Audio Surf is a game that is meant to let you enjoy your favorite songs in a more interactive manner. The song is turned into a race track of sorts, with you controlling a space ship that’s flying on it. There are 3 channel paths the space ship can go in and the simplified concept of the game is to collect the colored blocks and dodge the grey blocks. Timing is important as you have to constantly weave through the three different paths in order to dodge possible obstructions. Three possible channels related to an audio track with colored objectives to “collect”, where have we seen that before in a video game…

While the game at a glance is nothing revolutionary, the key concept here is that you can turn any song into an obstacle course to fly down. There are no more limits, if you have an audio file in an mp3 format then there is a very good chance it will play. I don’t suggest trying to load any audio books though as it will take forever. A 4 minute song generally only takes about 15 seconds to render the first time, and thereafter if you ever want to play it again the game has the information stored and it will load in less than 5.

Some audio files of mine would not play, even though they are mp3 and work fine in any media player on my computer. Most likely they require a codec that Audio Surf doesn’t support, but that’s probably an easy fix for the future, if the developers feel like it.

Back to the revolutionary part: the concept itself isn’t revolutionary, but coming across a finished product like this is rare enough that the word is justified. People have been adding their own sound tracks to audio games for a long time, but that typically took effort because you then had to actually program the game around the music. Audio Surf scans the mp3 file and then creates the game for you.

There’s a good reason major companies haven’t created games like this, and it’s not just because they can charge you money for each song you download from them. Whatever algorithm the game uses to read your mp3 file isn’t of very high quality, and it can often make obstacle courses that are inconceivable to complete. No game company wants to create a product that is as badly hit or miss as this one, and so it isn’t done. Well, almost no game company.

The game states that the faster a song is the more difficult it will be, but that isn’t true. Some very fast songs are jokes, while some very slow songs are literally impossible to play. Sometimes the rhythm is even messed up completely, and so your song will stutter start, going fast-slow, fast-slow, making it impossible to get into a regular groove. Often when the game stutters to a halt, or suddenly speeds up really fast with no visual queue that this is going to happen, you’re going to hit a lot of grey cubes.

If you want to get a perfect score on a song, don’t expect to start it up and just do it, because it won’t happen. To really beat a song, you will have to memorize whatever course is thrown out at you from the game. The track isn’t flat like it is in Rock Band or Guitar Hero, instead it undulates with the music. While this looks cool, your spaceship can be thrown into blind turns with no hope of surviving unscathed. Some people will probably get seizures from this as well.

The main mode of the game is simple enough. Catch all the colored blocks, dodge all the grey ones. There are many more modes, but they all lack any sort of explanation. Two sentences and a bunch of hints you can scroll through do not suffice as an explanation. After putting in over 5 hours I still have no idea how the scoring system works, and it’s largely irrelevant since in most of the modes you can’t actually choose what color blocks come at you. Supposedly if you get 3 blocks of the same color together, you get a score bonus, but I haven’t seen it.

Despite the large amount of issues with how levels are created, and how there is only mode worth playing; it’s still an enjoyable game. For those with an elitist passion you can grind out a song over and over until you make it into the number 1 spot on the online database, for that song. Only some songs are registered with the online system, but I think they will recognize any song you could find on iTunes. You couldn’t for example… play this song and expect the system to score you online. The game is made for short session play, but long load times hurt using it that way.

The game only costs $10, and it’s probably worth that much for entertainment. It also comes with a wonderful demo, so you can test it out before buying and see if you’d actually spend much time with it. I’m going to rate it a 3/10. Nice game, nice concept, but there just isn’t anything there, and oh, so very poorly designed to handle the musical anomalies it was made for in the first place. As a niche genre piece it’s great, but as a game, it isn’t much of a game.

Here's a sample of some guy playing it on youtube, as you can see, he's dodging the gray blocks, and going after the colored ones, which change color along with the background etc.