“Liberate Your Music” 
Your music is being trapped, your favorite bands and composers are being used to destroy you, and of course it is up to you to stop this madness and free the music from the thing controlling it. The question is: can you liberate yourself from this game?

Symphony is quite simple to pick up and play actually. You shoot down the most things possible with your ship and clear the stage, pretty similar to how Galaga plays: Vertical shooter, lines of enemies appear with the occasional big enemies, and you pick up bonuses and/or multipliers for each series of enemies you take down. However, it is not like your traditional “shoot‘em up”, this is more akin to Beat Hazard where it uses your music to generate a stage for you to play along with it. The higher the beat is to the music, the harder the stage is. That’s the main focus of the game, but there is more to that.

What do you do exactly in this game?

First of all, you use your mouse to play this game. Sadly though, you can only use that, there is no controller support but you get accustomed pretty quickly to the controls.

For each song you play and complete you get a weapon that you can use to get through the game. There are quite a few weapons; each one will help in a different way, and some are more powerful than others. You can also upgrade each weapon you get to make it more powerful and so it can shoot bullets faster too. Your ship can use up to 4 weapons at the same time (whether they are the same weapon or different ones for each slot), so you have to strategize and use whatever weapons will help you get through a song. There are also “rare” versions of the weapons that are more powerful than your regular ones. Though you get each weapon at random each time you beat a new song, so you have to be really lucky to get some of the better weapons and especially the rare ones. Then again, you have to get “Inspiration” and “Kudos” points to buy the weapons and upgrade them, so you just have to keep playing until you get the weapons you want.

One thing that bothered me though is that you have to search for the songs you have beaten to upgrade your weapons. And while it is not a chore, since you can filter your song list to show you which have you beaten, it would’ve been better or more convenient if you can just go to the weapons list and do it from there.

Also, this game has six different difficulties. The higher the difficulty, the harder it gets of course; but you more “Kudos” too if you clear the “Inspiration” goals for each song. And this game does get really hard, especially if you the beat of the song you are playing is high. More enemies appear and they get harder to beat if you don’t have upgraded weapons. But you have to get through the game’s “story” to get all the difficulties unlocked.

For each boss you beat, you unlock a piece of “The Symphony”. There are 5 pages in total and each page can have 2 more pieces. Though bosses appear at random, they do not have a pattern of appearance nor there is a way to make them show up. So again, you just have to keep playing to unlock all the difficulties and beat the “story” to the game. As you go on through each difficulty, the bosses keep getting more complicated to beat. Not impossible though, but you do have a time limit to beat them.

For such a simple game, there is a lot of stuff to do in it. At first you’ll be playing some songs just get the hang of it, the next thing you know is that you have been playing for an hour or so trying to unlock stuff in the game. It is really addicting, but at the same time it is also kind of frustrating. The difficulty in this game does get intense in the higher settings, good thing you have infinite lives. You do lose “Inspiration” points every time your ship gets destroyed though and those weapons and upgrades are expensive.

What about the graphics and all that other technical stuff?

The graphics in this game are really quite good. Nothing too astounding but still it manages to look pretty. Though it the screen can get kind of cluttered and sometimes the game will stutter or lag a bit and make you crash against an enemy or miss them entirely.

Also there is the problem about not seeing the bullets the enemies shoot since they are kind of small red dots and if the intensity of the song you are playing goes to red, you can barely see them. This is a real problem since you can lose a lot of points and miss the objective quite easily because of that.

As for the music, well you can pretty much use any music you want and it is probably one of the game’s main selling points. But Symphony does include its own soundtrack and for the most part it is enjoyable. It is a mixture of genres: Electronic, Rock and Classical. There are around 20 tracks in the game but most of them really aren’t truly appealing. They’re not bad at all, there are songs I would definitely listen outside the game but they’re not songs I would actually play in it, especially one with such intensity as this.

So how is the game?

Like I said in the beginning, this game is really addicting and I’ve been playing it a lot. Similar to older games or even games like Audiosurf and Beat Hazard, you try to achieve a high score and Symphony is basically that. You basically play to show off and beat everybody’s high scores in songs and be the best. You will fail a lot in the higher difficulties but you will keep trying until you get it. That is basically what drags you in. But the game is not something everybody will want to pick up and play. As I mentioned before, it can get really frustrating and not only because of difficulty being really hard in the higher levels, but also because of the inherit design flaws.

If you have noticed something in this review, for every good point about the game there’s a bad one. And while they may be just some minor flaws or just nitpicking, they do sometimes make you look at the game and ask “Why?”

Why didn’t they make the song search more intuitive? 
Why didn’t they offer control options? 
Why some of the weapons won’t work?
Why can’t you do stuff from the menu itself?
WHY?

Fortunately, the developer for this game is taking all these complaints and suggestions and making this game truly great. Though it does bring another question, why didn’t they do all this in the first place? I mean, it is really great that they are listening to the fans and while some of the complaints mentioned in this review have been already been resolved by the time it has been posted, most of this should have been resolved before release.

In the end though, the game fulfills its objective. It is truly entertaining and addicting, and it is a really good first effort by Empty Clip Studios. It is good for those moments you just want to kill some time killing aliens who kidnap composers and artists.

Price: $9.99
Acquisition method: bought through Steam