It’s fair to say that I like listening to music, and by that I don’t mean I’m some music aficionado or band snob, I mean that I enjoy having music delivered to my ears and the aural sensation it provides. My own personal music taste could be described as varied, but mostly atrocious. I like listening to music so much that waaaaaaay back in the crazy days of 2003/2004 I paid the royal sum of £300 for a new fangled device called an iPod. I was the only person I knew to have one…how times have changed.

I used to listen to music when I was gaming, this was obviously back in the day before voice acted cutscenes and fully orchestrated soundtracks, nowadays when I’m gaming I expect the game to provide its own soundtrack, so its lucky that I ended up reviewing BeatBudy: Tale of the Guardians, by German studio Threaks, as it holds it’s music in very high esteem.

Beatbudy: Tale of the Guardians, takes place on the planet Symphonia, where life is maintained by the rhythmic ebb and flow of three ancient beings known as ‘Buddies’ These three buddies, Melody, Harmony and Beat, slumber deep within the planet exuding musical life, but the villainous Prince Maestro (a gent with a certain flair of the melodramatic) has kidnapped the buddy Melody and so Harmony wakens their brother Beat to set out on an adventure to rescue her and thwart Maestro’s musical machinations.

Beatbuddy isn’t a music game in the way that Guitar Hero, SingStar, Rockband are. This isn’t a rhythm game fest, the music simply exists and impacts the world in which you play. As you travel through the world you’ll encounter both animal and planet life that changes the music around you. You may be travelling down a large liner tunnel, with the music fairly low when suddenly you hear the unmistakable thump of a bass drum mushroom, or your path will be blocked the rat-a-tat-tating of a high hat crab whose prickly spines mean death. In the literal sense in Beatbuddy, Music is all around you.

Symphonia is a liquid planet and so the game takes place under this ‘sea’, Beat has full 360 degree movement in this environment, and more often than not I found myself doing loop-de-loops to change direction rather than simply suddenly changing. The flow, if you’ll pardon the pun, of the game and the music seems to pull at you to slow down, to absorb (again sorry) the atmosphere rather than plowing onto the next scene.

In fact Beatbuddy will often try to get you to slow down over its six stages. Each stage is beautifully crafted with layered hand drawn scenes, its own art style and of course its own indivdually written and performed song. Even during it’s more repetitive moments the game is a joy to look at and listen to.

But there are stumbling blocks, early on the game introduces the BeatMobile, these are essentially vehicle sections and after the more fluid movement of Beat they can feel very stumbly and clunky, even when you get into the rhythm of moving forward it still feels a bit leaden. As I mentioned some of the puzzle mechanics are quite heavily reused, especially the traditional ‘move the power source from there to there to open that’ puzzle, and some of the finer ones, anything that involves switches, are few and far between

Overall Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians is a great game. Threaks should be applauded for challenging themselves to do something that certainly wasn’t easy. This game is obviously a labour of love for them and you can tell as for the most part everything is just right. A few minor gameplay gripes can’t stop me from toe tapping away and bopping along to this wonderful addition to my games library.

Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians  is available on Steam for Mac, PC and Linux, with a possible console release later in the year. You can check out the trailer by visiting the official site.

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