Beatmaster 3000

A little off-key

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Flash has always been notorious for its sound synchronization problems, which in turn has always hampered the creation of any rhythm based games. Beatmaster 3000 makes a bold attempt to further the genre but still falls short.

Beatmaster works like any other rhythm game you’ve played- time your actions to the beats of the music. This will especially come naturally to you if you’ve ever played DDR or StepMania (DDR’s PC cousin). Aside from the usual arrow presses though, Beatmaster throws in a couple extra modes that I’ve personally never seen used in a rhythm game- typing and mouse. In typing mode the arrows are replaced with letters (that actually spell a short story if you pay attention) which makes for much more challenging gameplay. Instead of 4 arrow keys, you’re looking at 27 letters + punctuation to choose from. Mouse mode is ok, but more of a novelty in my opinion. You have to mouse over the notes when they pass the top bar, but it’s hard to be accurate when your mouse has full vertical and horizontal movement over the screen.

As hinted at earlier, the thing that hurts this game the most is the synchronization. The beats just don’t feel quite right, almost as if each is a margin of a second off. Some beats are right on, while some don’t seem to be synched to anything. When a game is truly synched you should be able to look at a pattern of notes, close your eyes, and then tap them to the beat. Unfortunately, you just can’t do that with Beatmaster. It’s still fun to play through songs but just not as satisfying as it could be. The three songs in the game aren’t exactly memorable, but they were made by the artist himself so credit is due. Also, each song comes with three difficulty levels. Being a DDR fan myself I was able to beat arrow mode on all three songs on hard without much problem, but typing mode was a different story. Successfully completing songs on typing mode definitely takes a little practice. Although to be fair, I don’t think typing mode should include symbols like !,:,and ). They’re rare, but very, very hard to reach for while trying to keep beat.

Graphics are fairly standard, but I think the overall color scheme could have used an overhaul to make things brighter and livelier. What I really liked though is that the songs have graphical effects synched to them, such as glows, shakes, and energy beams. Unfortunately though the graphic effects seemed to be synched better than the notes themselves. Aside from synch issues, this game would have greatly benefited from some form of stat tracking. At the end of each level it tells you your score, but doesn’t save it anywhere. So there’s not as much incentive to play again and again to beat your score. You can’t play for highscores either, and you don’t even get any kind of letter grades to show how well you did overall.

Beatmaster is definitely a good timewaster and a noble attempt at making a rhythm game, but just isn’t any match for the real versions. With just a little tweaking to the sync system and some stat-tracking, Beatmaster could prove a solid name in the rhythm game field.

Click here to play Beatmaster 3000






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