Soundfall Review

Soundfall is an interesting title that seamlessly blends twin-stick shooter action with rhythm-based gameplay to create a distinctive and action-packed game. In Soundfall, I navigated visually stunning, colorful levels, shooting, dashing and slicing to the beat and killing enemies as I progressed. The game locks progress through individual levels with arena-like challenges, where defeating all spawning enemies unlocks the path forward.

To keep the gameplay loop fascinating, Soundfall introduces different characters progressively, each with varying melee and special attack. While there is no character progression per se, there is a character level that, as it increases, unlocks harder difficulties and facilitates stronger weapon drops. Loot in Soundfall is randomized, with weapons and gear coming in different rarities and with different perks. Harder difficulties not only introduce enemies with larger health pools, but also introduce elemental resistances, increase the amount of enemie spawns in each arena challenge, and introduce more challenging foes earlier than in lower difficulties.

One major highlight of Soundfall is its diverse soundtrack, featuring songs from many renowned artists, with Jens Kiilstofte as the main composer. Tracks pan across various genres, from rock, metal, and hip-hop to dubstep, EDM, classical or shoegaze. Each track is captivating and immediately immersed me in the gameplay, allowing me to focus on the level at hand. It doesn’t matter what type of music you like, there is something for everyone here.

In total, my journey took me through ten visually distinct biomes, each featuring unique hazards, as well as two unique boss fights, totaling 142 stages (plus five additional temple levels where each of the different characters is unlocked). However, for such a large number of levels, enemy diversity proves rather lackluster.

Upon reaching max level 50, I unlocked “Lethal” the ultimate difficulty. I then decided to clear Soundfall’s ultimate challenge: Multiplatinum. This in-game challenge tasked me with clearing 142 stages on Lethal difficulty with a platinum medal. One platinum medal is awarded for beating a stage without taking damage, without idling too long between actions as to not break my combo, clearing each stage before the song ends, and by performing every single action on-beat. And it is this challenge that opened my eyes to the many flaws unfortunately present in Soundfall.

To be upfront, some of these issues are specific to the Playstation / console versions of the game and require a bit of background information. At launch, extremely powerful weapons could drop once a player reached maximum level, making Lethal difficulty manageable. These weapons were later removed on all versions of the game, with a balance patch later releasing on PC to make Lethal difficulty easier to clear with regular weapons, additionally decreasing enemy density, lowering enemy hitpoints and increasing player damage. To this date, the balance patch has not released on Playstation, making clearing tracks on Lethal literally impossible with regular weapons – or at least not quickly enough to achieve a platinum medal. Fortunately, Lydia’s special bow (Lydia being one of the five available characters) provides a workaround. There is a disadvantage to using her bow though, and requires adapting to this new playstyle, farm for weapons and gear with the right perks, as well as ignore many of the game’s mechanics such as using regular weapons or strategically using other characters for their special abilities. And even with perfect gear and using Lydia, some tracks are still very tight to clear on time.

Beyond Lethal difficulty, there are broader issues affecting all versions of the game. There are perks that reduce penalties for playing off-beat, which seems counterintuitive in a game where you want the player to play on-beat. Rewards for end-game challenges are disappointingly lackluster, with weapon and gear sets awarded for completing the hardest challenges not even being of the highest gear rarity, when perfect gear is almost mandatory to clear those challenges in the first place.

However, one issue stands above all others. There are tracks, where the metronome is off-sync. In a rhythm game! There are also tracks where the metronome changes pace mid-stage, despite the song staying consistent in tempo. My favorite is a track where during a guitar solo, the guitar plays in triplets and the metronome, instead of keeping the beat, briefly switches to triplets as well. In all those cases, the only way to ensure on-beat actions is to enable the metronome tick sound at all times, to notice when it doesn’t match the actual beat of the music. In my case, this meant 40 to 50 hours of constant ticking in my ears, which over time started to get on my nerves. This is – in a rhythm game – an unacceptable issue.