A good player can carry a lesser one and as long as all players don’t die, defeated ones can be rescued or brought back at a checkpoint. Also the online is easy to drop into and the benefit of playing with multiple players helps alleviate some of the overall frustration from the difficulty. One, even if you haven’t unlocked every song, everything is available randomly in Challenge, removing the barrier between experts and rookies. Some smart decisions are on display in this part. Performance is scored on a letter grade basis and other bonus points are awarded as well, used to mark high scores and also unlock more content. The final track is always a random boss fight. Each challenge is three songs long with the first two being able to be selected by the group out of a random selection of three. Challenge can be played locally on the same system, locally across multiple systems, and online with randoms or friends. The story unlocks content in Challenge, which is where the legs of the game are. It’s a smart way to let players experience the game without penalty. It’s not score-driven and an optional Casual Mode gives your little shape some more HP so the occasional brutality of the songs can be mitigated. Presented with a cute and mostly wordless story, this mode takes you through the majority of the songs. Several modes are present in Just Shapes & Beats and if you’re experiencing this more so in single-player, the Story mode is where to start. It plays out like a bizarro Guitar Hero song where instead of a note highway, you’re contending with projectiles and enemies. However, all of the movement on screen matches up with the music in such a beautiful way that it’s easy to forgive those occasional frustrations. While most of the traps are teased visually, sometimes the vile beats pop up out of nowhere and really can only be avoided by repetition or luck. Dying will likely happen a lot, especially during the more bass-thumping intense songs. A dash makes it easier to zip around the screen and phase through hurdles, but it never gets more complicated than move around and don’t die. The thrust here is that you’re basically watching a visualizer while maneuvering a tiny shape to avoid obstacles created by the beats of the music.

Just shapes and beats characters