I actually picked this up close to release last year, but I was on my previous PC, which was pretty good but bottlenecked by a pretty old (at that point) intel i5 CPU, and it had lots of issues with it surprisingly (considering how this game looks, it shouldn’t have had the 5-10 minute loading times it did on an SSD). My new PC is considerably beastlier, so I picked it back up and finally got some runs in with no issues at all.

I was pretty interested in this one as it had the pretty unique idea of being a rhythm FPS. It wasn’t the only rhythm FPS featuring metal music we saw announcements for last year (the other being Metal: Hellsinger, which is not out yet), which was pretty weird, but I’m always in for interesting gameplay mechanics and both of these do seem to play quite differently.

So let’s go and see if this is good!

Developer and Publisher: Awe Interactive
Release date: September 15th 2020
Platforms: PC
Genre: Roguelite Rhythm Doomlike

So this is a roguelite, with a structure similar to Binding of Isaac. You get this grid-based map, and each room takes one space of the grid. Each room will have doors that lead to other rooms, eventually leading to a boss battle, leading to the next floor where you have a similar map to go through. If you die, you restart with nothing from previous runs. The difference is that this is an FPS and a rhythm game. Each floor has its own specific music which is fun, it’s usually pretty decent metal (with no lyrics), sometimes with some electronic aspects to them.

Basically you move around in first person pointing a gun (or your magic-shooting hands) in front of you, shooting things in front of you, strafing and jumping and dashing. Your crosshair includes 2 arrow bars, and, much like notes in DDR, moving arrows come from the sides of the screen and overlap those arrows to the beat of the music (with smaller arrows for half-beats in-between). These are constant and keep the same rhythm throughout the whole game. How the shooting works, then, is that, depending on the weapon, you can shoot every beat or half-beat. If you miss that beat, you miss the note and the shot doesn’t go off. You also have to dash using that rhythm. But that’s not all. If you’re using guns, you also have to reload them to the beat, and some have several reload inputs to do which makes them pretty tough to deal with.

So there’s a few types of rooms. The main type is enemy encounters. Basically the room will be filled with a bunch of enemies for you to rhythmically shoot at. Some may charge at you, jump attack, fly, shoot projectiles and such. Generally strafing around will allow you to mostly avoid them, but it’s a bit to think about since you’re also thinking about the rhythm of your shots and dashes. Sometimes the rhythm thingies around your crosshair will have different designs, indicating you need to dodge in a specific direction, or jump, to avoid damage. It can be a bit difficult to pay full attention to every enemy around, but if you’re careful it’s not too bad. These regular rooms all end up having “something” special, like gambling chests (3 chests that require keys but only one has something good), plates to put coins in for stat increases, thingies that hurt you but give you money or keys and so on. There’s a shop with a giant dancing chick, it gets better as you buy stuff there. Stuff like max HP boosts, healing and equipment. There’s a blacksmith, who sells guns and weapon/stat upgrades. There’s a library, where you need a key but get a super ability. There’s stairs, which for a key lead you down to an alternate next floor than if you take the exit in the boss room. There’s challenge rooms, which spawn a bunch of enemies if you flip a switch, and can be switched on several times for more enemies and more rewards. There’s several types of treasure rooms too. And there’s the boss room. The boss is the same every time, so Asgard 1 will always be Draugr and Asgard 2 will always be Ymir and so on. Sometimes bosses will have some random power up, like being giant or shooting you more projectiles when you damage them. Sometimes entire levels will have random power-ups too, like “Explosive” making enemies drop explodey skulls that will hurt nearby enemies if you grab them, or “Space” which makes you jump higher, and some others.

Basically the goal of each run is to get to the bottom of the dungeon to fight Nidhogg, who is generally really easy if you managed to even get there in the first place. You spend money to get equipment or stats and get keys to get more equipment generally. Equipment has a lot of functions. You get 4 slots: armor/shield, glove, hat and shoes. You can get equipment that will give different kinds of stat boosts,  change your shots, give extra effects to your shots like timed explosives or “cleaving” (attacks hit nearby enemies), shield regen, make you lay poison in your path as you walk, stuff like that. There’s some especially OP boots that just deal damage to everything in the room over-time. And that’s that with this one. Every run is hoping to get the best equipment you can, hoping to get all the stat boosts you need (especially max HP and damage being the most useful), and just killing all the bosses.

You unlock things as you play, such as characters based on different conditions (characters start with different guns/weapons and have different special abilities). Finishing a run with a character unlocks different things for them, like a secondary fire ability and an ultimate, which should help on following runs. The shop and blacksmith get bigger stock as you spend money there. And there’s several difficulty levels, so if you want to 100% this game, it should take you a good long while.

One thing I will talk about quickly is the visuals. This has this weird effect to it, where it looks like a badly-optimized GIF from the mid-90s (if you remember playing old PC games that had actual options for how many colos you had to ). Instead of having actual gradients, the colors have these clear blocks of specific colors before “gradienting” to another color. It’s not smooth, basically. It focuses on basically one color gradient per level, so there first 2 floors are some brown-ish orange color and it gradients to darker and lighter versions of it. Every 2 floor the color changes. You actually have setting options to change the color of each area, but instead of being a color selection it’s a percentage? I don’t get it, but it looks bad if you change it from the default so might as well just leave it. I’m talking about this because I don’t think it looks super great. I’d rather have regular-looking graphics. Just a personal preference.

Overall

BPM is fun but I don’t have the desire to keep playing it t0 unlock everything. I like the base gameplay, it’s really unique and interesting, the music is pretty hype and it’s fun for a bit. I feel repeating playthroughs eventually gets a bit too repetitive, as each run eventually feels like doing the same thing again, with the “build” you get each run not feeling particularly different. You’ll find the gun you like, the upgrades you like, and there’s little reason to deviate from what works. Not really much more to say here.

I recommend it at a discount.