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Indie games are all the rage these days, some even say, and with good reason, that all innovation in gaming is happening on the indie front. However indie games are always a gamble, a gamble with pretty bad odds. 

Beat Hazard is one of the few sure bets in indie gaming. One part Geometry Wars, one part Audiosurf, 5 parts epileptic seizure. The game came out for the Xbox 360 last November and just came out on Steam this month. I’ve never been one for shooters but Beat Hazard taught me fear, love and respect for the genre via some very severe ass kicking.


Beat Hazard’s premise is simple, it’s an asteroid-like shooter controlled by your music. At face value that may seem like merely a gimmick but in a genre known for its impossible bullet hells, having your music directing the gameplay provides a powerful incentive to the uninitiated and a constant challenge to the veteran.

I initially approached Beat Hazard with a very smug attitude. After all it’s my music I’m playing against and I know my music down to the beat. My library contains all kinds of music, from Jazz to power metal to all kinds of electronic… and a bunch of anime and game OSTs as well. I started off with some power metal and received a swift kick to the balls. The next 4 tracks were pretty much the same. Jazz? No dice. Electronic? Tough luck. Beat Hazard taught me to fear it and show it proper respect. It was perhaps an hour later that I managed to beat my first track… a 50 second Cowboy Bebop song. Yeah, I suck at shooters, but the music taunted me

Beat Hazard’s music processor is a lot more detailed than one would imagine and it’s designed so that you cant really get a boring track easily. Intense music will have you firing at high rates but they will also bring bigger enemies and space debris from all around, there’s also a higher probability of bosses appearing. Calm music on the other hand is a freaking nightmare! Sure there are less powerful enemies around you but you are also firing the equivalent of a pea-shooter in space. Before you know it your screen will be crawling with cannon fodder and the game becomes a hellish dance of evasion. 

As you destroy enemies you receive power-ups such as bombs, score modifiers, damage increases and, most interesting of all, volume modifiers. The louder the music gets, the more the game reacts to it and the more fun it becomes. The game is designed to get you to plot your own demise, you’ll learn to love the pain.

The visuals are mesmerizing at best and a clinical hazard at worst. Once the power-ups have kicked in and the music is pumping your screen will look like a strobing snow globe filled with pixie dust. The screen can get so cluttered with music feedback, enemies and your stream of death rays that identifying what the hell is going on will become a challenge. This might seem like a gameplay problem, but like I said, you’ll learn to love the burning pain in your eyes.

Every song you play will play pretty much the same every time you play it, so while the direction or speed of enemies and debris might change, they will always come out at the same moment and always in the same amounts. This allows you to really treat each song as a well developed level which you can learn and replay until you beat. Just a few days ago I spent a whole hour trying to beat a single track and learned the exact second where I had to watch out for bosses, swarms and slow parts where I couldn’t shoot for shit