Audiosurf 2 Review

Many games come with a purpose. Some to complete a story, others to make your way through many stages and beat the last boss. Audiosurf 2 really has no purpose other than to have fun while listening to your favorite music and to beat the scores of those from around the world. Put your headphones on and turn up the volume this is going to be a blast!

Just like the first game the aim is to beat high scores while running along to music. The leaderboards are in real-time so the fact you can see how another person is doing compared to you is a nice addition, a feature more games should have. The different types of music effect how you play. If you’re playing something that involves a lot of bass you will find yourself going up and down waves (or bumps) in your tracks resulting in jumps. Collecting the same color panel’s increases your high score in the casual mode while getting the bombs or spikes (depends what skin you use) decreases your score.

This in theory sounds generally simple. But the fact you’re booming along at supersonic speed (the speed varies depending on how fast the music is you’re playing) makes it a lot harder than it sounds. The notes sequence change every time you play a song, so you really do not know what to expect and getting the really high scores will take some practice and time (as well as patience). The original classic modes are back as well as a ton of new other features thanks to player mods.

One great thing about Audiosurf 2 is the fact you can play songs right from the sound cloud. This gives you access to a lot of music already and looking at what’s popular in the game at that time you can discover some songs which you will be adding to your playlist in your favorite music player. Unfortunately the fact it doesn’t have its own media player and you can’t just stick a playlist in there from your favorite music player is kind of a letdown. I do understand why this could be problematic though.

Another New feature to Audiosurf 2 is the ability to play new game modes. These range from playing the causal mode to wakeboard, playing as a surfer or even a runner that jumps and dodges under walls when the notes of music changes. It’s one of those things you have to try for yourself to really understand it. It’s a lot of frantic, crazy, fun. Basically it’s a game anyone can just pick up and play which is a rarity nowadays.

In the Wakeboard Tricky version you can get some serious air, you will literally find yourself looking forward to when the big waves are coming as you try your absolute best to get the best grind to get airborne so you can rack up the points by doing tricks. At first it takes a little getting used to especially the grinding part but once you do, it’s so much fun.

The audio sprint version is one of my personal favorites if you find the right sound you will literally find yourself doing it more than once for two reasons. One because of how frantically brilliant it was, Two because that person who just beat your high score or you narrowly just missed out on beating needs to be beaten. All the original modes return too mono which is a competitive monocolour mode you need to get power blocks inside cork screw loops. In the Ninja mode you need to dodge all the spikes and hit as many color blocks as you can this also includes the cork screw loops but it’s faster. Mono will always be my favorite mode but I do like the original and unique game changing ideas the community has done with the mods. It’s definitely something that defines this game.

One thing that disappointed me was not having the ability to redirect the auto find music. Not everyone has music where it specifies, I had to transfer all my music to that one place just so I could play it which was annoying as I had a lot of music I wanted to try out and I still couldn’t get it to work properly. I just think it wouldn’t have been hard to enable you to change that. Another thing I found was when previewing a track I couldn’t really get the idea of what the song was going to be like if it took a good few minutes or so for it to get going which these heavy house beats usually do. A feature where it previews the best bit of the song would have been great but the fact we can preview music at all is a welcome addition. Or even let us skip the intro to it that would have been nice

In the end Audio Surf 2 is a fun cool way to take your music further it may be short but it is really sweet. I will play this game a lot in the future it gives a cool and unique spin on what can be done with music and it’s a nice thing to play while you just want to chill out and listen to your favorite music. It lacks some vital features but still Audiosurf 2 exceeds the first in almost every way.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.