The latest rhythm game is here from developer and publisher HyperStrange as they released LOUD: My Road to Fame last week. Built to play like an arcade game, which is suggested to be done by using the player's gamepad, this title brings the arcade rhythm play style to home screens. Offering a full list of unique tracks, a new visual aesthetic to the genre, and a story that fits the dream ideal of any musician, this game is one that is worth checking out.

Story

Astrid is your average angsty teenager that dreams of owning a guitar and seeing how far it can take her. After a surprise gift from her father, she gets her first guitar and begins working on her skills. Before long, she finds herself performing which leads to being signed and eventually playing on stage!

The story is pretty straightforward, there are nice scene-by-scene cutscenes to fill in the story between stages, and a handful of songs on each stage area to beat to move on. The story is quite literally how just about every musician' wishes their musical career would begin.

Gameplay

They keep it direct when it comes to the gameplay. You have three difficulty options with only the first two available at first. Once you beat the song with an ‘S’ rating on the medium difficulty, you will unlock the hardest difficulty for the song. This does have to be done with every song, so if you are already used to rhythm games then make sure you unlock the hardest difficulty for each song as you complete the career mode.

The game only offers two play modes: career and free play. Free play is practically empty at the start, but as you beat each song in the career mode, they will begin filling up the free play song list. You will unlock some hidden songs by completing the later chapters as well. Luckily, the hidden songs don’t have different difficulties and offer the challenging versions of the game.

As for the gameplay itself, the game suggests heavily to use a gamepad. You will find six star paths around Astrid and they are the note-to-play indicators. On the left, you use the Up, Left, and Down arrows on the D-pad while on the right, you use Triangle/Y, Circle/B, and Cross/A. You will come across single notes and hold notes, per usual, but they also have mash notes where you hit the button as much as you can while the path is there. This is a nice addition, especially with it being a guitar-based game. You can also use either analog stick as a whammy bar for the long notes.

Audio and Visual

This game didn’t put too much into the visual aspect and seems to be aiming for an early 2000s-era art style. It’s almost the aesthetic you would expect from a concept comic book or an animated music video from that era. However, the audio is a big part of this game and the music throughout the game is definitely hit-or-miss. Making unique tracks for a game like this is a strong route to take, but with that, you run the risk that not every song is going to be a jam for the player. This game does have that factor where some songs weren’t great, but you play through them to see what other songs are on the playlist.

Replayability

While it may seem like the track list isn’t super long, it does hold replayability. Some songs are more fun to play than others, once you unlock the hardest difficulty for your favorite songs you can go on to trying to master them, and the hidden songs aren’t easy to beat and that alone is an interesting challenge. Hopefully, we will see more songs released for the game in the future which will give more reasons to load back up.

What It Could Have Done Better

I was hopeful that once I completed the career mode it would just unlock the harder difficulty for all songs in one go, but it didn’t do that. It really means that the songs you got an 89.95% on will have to be replayed to earn that S rank before you can play it on the harder difficulty. This felt a little punishing in its own way and definitely hindered my want to replay some songs. I found myself spending more time in free play on songs I already unlocked the hardest difficulty for or attempting the unlocked hidden songs.

I’m not sure how they can make it better, but having the notes appear all over the screen as they do for this layout is rough to follow. During the more hectic moments, I turned to focusing on the center of the screen and using my peripheral vision to keep up with the incoming notes. It’s just so spread out and I don’t even have one of the bigger screens that some gamers use.

Verdict

LOUD: My Road to Fame is an entertaining rockstar rhythm game! It was a lot of fun to play and getting through the songs, even the few I didn’t care for much, were a lot of fun. I’m not sure how I feel about the layout style itself, but it does the main job it is here to do - let the player be a rockstar for a full tracklist of songs. Given that, I would recommend any fan of rhythm games to check this one out.

LOUD: My Road to Fame is now available on PC via Steam. It will be coming to consoles at a future date.