Short Reviews: Sonar Beat
By: RJ (@rga_02)
- Sonar Beat
- Developer - Life Zero
- Publisher - Life Zero
- PC & Mobile
It is always exciting to see a new rhythm game concept and more even more exciting to see those games available on the PC. Sonar Beat is a fresh new take on the rhythm genre, but will it rise above the rest or sink to the murky depths?
Instead of a typical lane-based screen that you would find in elsewhere, you are presented with a sonar radar broken up into sections. A line sweeps around the dial that scans for threats and you need to make sure you kill off those threats in time before they advance further.
Sounds simple enough right?
Well, that simplicity carries on to the control scheme which uses your mouse. For example, when you see a blue circle you click left, purple circles require both clicks, and so forth. However, using the mouse was a horrible experience for me. It seemed like that my clicks weren’t registering. For reference, I was using a Surface keyboard - which to be fair is awful by default - so I switched over to a traditional gamer mouse. That still didn’t improve the experience. So either there must be a severe input delay or something must be up. I recalibrated it multiple times to only have the same result.
Thankfully, controller support is available for this game. Using an Xbox One controller helped with the inputs greatly but there are still some issues. As of the time of publication, these are issues that I’m encountering in version 1.000.300.
Now let’s talk about music. The dark ambient songs in this game fit in well with the overall aesthetics. Considering that these tracks were also done in-house, it is something that the developers should be proud of. However, they do start to get repetitive especially if you are replaying the level. Despite starting off as a very atmospheric tune, they end up being exciting as the noise coming out of a cardboard box.
Sonar Beat is a nice and interesting concept and that is where the problem is, it feels like a concept. It feels rushed, buggy and nearly lifeless.