FRAG Blog

Don’t know about the rest of you, but to me flashy graphics and all of that doesn’t make a game great on its own. (Case in point, have a look at Crysis – looks great if you have the hardware to run that, but its beauty is pretty much only skin deep.) It’s often the simple concepts, executed well, that will get me addicted to a game… and, well, Audiosurf is one of them.

The concept is brutally simple – pick a song that’s lying around your computer, then race around a track picking up coloured blocks as you go. Seriously, that’s all there is to it – doesn’t get much simpler than that. It’s the execution of this concept that stands out. For example, the pace of the game actually responds to the music – slow for quiet parts, fast for the more intense bits. It comes with 14 game modes, from a casual mode (which is what I use – I play this to chill out, after all) to modes more suited to people who want to take this game more seriously than I do.

I think the best way to illustrate this all is with a demo. Here’s a clip of me audiosurfing – nearly a perfect run, apart from picking up the grey block at the end (which you’re supposed to avoid). For the demo, I picked an old trance favourite of mine (Plastic Boy – Silver Bath), which really shows off how the game reacts to the changing dynamics of the music. (As an aside, I’ll probably be playing a remix of this track in my live trance set at the June LAN.)

If I’ve got you interested enough, the game is available as a digital download (around 350MB if my memory serves me correctly) on Steam.