by Omar (@siegarettes)
- Signal to Noise
- Developer - Solanimus Inc
- PC
Someone tell me where I can get the guts of Solanimus’s developers, because it definitely took some stones to release this game. Signal to Noise is a game that simultaneously wants to be Dyad, Symphony, Beat Hazard, Audiosurf, Brainpipe, Space Giraffe, or maybe just a Winamp visualizer. Signal to Noise advertises itself as taking inspiration from games like Tempest and Star Fox, but with levels created on the fly from your own music. That’s ambitious. There’s a delicate balance to maintain when building around that technology, as the various levels of success from some of the previously mentioned titles shown. Unfortunately, Solanimus doesn’t have an ounce of the ability required to make that happen.
Signal to Noise is a game that has higher ambitions than the developers have skill or experience to pull off. Or rather, that’s my takeaway from the press releases, because there isn’t much to speak of their intentions within the game itself. Signal to Noise has been in development for two years before its release. The few sightings of gameplay footage, showed various different iterations of the game that included elements not in the final version.
Signal to Noise is so dreadfully incomplete that for a while I was wondering if I had finished code. It uses a bizarre control scheme that cannot be remapped. The menus are giant, and the chunky buttons look more at home in an alpha build, or a Geocities page. There’s also a rudimentary file browser to load songs that crash or hang forever, if you attempt to create a playlist of more than one song.
After a few albums, I’m not even sure if I can tell you how the game uses your music to generate levels. The visuals are too busy and the connection to the beat is so non-existent, that they may as well have been random. The art direction is a noisy mess. There’s no feedback to communicate how your weapons or powerups function, what they are, and what will damage you or not. Ironically, the signal-to-noise ratio of this game leans distinctly towards the latter. It’s a mess, one that’s unplayable by every measure.
I don’t enjoy hating on the efforts of small teams, but I can’t be honest without telling you this is hands down the worst game that I’ve ever been handed for reviewing. I will say this however, I wish I had the guts that the folks at Solanimus do. They either truly believed they had something here, or they’re pulling one hell of a con.