0D Beat Drop is a Columns-style block stacking game; struggling amidst a sea of Columns-style block stacking games now available in the Xbox LIVE Arcade marketplace. Can it stand out from the crowd, and, more importantly, is it entertaining enough to be worth 800 of your hard earned Microsoft Points? The answer, in the end, largely depends on how much you love Columns-style block stacking games.
Beat Drop’s gameplay will be largely familiar to pretty much anyone who’s familiar with Tetris, and who isn’t familiar with Tetris? Coloured blocks go down the screen, you stack them next to blocks of the matching colour, blocks go boom, you gain points. Stack the blocks too high, you lose. Beat Drop’s caveat is its use of music, specifically the rhythm of the backing music, as a defining feature of the gameplay. The graphics on screen pulse to the beat of the music (as does, quite irritatingly, your controller), and, if you hit a button in time to the beat, your blocks will slam down into the field, eliminating any matching blocks they connect with.
This feature works well, and adds a new level of pace and strategy to the otherwise quite vanilla gameplay; the beat drop system lets you set up strings of combos, and slamming your final block down onto a carefully constructed tower in time to a thumping tune is really quite rewarding. If your opponent lets you, of course.
One gripe I had with Beat Drop is that, aside from an objective-based trial mode, it is ALWAYS a competitive game. There’s a myriad of game modes available, but all of them involve competing with at least one opponent, either AI or player controlled. They will constantly be endeavouring to fill your screen will a deluge of new blocks, which rather kills the opportunity for combo strategy. Don’t get me wrong, the competitive play works well, but I’d have liked at least one mode where my only opponents were the clock, and my ever-mounting pile of blocks.
The AI opponents are also relentless harsh, even on the easiest difficulty setting, and the margin between emerging victorious and drowning in a sea of blocks is very thin. There’s no chance to try and learn the ropes of the game, just a lengthy run of tutorial screens that laboriously lay out the rules of the game, before you are chucked in at the deep end, usually to be decimated by the AI within the first couple of rounds. Playing with friends is a lot more fun, as you all start off on equal footing. Again, a non-competitive mode would have made learning the ropes a lot easier for new players.
Presentation-wise, Beat Drop is a mixed bag. The menu screens are offensively bright and over-loaded, hitting you like a psychedelic punch to the face. The gameplay graphics are better, with the right amount of colours to let you know what’s going on. The graphics pulsing in time to the beat of the music is a neat feature that helps you keep track of your timing for the all-important beat drops.
Beat Drop’s most interesting feature is its ability to use your own music to play with. Unfortunately, the interface for doing so isn’t great. The game can’t simply import your music; instead, it has to ‘listen’ to a track to work out the correct rhythm. This involves sitting through the entire song you want to use, waiting for the game to find the correct rhythm. So, if you want to import a playlist to use in the game, you are going to have to listen to the entire thing through first, as well as deal with Beat Drop’s unnecessarily complex importing interface. While not ideal, it is still a feature to be applauded, and being able to play along with your own music adds quite a lot to the game.
In end, it comes down to how much you want to play another block-matching game. Beat Drop has some unique features that make it stand out above the average Columns clone. It can be addictive, and its use of music and rhythm works well. It’s not the best block-matcher out there; it’s not even the best music-based block-matcher. It’s also not what I’d recommend as a jumping-off point for player looking to get into this sort of game. If you are a genre fan, however, and are looking for something a little different to play, then 0D Beat Drop would be a good way to spend some time.
VideogameUK verdict: 6/10
