2015 saw a resurgence in popularity for the rhythm genre of gaming and one developer name is synonymous with the style, Harmonix. Starting with the PlayStation 2 classic FreQuency in 2001, two years later Amplitude was released to critical acclaim. Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Amplitude has now been given the reboot treatment for release on Playstation 4. Can Harmonix help start 2016 in tune…
The gameplay is pretty simple and familiar as a song is split into its component elements of drums, vocals, bass for example each having its own track. The player must hit the correct beats in time by piloting the ship between the tracks. Successful hits will score points and missing beats will effect the flow of the musical track.
Amplitude has two modes, Quick Play and Campaign. Campaign for me felt rather redundant really as a game mode, as that narrative really fails to give any more substance other than a nice tutorial into how the game works as you progress through the early tracks, learning the basics and unlocking more tracks to play and game bonuses to use. I never felt I was accomplishing anything more than just unlocking the next track which left the mode feeling rather empty.
Quick Play allows you play any of the game’s 30 tracks that you have unlocked and can be played Solo or co-op with up to three other players competing for the best score. A friends Leader board will show where your own score per track ranks against other players in your friends list. I found this mode is where I enjoyed Amplitude the most as unlike campaign I felt I had a goal to reach for instead of just completing the song.
Visually Amplitude is a colourful and vibrant game. Players can choose a ship to pilot and each has its own look. Moving between the different song elements is animated well and with the power bonuses you can use all brings excitement to the tracks and they become more demanding and complex as the difficulty increases with the more expert tracks. The controls feel very natural using the triggers and Right Bumper to shoot the correct beat marker and are really responsive even when the action can get quite frantic. I did get some tunnel vision after playing a few tracks back to back which was a little disorientating but looking away from the TV after a song cleared that up.
What came as a surprise for this rebooted version of Amplitude us that the musical tracks do not feature the variety of well known songs or artists that the original games used. The music never really comes to life outside of providing gameplay. The songs used, with a good portion created especially for this game, tend to blur into one another after a while and that sense of being the same can break the atmosphere of the game at times. With a lot of the tracks being locked until gameplay releases them, you will need to replay some tracks a good number of times to unlock more challenging ones which is really only to give the Campaign mode a reason to be there.
Overall I found Amplitude to be a fun title for a genre now clawing its way back into modern gaming but thankfully without the need to use plastic toy instruments. Visually the game looks great with a way into its gameplay for players of differing skills. It would have been nice to have played some more familiar tracks such as Rock Band Blitz offered but the style of music matches the visuals nicely and is well balanced for the launch of this game but do feel post release, Amplitude will need new tracks to stop it feeling repetitive.
For fans of the original games Harmonix has kept to what worked but the lack of more well known tracks and artists could put off some players and leave you wanting more from it.
Sadly whilst Amplitude is a competent rhythm based game, the lack of content to sink your teeth into takes some of the polish off. I enjoyed playing but regrettably never experienced a wow sensation during gameplay.
