Soundfall Review: Rhythm-Based Dungeon Crawler

Soundfall starts with a simplistic enough storyline. You are a young girl with a passion for music, and you’ve been accepted to appear on what I presume is a talent show that’s pretty popular in this world. Unfortunately, you can’t make it, though, even if your friends are pushing you to attend. The issue here is you can’t get cover for work, and you need that job. Well, that day, you stick your headphones on, and the next thing you know, you’re transported to another world, known as Symphonia. The place where music is created.

There is a problem here, too, though. Evil forces are taking over, threatening all music. Now, the locals here agree: you help them fight back, they’ll help you get back home. It’s decent enough, a nice little message, I guess, to wrap things up. And as you progress, you will meet new characters along the way, NPC’s or other playable heroes.

As for the gameplay then, here meet the dungeon crawler and rhythm game mechanics. What that essentially means is you can only attack on the beat of the music if you do want your strongest attack. In fact, if you miss the beat too many times, you may find yourself with an overheated weapon, awaiting a cooldown to wear off. It’s a particularly trying situation when a wave of enemies is flowing towards you.

At first, this will honestly prove for many a little demanding. I mean, even a dash, which provides invincibility or jumps, needs to be in time too. It just takes, you know, some practice. So, think about it: you’re moving around the screen with the left stick, you’re rotating your character with the right, and aiming, of course, at the same time. Then, you’re matching the beat with the fire and the dash. It’s a somewhat new collection of muscle memories that you will need to process.

I’ve played a lot of rhythm games as well over the years, and I definitely stumbled my way through the opening of a couple of stages. As I did start to get into it, though, I really started to enjoy the idea. It’s no question unique and it starts to play into the strategy as different levels are accompanied by different tracks of varying speed. It’s also rewarding you for beating them before the track is over and another loop begins. It’s a game that instantly latches onto that high-score mentality and it packs different difficulties as well.

An area I did not expect with Soundfall, was its use of loot. It’s a key factor of the game, and there’s a whole lot of it to uncover. There are tons of different weapons, equipment, and all of varying levels. Often, this will do things like impact fire speed, the spread of your bullets, or maybe your protection. And yeah, jumping from level to level, I was always heading to inventory to see what new goodies awaited me. The loop here can be seen as beat the level, get rewarded with a big old chest.

So, opening the game, then we start with our lead Melody, but new characters appear as well, and each has their own unique skill set. This changes in a few ways: their melee attack will be different, and then there is what we call our ultimate attack. This is a particularly useful skill in overwhelming moments, as it tends to do massive damage. Our first hero, for example, has a spin attack. Our second introduced, it has a big old slam with an axe. He is doing a destructive superhero landing.

When it comes to syncing the audio, you actually might notice some difficulty. You do get built-in here an audio and video latency option. It does calibration alongside you and can be accessed at any time. This, it’s a quick 30-second setup, and I would recommend every time you reopen the game, quickly check it out. It works well, though you can also then add a metronome sound if you’re struggling to identify where the beat is.

There are some problems with gameplay. I saw some slowdown in larger locations. I would describe it as minor personally, but it can impact you when you’re focusing on so much at once. Do want to stress though here, nothing incredible and far from frequent, but it is there.

Then, as the game progresses, the strategy can get pretty tough in the sense the music is slow, and the enemy count is high. You need to think about the gun type you are using and how you are going to take down maybe multiple at once. I wouldn’t call it a problem, but it can move slightly away from simply running and gunning.

With 10 worlds in and 10 stages in each, I did feel the repetition started to kick in for me. In Soundfall you get two modes: story and free play, and I ended up leaning towards the latter by the end game because I could basically make sure the facial variety was changing quite a bit quicker. You see, the way the game is structured, the first world is, let’s say, jungle, then ice, and so on.

So, you’re doing 10 levels in very similar-looking locations, and I was getting burnout. That’s the beauty of free play, though. You can choose any song, any level you want, and put them in any order you want as well. That definitely keeps things fresh. And I think the design work, the idea, makes sense of structuring it, you know, location by location, but it doesn’t necessarily provide, you know, the most thrilling experiences.

Overall, though, for gameplay, I didn’t have high expectations, and I’ve actually walked away pretty impressed. The gameplay is solid. It’s got some unique mechanics, and for the most part, it’s definitely well-implemented. Throwing in the fact it’s packing a huge amount of levels, quests (which are simply achievements), and even then local and online multiplayer, there is plenty in here to keep you busy.

Graphics then, and this is the reason I didn’t go in with high hopes. After seeing the trailer, it couldn’t be more bland-looking to me. Sure, there’s some nice ideas – the environments move and react to the music. But yeah, it just looks pretty boring, honestly. The levels are kind of stereotypical, and for a game packing so much personality in its story and its gameplay, comes as a bit of a shock.

I do also, at the same time, never called the visuals bad, though honestly, just yeah, uninspired. And that’s not only these worlds but the enemies in particular. It’s mostly the same foes rotating: we have the grunts, the dog-like creatures, some that are slightly larger that do body slams. It’s like they used up all their creative juice, and it begins to then rely on simply color swaps.

Where it does impress visually, though, I liked some of the character and enemy animations. You can see them bopping along to the music, and then also the occasional cutscene and dialogue exchanged. These are accompanied by some great animations or even just some really stunning static hand-drawn characters.

Audio then, and there are some decent sound effects in here for weapons, environmental pieces, and enemies. But the real focus, of course, is the music. And I think there’s a decent variety in here that most will find something to enjoy. That said, do not come here if you think too much in the way of the heavier side of the music world. It’s more pop, EDM, and that needs to be something you can listen to a lot.

Many of the artists then are ones I’m familiar with, but I don’t believe a wider audience typically would be. Then there’s a fair few that have been composed specifically for the game as well. Don’t discount them, though, because it’s not chart-topping. There’s some really good stuff in here.

One noticeable missing audio is the lack of voice acting. With its audio design and that being a key focus, I think this would have been a nice final touch to top it all off.