When the people behind indie favorite action-adventure game, Psychonauts, said they were going to make games for mobile devices, no one expected Double Fine to produce a musical rhythm game. Actually, I wouldn’t even call Dropchords a musical rhythm game, it’s sort of like a bad puzzle-reflex game with engaging music and some flashy graphics.
To classify a game in the musical rhythm genre, the music has to actually be a part of the gameplay. In Dropchords, the music has no bearing on the game other than to distract you with its techno heart-thumping beats. If this is the definition of the genre, then any game with a soundtrack, which is almost every game, is a musical rhythm game. Unfortunately, even in this aspect, the game falls short. There is not much in the way of variety in the music that would cater to anyone outside of those who dance regularly in a clubbing scene.
The game starts by asking you to hold your thumb down on either side of a circle. Then as a line is formed connecting your fingers through the circle, smaller glowy circles representing musical notes appear in the middle and your goal is to turn the line inside the bigger circle to make contact with the notes. Occasionally, red symbols representing scratches appear and you have to avoid them so you don’t lose health and your multiplier. That’s all there is to it.
Touching the notes does not add to the music, and getting scratches does nothing to interrupt the beat. The levels will increase in difficulty, but they tend to veer more towards boring frustration rather than intensely challenging. Scratches will sometimes appear very near your line, making avoiding it almost impossible, and sometimes move in a purposely obstructive manner.
The levels and gameplay also lack in variety. Besides the music and the background color, nothing else changes. Without any random generation, you go through the same levels every time you start it up. There is also no unlockables or rewards for reaching any level. You continue picking up notes while avoiding scratches until your health reaches zero and your high score is accumulated. There is a leaderboard for you to compare scores with your friends, but there is no point because none of them will be playing after a few days.
The graphics in Dropchords is reminiscent of musical visualizers you see in some media player softwares. While it is nice to see at first, the flashy colors could give one a headache and tired eyes after a longer playthrough.
If Dropchords was released by an unknown developer, it would probably not have been reviewed highly by some sites or achieve the amount of downloads it has so far. Reputation can garner you many favors, but expectation is a double-edged sword, especially when your name is Tim Schafer. This game failed to deliver in every aspect, and it makes it all the more appalling that the idea came from his head. The soundtrack is available online for download, so you might want to remove this game from your device and just listen to the music. Meanwhile, we await their upcoming point-and-click adventure game, Broken Age, as Double Fine gets back to doing what they are actually good at.
