Symphony plays a nostalgic ode to the classic high score shooter - but you’re in the comfort of your music library, with each song you play presented as a level. The choice of the song’s difficulty is yours, which is a nice dynamic feature because you might want a challenge, or you might just want to enjoy the music depending on your mood.
As you advance in the game, you unlock a variety of weapons to customize your ship and as you rack up more points, you can upgrade your weapons. These upgrades are unlocked after each song is finished, which allows more leeway with customization. You can upgrade those dinky shooters you started with in the beginning of the game to powerful laser guns, or you can ditch them completely and replace them with shotguns. Of course, this is at the expense of your collected points, which double up as the game’s currency.
The higher the score, the more points you collect = the stronger your weapons are and how efficient you are at ridding yourself of your enemies. Bosses (called demons) come at random when you least expect it, and in the beginning chapters they can feel somewhat predictable; but as you progress, the demons get more difficult to beat. There are enemies that might lower the volume of your music when they appear, and you’ll encounter heat-seeking mines that appear out of nowhere. If you aren’t paying attention, they’ll do some hefty damage to your ship. Fortunately, since these enemies don’t appear as often as you’d think, you can turn the sound effects off completely so you can enjoy your music. Alternatively, you could off your music and leave just the sound effects, if you want to hear your enemies being crushed.
Symphony has potential to grow but it still stands out from most games in its genre, like Beat Hazard or Audiosurf. Since it’s now been an entire year from when I first played the game and a few months since the patch was updated, it’s about time to do a recap.
Empty Clip Studios claims unlimited song length support, controller Support (in-game only for now), faster & more stable song scanning, especially for large collections, along with bugs that have been fixed before the patch. Please note that they claim controller-support for in-game only. So, let’s say you want to pause the game because you want to change the sound options, then you’ll have to use the keyboard to bring up the menu. I gets a little obnoxious if you play songs that only last 2 minutes, since you’ll have to repeatedly switch between using your mouse and using the controller in a short period of time.
For those who prefer the sensitivity of a mouse or have had trouble with controller sensitivity in the past, fear not – you’re able to tweak the sensitivity however you like. You also have the option in-game to set your controls to your liking, so it’s only a matter of personal preference. Quite frankly, holding the mouse button for long periods of time after playing multiple songs in a row, strained my index finger.
I’ve never encountered bugs, nor were there any major issues that I could report. Some people have reported issues with the scanning process, and it’s the only problem I ran into. Sometimes, when your music isn’t tagged a certain way, you could run into a problem called “NO ARTIST TAG” – which means you’ll have to sift through thousands of your unorganized collection for that one song you really want to play. This only happened to me when I played the beta pre-megapatch and I had to re-install the game again when I got a new computer. When I played after the beta was over and the update took place, there were no problems re-scanning my music.
If you do still run into this problem though, Empty Clip Studios are attentive and quite active on the Steam forums for the game - they are also pretty good about fixing the problem when contacted. Otherwise, fans of the game had good luck tagging their music with Mp3Tag.
Previously before the patch, there were a lot of people complaining about speed and stability issues when it came to scanning their music library. For example, my library contains a little over 5000 songs and it used to take 5-6 minutes to completely render my entire library from before. With the patch, it now minimizing the wait time to 2-3 minutes. Some people complained about the length of a song being shortened, but I have yet to run into this problem before and after a patch. To give you some perspective, I played through A Diamond for Disease by Arsis (12:52 runtime) and it wasn’t shortened.
While this game has been out for two years now, it still feels relatively new and fresh from its updated patch. With that said, the developer did achieve what they set out to. While they still need to iron out a few kinks, it remains a strong contender in its respective genre.
