Beat Hazard Ultra

Publisher: Cold Beam Games

Developer: Cold Beam Games

Release Date: 6/16/2011

Rating: Everyone

MSRP: $9.99

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Being able to play a game using your own music isn’t new, but being a good one is hard. Beat Hazard lets you select your own music and then uses the tempo to create difficulty spikes and flow of enemies. The beat of the song is seen in the bullets you shoot as well as the crazy explosions one screen that can give you a seizure. When you select your music you get to decide the difficulty. Pick a heavy and fast metal song and you’ll be lucky if you get through the whole thing. Pick a normal soft rock song and the difficulty is very gradual.

When you actually start shooting there are several power-ups that range from increasing the volume, shot power, money, and bombs. If you die you can collect the stuff you’re dropped, but if you keep collecting the stuff you get more and more powerful. You can use the money to buy perks that range from power-ups when you start, extra lives, and other various perks. There’s a good amount and it’s worth playing just to unlock them all. However, the game doesn’t have much depth so this is a 30 minutes-at-a-time game or you will get bored. The visuals are decent, but the special effects that flash around remind me of Geometry Wars on crack.

So this is once again a game that makes you the decider of how fun of an experience you get. The engine underneath does a good job using the songs to great a fun space shooter, but I would like to have seen more power-ups or maybe something more 3D. If you don’t like 2D space shooters you won’t like this even if you get to use your own music. The game can get really hard quick and can be a bit confusing at first until you get the hang of it. There are quite a few modes such as multiplayer, boss rush, and endless mode so there is some variety there. For the low price, you can’t really go wrong so pick it up and enjoy the craziness!