Review of Amplitude: A Cult Classic Reborn

Allow me to preface this by saying that I've never played the original Amplitude, so I'm coming at this from a completely clean perspective. Rhythm games are a tough breed; it takes the right mixture of difficulty, catchy music, and psychedelic graphics to make it truly successful. That being said, Amplitude takes on the challenge pretty admirably.

This is obviously the spiritual cousin of Guitar Hero, which was also made by Harmonix. You have a track. There are notes on the track. You hit the buttons in time to the music. Simple, familiar, fun. This is where the similarities end, though.

Amplitude has you racing down this musical track in a neon ship, and instead of playing one instrument throughout a song, you are playing all of them. Drums, synth, vocals, guitar, bass... all of it.

You play the game using either the L1, R1, and R2 buttons or the square, triangle, and circle buttons on the controller. Using the shoulder buttons feels much more natural, however that R2 trigger will make certain parts of the song extremely difficult considering the button is much more loose that the other two shoulders. Most frustration will be caused by that R2 trigger.

The idea is to play a section of the song and quickly transition to another without missing a beat creating a chain and raising the amount of points scored for each section of song. On the lower tiers of the four difficulty settings this is pretty easy, the notes of the sections you're switching to glow to show you what to push. On the harder settings, this seemingly simple action can make you want to stab puppies and throw toddlers out of windows. Especially since failing to keep a chain will cause you to lose energy, and obviously once you're out of energy you fail the song.

The song selection itself is almost done entirely in house and mostly consists of electronic music. You won't find any big names here, but the majority of the songs are pretty catchy and you'll find yourself humming them sometimes. Or, I did at least. There are some that are pretty awful, and you can take solace in the fact that you don't have to play them to progress through the campaign. There are some collaborations with other developers as well, you'll find songs from other games in there too. My personal favorite being "Impossible" which was featured in SuperGiant's game Transistor (another great game).

The game's main campaign, if it can even be called that, supposedly has a story to it... but its never really fleshed out beyond some voices at the beginning of a song and some captions in the song selection screen. The meat of the game is in the quickplay menu, where you can not only play the songs in the campaign, but also the songs you unlock during it. Ultimately Amplitude is a one trick pony, but that pony does his trick well. If you've never played a rhthym game before I wouldn't suggest picking it up, but if you're a fan of the genre Amplitude is a lot of fun and provides the right amount of challenge for veterans. If you're not sure if you should purchase the entire game there is a 3 song demo available for free in the Playstation store which will give you a pretty good idea of what the game has to offer.

Buy, rent, pass?

Depends on your preference; but I would say it's a definite buy for fans of electronic music and fast paced, reflex based game play.