Music has always been an integral part of Android games. It lifts the mood, changes the intensity of the game and enhances the quality of gameplay. But what if someone decided that the gameplay itself depended on the music and gave you the choice to choose the music? BulkyPix, the guys who brought you the wonderfully breezy game Jazz: Trump’s Journey decided to do just that, and unlike Trump’s journey, their innovative venture Song Rush falls flat – very very flat!
I’ve got the Blues… The SongRush Blues
SongRush starts off with a great idea. Using simple one tap controls, you jump and slide over an obstacle-riddled platform in tune with a song that you choose from the game library. You also get to collect a bunch of music notes along the way. A octopussy typed creature tails you in the hope that you’ll make a mistake and fall back so that it can grab you with its spindly tentacles. Your ultimate aim: to run as long as you can towards the center of the platform and avoid getting strangulated by the long reaching tentacles.
You start your first run by picking a song and paying a token. You have a couple of free tokens initially and you will enjoy plenty of success in the tutorial mode. But just when you think, Hey, this is a great game! it all falls starts to fall apart.
You run out of tokens, even the ones you exchange for notes, and then have to wait for half an hour for the game to regenerate a fresh token or hop off to the Store to whittle cash on more wasted tokens and notes. I say more wasted tokens because the tokens won’t even let you play for one whole minute. You’ll be strangulated by the tentacles even before you start the game, in some cases. It’s completely bonkers if you can’t run for long, can’t earn enough notes to exchange for tokens and have to wait for half an hour to regenerate just one token, which you will lose it in a matter of seconds. Actually, its more than bonkers, its highly preposterous and completely untenable!
More Pains
The game’s music library lets you add songs from your smartphone’s music collection. Uploaded songs will be analyzed and graded according to difficulty levels, but the point is really moot if the game is over even before its begun. There are no quick and easy options to choose songs from your cloud storage solutions either. While you can sort songs according to alphabetical order, last played or most played, you may not be able to delete a song from the library. If you could, its certainly not obvious.
The controls are fairly simple, (tap on the left to slide and tap on the right to jump,) but they feel unresponsive at times resulting in jagged gameplay. I’d like my hero to jump when I ask him to and slide when I want him to and he does neither of these things smoothly. I also experienced animation issues on my HTC Desire X and lost a whole lot of tokens when I was met with an empty play screen.
The graffiti-inspired graphics and game backgrounds are artistic but repetitive and you won’t find any new dangers or obstacles here. The game lacks depth and creativity and you’ve seen everything once you’ve played around for a little while. The game’s IAP system is yet another disappointment. It is unrealistic and expensive and you won’t even be tempted to spend on the the lowest pack which is about $1.99 for 1500 notes.
SongRush is a lackluster game that seems to be too keenly focused on bringing you down rather than letting you enjoy some good music while platforming. If you are really keen on bringing yourself down, you’d be better off listening to an oldie from Neil called Song Sung Blue, and who knows, you may even feel better when you’ve karaoke’d it with him a couple of times!
