Review: Audiosurf

Audiosurf is a fun little indie title created by Dylan Fitterer which was released in 2008 on Steam and still stands up very well to this day.

To put it simply, Audiosurf is a rhythm game with a difference - instead of playing already licensed songs, you can play whatever audio file you desire. You can play music, soundtracks - even audiobooks if that's what takes your fancy. You can rip music from CDs, play mp3s or even play music you've recorded yourself - if it's an audio file, it'll work.

The core gameplay of Audiosurf is a combination of your standard rhythm game, a driving game and a colour-matching puzzle. As you collect coloured tiles, they gather at the bottom of your screen and you must make matches with other colours. The game it reminds me most of is Klax - an Atari game from 1989 which revolved around collecting falling coloured tiles.

The difficulty is determined by the tempo and intensity of the songs, naturally. You can detect the difficulty of a song by looking at the "roadmap" it forms. If it is mostly uphill, it will be slow and mellow. If it is mostly downhill, it will be fast and frenetic. Bumpy and made up of hills, it'll be a mixture.

Each character has their own skills - such as collecting and storing tiles for later use, generating new power-ups or clearing the board of unwanted tiles. In general, the "hotter" colours are worth more points and the "cooler" colours are worth less points. Red is the highest value, followed by yellow, followed by blue and purple is the lowest value.

You can also rack up more points by maintaining stability and not "overflowing" your tile storage. There are also power-ups that appear at the side of the road to double your multiplier, change all of the tiles to one colour, add more tiles of a certain colour or arrange your tiles in order to make more matches.

Audiosurf is, in my opinion, one of the best games to stream on Twitch. The freedom of using your own music allows your audience to request their own songs, and as each "level" is determined by the length of the music you play, it is a fast-paced game that will keep an audience entertained.

And as Twitch is a lot more lenient about the use of licensed music, unlike certain other streaming services I could mention *ahem* - you're not going to get a copyright strike just because you wanted to make everyone laugh by trying to get a gold medal on Nicki Minaj's Stupid Hoe.

And for those who are mic or camera-shy like me, Audiosurf works as a stream-able title without the need for a brash webcam overlay or a loudmouth commentator - just sit back, relax and enjoy the music.

The song used in the video above is called Shadows, by Nightlights. Here is a link to her Bandcamp. :)