Sound Shapes Review

Sound Shapes has been ambiguously floating in the PlayStation ether for a while. Originally created as a Vita exclusive, it was over a year ago that we first declared it to have serious potential as a launch title. But Sound Shapes slipped from the launch window, and anxious players had to patiently wait, seemingly so developer Queasy Games could port it to PlayStation 3.

Now, six months removed from Vita’s western launch, Sound Shapes has finally arrived on both PS3 and Vita, and I’m happy to report that it was worth the wait. Sound Shapes packs beautiful visuals, a stunning audio array, rock-solid gameplay and a suite of creation and sharing tools that unify both versions of the game. That last part’s good news, as Sound Shapes’ low price buys you both the PS3 and Vita iterations of the game.

Instantly striking about Sound Shapes is its presentational fluidity, its ability to get you right into the action through its gorgeous, minimalist, no frills approach. This immediately shines through from its compulsory tutorials. Though Sound Shapes contains a slew of options, it behooves you to get right into its 20-stage campaign first, since doing so unlocks scores of components that can be used in creating your own stages later on. And beating Sound Shapes’ campaign unlocks two other modes that will be interesting to challenge-seekers and Trophy-hunters in particular. Those modes fully compound Sound Shapes’ inherent fun factor.

The campaign itself is interesting right off the bat because each of the five “worlds” (called “albums” and filled with stages in-game) are designed by different visual artists. Better yet, a different musician was assigned to each album, giving the varied art its own distinct and unique audio accompaniment. For instance, the four stages of CORPOREAL (designed by Superbrothers with music from Jim Guthrie) feel, look and sound different than the three stages in the Cities album (designed by Pyramid Attack with music from Beck). PixelJam, Colin Mancer and Vic Nguyen are some of the other artists in the game, with more music from the likes of I Am Robot, Proud and deadmau5.

Gameplay is fairly straight forward – Sound Shapes is very much a side-scrolling platformer – but there are a number of twists that will keep you on your toes. Each stage comes littered with collectible circles that, when gathered, add components to the background music. As you begin to collect more and more, the music grows in robustness, losing old features – such as a gentle hi-hat hit or a jarring bass strum – and gathering new notes, instruments and chords in their wake. The motivation of the game’s little blob character remains unknown – he simply wants to get to the end of any stage where a record player can be found, allowing him to move on – but that’s one of the strangely endearing features of Sound Shapes. It’s open to interpretation.

As a result, Sound Shapes has multiple layers as both a standalone platformer and as something more, something deeper and more artistic. It isn’t designed to be ruthless. It’s actually quite forgiving, casual and easy to understand; that’s part of its charm. You can easily beat the game in under three hours, but when you compete with the masses on worldwide leaderboards that chronicle both your aptitude for collecting a level's "sounds" and the timeliness (or lack thereof) in which you beat a stage, Sound Shapes’ brief campaign quickly balloons by becoming the worthwhile sum of its many parts.

But only when you beat Sound Shapes does the game truly begin in earnest. Thrashing through the campaign unlocks two new modes – Death Mode and Beat School – that open up the essence of Sound Shapes for players to dissect at a molecular level. While Beat School challenges musically inclined gamers to put together beats using only Sound Shapes’ creation tools and their ears, Death Mode puts players back into sticky situations, tasking them with collecting a certain amount of objects in a given time. As a musician, I blazed through Beat School, but I can’t help but wonder how the everyday gamer will do with them. Death Mode, on the other hand, was far more challenging for me.

Through these two modes, all but one of Sound Shapes’ Trophies are earned, and like the recently-released PSN exclusive Dyad, this makes Trophy-hunting an entirely separate and novel affair from playing the game itself. While earning the game’s only Gold Trophy comes by way of beating the campaign, its other 32 Trophies – all Silver – will come via arduous Death Mode adventurism and a knack for recreating music in Beat School. And yes, Sound Shapes doesn’t only come packing a Platinum Trophy, it also comes packing two separate Trophy lists for the two versions of the game. And if you sync your save from one to the other, expect to earn all of the Trophies from your Vita on your PS3 (or vice-versa).

Speaking of syncing saves, Sound Shapes allows players to send their progress from one iteration of the game to the other. And while I preferred playing Sound Shapes on Vita, the PS3 version is equally splendid in both core gameplay and content creation. Likewise, created stages cobbled together with the game’s intuitive creation tools can also be shared and played across platforms, and part of Sound Shapes’ lasting appeal will no doubt be derived from the player-created stages that will undoubtedly get more complex and impressive as time goes on.

With that said, I encountered issues with both syncing my saves between games and playing user-generated content. It took me around 10 tries to get my PS3 to read my synced Vita save – a problem a producer on the game told me was due to being signed into the PSN before booting the game up – but regardless of why the issue exists, it needs to be patched. Likewise, I tried to play a handful of user-generated levels and would get error messages just as many times as I would be able to successfully jump in and get playing. The reason for these issues remain to be seen, and again, a fix would be nice.

Source : ign[dot]com