Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Harmonix Music Systems

Release Date: 11/19/2001

Available Exclusively On

Before Guitar Hero and Rock Band, Harmonix created this fun rhythm game using pop, hip-hop, industrial rock, and other genres. You tap away on your controller with a “pick your own path” type of gameplay. The game is fun and very challenging, and comes with some great tools.

You use the square, circle, and triangle buttons to tap away on a track. Use the D-pad to rotate the tube and pick any track you want to play. You will know when you have to play when you see a green line connecting dots. This gives you a break between sections so you can rest your thumb for a second. Tracks range from vocals, synth, bass, drums, guitar, and other instruments. When you successfully complete a section that instrument will continue playing. Score perfectly in that section of the song and the instruments won’t turn off when you enter the next gate. I found this a little annoying, but it encourages you to play perfectly the song doesn’t stop. You are scored, as usual, and a meter is shown on how bad or well you are doing. Fail too much and you will fail the song.

That’s the entire game in a nutshell. It seems simple, and it is, but the game is challenging later on when you have to do longer sections and faster button presses. There’s some pretty good music here by Powerman 5000, No Doubt, Fear Factory, and other popular musicians. The visuals are trippy and can give you a headache after a while. They are psychedelic and full of bright colors and fractal shapes. One thing I found useless was the free scratch mode which lets you press one of the three buttons while moving the left stick back and forth to scratch. This isn’t there for anything but for fun I guess.

Once you beat the main game on each difficulty you can go into Remix mode which plays a song while you add your own notes to the song. This can be pretty fun for people who want to change up the game themselves. However, I did find that there should have been more songs, but I guess remix mode is supposed to remedy that. There are a good dozen hours of gameplay here and you will keep coming back to master the game.

For just a couple of dollars, Frequency is one of the most fun I have had in a rhythm game since Rock Band 2. I found myself coming back and trying to master the songs. The music may not be to everyone’s taste, but if you open your mind you will find a gem of a game here.