Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians Review

The Wii U Eshop expands in a quick fashion nowadays, the Nindies program is bringing the best of the indie world to the Eshop. There have been some good examples of this recently and if you look to the future you can see a decent amount upcoming. I feel this is the way Nintendo are fighting the fight for players, considering the 3rd party walk out it has had over the years. Not many games are exclusive still it is nice to get them as downloadable options anyway. Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians is a good example of the type of game you can get with it, it was released at Gamescom in Germany a few weeks ago, but does it hold up compared to its good indie game counter parts?

Well what we have here is a mix of games really; I will need to go into what I mean here. Let’s start with one aspect of the game, have you even played a 2d platformer with a swimming level? Yes it feels like one of those, you use the analogue stick to move the player character up and down left and right. You direct your character through under ground chasms facing different obstacles and creatures. This is where the beat aspect of the game comes in, the busier the screen is the more music there is and you have to move to the beat, pressing a button to push forward through jet streams with corresponding colours and such. I liked this part of things, the variety of this is good and keeping to the beat is fun within the setting. I never had any problem with the controls or the game play, it was all pretty decent.

The music is one of the main parts of the game for me, as you can guess from the name of the game. Beatbuddy, you keep the rhythm with atmospheric sound tracks, including jazz, techno and even classical music, all sorts of music genres, it is very well implemented and very nice to hear for me. Partnered with this is the graphics, they are a nice hand drawn style for the background and foreground of the game area. I like the colour scheme and how it all looks like it fits well and creates a world of its own. When the screen is busy with different lights and beats the gameplay is only enhanced.

The storyline fits in with everything well, it’s an abstract one right enough, something about a evil prince stealing all of the music from a world made of music, if that makes sense to anyone. I can look down on it as a bit like an 80’s cartoon I once watched, but it is okay for what it is. The non player characters chat away nice enough and all of a sudden you find yourself drawn into the world

While I have been going on good guns about this one I know, but it isn’t the perfect thing I am going on about. There are a few issues to be honest; there are some bugs within the game, frame rate issues, even bugs that restart levels, which should not be happening in final builds of the game (hopefully a patch will fix these issues). Some of the puzzles are good but they can get repetitive after a while too. Also while it is supposed to be a rhythm game you can beat parts without keeping a rhythm too, making it a bit easier than needed to and undermining the whole concept of the game.

Overall Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians is a good game with some flaws, it is beautiful to look at and listen to and while similar to game experiences that have been before it is actually quite an unique offering. Is it worth your cash, for me, maybe wait for a patch or a sale on this one over all if you don’t fancy it, otherwise yes, I would go for it myself.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Nintendo Wii U code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.

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