Symphony

Symphony falls into the same niche genre as Audiosurf and Beat Hazard, which involves using your own music files to play some sort of skill-based gameplay. Symphony is most closely related to Beat Hazard, since they're both 'space shooters'. While Beat Hazard plays in the free-turning shooter style of Asteroids, Symphony sticks to the forward-locked style of Galaga. You stay in a box while enemies pour into it. I would have much preferred the gameplay to scroll continually like a Touhou bullet hell sort of game, because by comparison, Symphony looks really slow, even when the gameplay is very busy.

Being 'very slow' is one of Symphony's main problems in many different areas. The enemies soak up bullets like mad and take forever to destroy. The unlock system in this game is also slow, forcing you to complete boss after boss after boss in order to unlock the harder difficulties (keeping in mind every boss plays nearly the same). Even loading the mp3s into the game is slow, since if you want to add 1 single song to your collection, you'll be forced to reload your game's entire library.

Many other small problems arise from seemingly overlooked mechanics. For example, high score players get the most amount of points out of playing with stock weapons on the easiest difficulty, nullifying any sense of strategy. Adding any special weapons gives a percentage based score penalty. Having to shoot enemies that constantly move to your sides and behind you in a game where you can't turn is also quite unfun. Especially when the shooting area is as wide as it is long. You can adjust your turrets so you can shoot behind you, so wouldn't it be better if you could just turn instead? The enemy patterns aren't exactly harmonious here since they're randomly generated. The actual 'music' experience isn't so exciting either, as the musical impact only amounts to the screen turning red and the enemies moving faster.

The whole upgrading weapon unlock system is fun, though playing the actual game gets repetitious and tedious very quickly. And really, there's no reason to play this when Beat Hazard is such a similar game that is better than this one in nearly every regard. I'd recommend if you want a 'mp3 shooter game', you go with that one instead.