This magazine and Amplitude have a long-standing relationship. Some ten years ago, the staff at the time spent every lunch time either locked in multiplayer battles on Harmonix’s beat-blasting classic, or joined in arms trying to best its final stages. Eyes watered, heads ached, fingers cramped, but it’s safe to say the game significantly contributed to the magazine’s history.
What a treat, then, to have Harmonix back doing what it can do better than anyone else on the planet – rhythm action on a controller. Amplitude’s 2016 reboot almost didn’t happen – a Kickstarter campaign went down to the final minutes, and looked dead and buried at the halfway point. It’s clear that this is a game built at a more modest scale than its forebear.
There are no ‘popular’ songs on its soundtrack, instead we have 30 tracks either composed in-house at Harmonix, or licensed from indie-game composers and a couple of local Boston favourites (yes, Freezepop make the cut). It’s an unusual mix, with a few tunes bordering on the awful, and plenty more that need a few listens and plays to get your head around. The bulk of the new songs form the game’s campaign; a rather odd ‘concept’ album that supposedly tells the story of a patient who is undergoing brain surgery, but in truth just acts as an excuse to piece together the game’s odd music.
As you progress, the tunes do get a little less experimental and creep, thankfully, into ‘banger’ territory. This is always where Amplitude was going to shine – the endlessly compelling loop of beats, lights and synths that manage to capture the essence of a piece of music as you play through it.
If you’ve never experienced Amplitude, its predecessor FreQuency, or even the recent and criminally underrated Rock Band Blitz, then the sea of coloured blocks and glowing, twisting tracks are as daunting as a throwback trance night at a dingy local nightclub.
It’s actually pretty simple – you control a ‘beat blaster’, who moves along the tracks, and clears each coloured block in correspondence with the correct shoulder button. Clear two bars on a track, and you move onto the next with a jab of the D-pad. So you might clear a couple of bars of drums, then move onto bass, onto the synths and so on. Combos form when you clear tracks in sequence without making the mistake of leaving any gaps, and you build up a multiplier by not making any errors.
The genesis of Rock Band and Guitar Hero is clear to see – Harmonix invented this way of representing music in videogame form many years ago (alright, the Boston-based developer didn’t invent the genre, but it clearly perfected it), but the pace at which Amplitude plays makes it arguably even more compulsive than anything where you’re wielding a piece of Mad Catz plastic. Like a classic 2D shooter, your mind connects directly with the action – your fingers become a blur. The second you think about what you’re actually doing, it all falls apart.
Or at least, it does on the higher difficulties. Amplitude does cater for a newer audience, to those who have never felt the burn of Komputer Kontroller’s Robot Rockerz, whose fingers aren’t twisted into twitching claws, whose eyes still work. On the lower levels, Amplitude is actually quite a dull game – the cacophonous music only worsened by the limited interactions on screen. Yet it’s a great tutorial – just as a PES player must drop the difficulty every year to understand the new nuances on show – so it’s worth battling through the campaign on Intermediate mode so you have time to recognise the little tweaks to the formula that make Amplitude 2016 something of a smoother experience when compared to the original.
The most immediate change is instant track jumping. In all of Harmonix’s beat-blasting games (as we’ll call them for convenience), you had to manually skip through the tracks you’d cleared to reach the next one available. Now, one press of the D-pad sends you straight to the next uncleared track. A small change maybe, but one that fundamentally alters how you string together combos, makes high scoring much easier, and makes for a smoother game and a significantly improved sense of flow.
This is coupled with little beacons of light that highlight the next note available on an adjacent track. In the original game, these were highlighted with a pulsing green arrow, but this subtle stylistic choice makes it much easier to determine exactly where the next note is, and how to keep your combo going. It’s doubly important on the hardest difficulty, which will push your abilities to their absolute limits, perhaps even more so than the original game’s legendary final few tracks.
And if you’re a true Harmonix-head, you can even activate Freq mode, which wraps all the tracks into a tunnel like the classic FreQuency. Unfortunately, as the tracks bend in Amplitude, it makes Freq mode a little too unwieldy to play at high difficulty. Still, credit to Harmonix for pushing its budget to really deliver for the fans who supported the project financially.
And that’s really the best way to look at Amplitude. This is a game for the fans, paid for by the fans, and limited only by its budget. The music won’t be to everyone’s taste, and of course doesn’t include any pop classics, but the precision and excitement of the moment-to-moment musical action has never been stronger. Harmonix is a master developer, and Amplitude only cements that legacy.