colours is better than zoning out listening to music whilst staring into space? I for one have found myself dipping into Beat Hazard more and more when I just fancy listening to some music. You don’t even need to be in the gaming mood to play it, especially not in the ‘Chill Out’ mode in which you have unlimited lives and the music automatically shuffles, leaving you to mindlessly plough through brightly coloured enemies and make flashy boom bang happen. It’ll hold your attention for longer than you think.

The more traditional gamey modes include ‘Standard’ which is just your basic ‘choose a song and play through it’ mode and ‘Survival’, in which the enemies are more difficult and frequent, and you survive for as long as you can while the songs shuffle. There is also ‘Boss Rush Mode’, which is similar to ‘Survival Mode’ in the fact you are surviving as long as possible while your music shuffles, but with only waves of bosses to defeat as opposed to smaller enemies. These bosses are vibrant and interesting, for example large spaceships which try to suck you into them, thus killing you, and large spider-like creatures, which flail their many limbs at you and are invulnerable when curled up in a ball. In other modes, these bosses only make an appearance at the end of a song to serve as a bombastic conclusion, but the constant, unwavering attention of these beasts in Boss Rush mode makes for an exciting and intense experience.

 In all of these modes except Chill Out, the points you earned are accumulated into the big pile of points you have earned overall so far, which are used to determine your rank. There are also unlockable perks, which can increase the number of multiplier pick-ups, allowing for ridiculously high scores and faster levelling-up. Other perks include extra superbombs, which clear the whole screen at the press of R2, and extra lives to make completing those eight minute songs on Hardcore more achievable.

There is also a co-op mode, in which you can play Standard Mode with a friend, but no other modes which seems a shame. It’s a lovely social gaming experience though, as you share lives and powerups, meaning that there are no arguments about one player hogging all of the pick-ups, and you both die together, so there is no watching your co-op partner play by themselves for 5 minutes every time you die. There is also an online mode, but I can’t say anything about that as I haven’t been able to get a game going.

Beat Hazard Ultra is a game which you can play forever. Essentially it is something to keep your eyes and thumbs busy whilst you listen to music, which I am fully in favour of. I occasionally play games with the volume down and music on anyway, but I always have the thought in the back of my mind that I’m missing out on something – the dialogue, the original soundtrack the game was meant to be played with – I feel like I’m playing half a game. In Beat Hazard Ultra, love of gaming and love of music has finally been combined in a cohesive way. Forget plastic instruments, this is the future of music games.

Verdict: 9/10