Obviously a large part of this is down to licensing cash. This new Amplitude was Kickstarted and acquiring a vast library of music is a good way to quickly drain the coffers, but in many cases a rhythm game is only as good as the music underpinning it - recognisable tracks keep people coming back for more, but when half of the tracks on your music game are from the artist 'Harmonix' you're setting yourself up for a failure.
I missed the original Amplitude on its release but was a big fan of Frequency and played a fair bit of Rock Band, so I was really keen to try this, but despite the experience being really well put together after an hour I found myself running out of things to do.
There's a multiplayer, but it requires you and your musically minded mates to be sat in the same room without any of the spectacle of Rock Band.
It's hard to really come up with many flaws to Amplitude. It's fairly well put together, the game is totally serviceable and there aren't many sharp edges. Playing the game /is/ fun.
But there's just no soul. Nothing to really make the experience sing out or diversify it from many of the other excellent games on PlayStation's store. In many cases there's not much to diversify the game's tracks from each other. I've played 30 of the games 32 tracks and the only two I can pull out separately are the C418 track mentioned above and a Freezepop song. I'm already a fan of C418 and Freezepop so it feels like cheating. The rest is a brightly coloured flash.
Fun at the time but sitting here afterwards it feels particularly unremarkable.
If I went back to the game now it'd be for its multiplayer - the carnage of 4 people crossing tracks and trying to lock each other out with colour coded ships is really quite good - when those four players are also firing off all of their power-ups in tandem things can get outright ridiculous.
Largely though, Amplitude is an exercise in disappointment - an aging franchise desperately looking to relive the glory days of its youth, but not really understanding what made them so glorious in the first place.
I missed the original Amplitude on its release but was a big fan of Frequency and played a fair bit of Rock Band, so I was really keen to try this, but despite the experience being really well put together after an hour I found myself running out of things to do.
There's a multiplayer, but it requires you and your musically minded mates to be sat in the same room without any of the spectacle of Rock Band.
It's hard to really come up with many flaws to Amplitude. It's fairly well put together, the game is totally serviceable and there aren't many sharp edges. Playing the game /is/ fun.
But there's just no soul. Nothing to really make the experience sing out or diversify it from many of the other excellent games on PlayStation's store. In many cases there's not much to diversify the game's tracks from each other. I've played 30 of the games 32 tracks and the only two I can pull out separately are the C418 track mentioned above and a Freezepop song. I'm already a fan of C418 and Freezepop so it feels like cheating. The rest is a brightly coloured flash.
Fun at the time but sitting here afterwards it feels particularly unremarkable.
If I went back to the game now it'd be for its multiplayer - the carnage of 4 people crossing tracks and trying to lock each other out with colour coded ships is really quite good - when those four players are also firing off all of their power-ups in tandem things can get outright ridiculous.
Largely though, Amplitude is an exercise in disappointment - an aging franchise desperately looking to relive the glory days of its youth, but not really understanding what made them so glorious in the first place.
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