BPM: Bullets Per Minute is a game firmly rooted in music, as such I have included as many tenuous links as possible. Forewarned is forearmed..
BPM is a strange fruit, but a fresh and original idea. It's a bizarre amalgamation of procedurally generated roguelike, FPS and rhythm shooter.
You play the part of a Valkyrie, with your trusty sidearm, you alone must repel the demons of the underworld who are invading Asgard.... but there's a catch.
You have to clear one room at a time of demonic denizens, but you have to do everything to the beat of a genuinely excellent soundtrack.
While music pumps in the background, you have to time your actions to correspond to the beats of the soundtrack, you have to jump to the beat, reload on the beat and shoot on the beat (or half beat). If you don't hit the beat for these actions it results in failure and probably death in this incredibly unforgiving game.
Now I have a decent grasp of rhythm, I play guitar, dabble in drums and have reasonable DJ skills (honed on direct drive decks with vinyl, all you digital slackers). But "eff" me this game is tough! The soundtrack isn't particularly over frantic and its easy to predict when the beats are coming, but it's not always easy to hit them while concentrating on the FPS/enemy part of the game.
There are in game options to change the margin of error for beat matching, but even on "loose" I felt like Hugh Jackman in that scene from Swordfish in each and every room.
There is even an option to turn off rhythm detection completely, basically rendering the game a standard FPS. But in all honesty as a standard FPS its very lacking, it wasn't designed to be played like that and therefore feel it shouldn't be judged as that.
I love the idea, I love the creativity, but I'm honestly not a fan of the execution. For me there were just too many overriding factors holding back the concept.
The weapon upgrades are too few and far between and many don't make a whole lot of difference. As a Valkyrie, the last bastion of defense for Asgard, I want to feel like a complete badass, not be armed with shitty pistols that restrict my rate of fire and only have a range of probably twice the length of my arms.
I also wasn't a fan of the aesthetic choices, each area has a slightly different colour theme but they all have a kind of weird "artistic" chromatic aberration/over-saturation effect to them. While I can see kinda why it was added, with the music and the gameplay it works in a music video, but a music video is only 3-8 minutes long; after an hour of gameplay my eyes felt like they were bleeding and my head like it had been split asunder by Baldur himself.
Now, lets pause for a moment as I break the fourth wall and unpack my own review...
I'm painfully aware that all of the criticisms I have leveled at this game could be nothing more than products of my own inadequacies brought on my the natural aging process. As you could probably gauge from my earlier DJ reference, I am not the sprightliest gamer. I am a seasoned professional.....and with great seasoning.....comes slower reflexes.
So I am prepared to give this game the benefit of the doubt. I can completely see that this game is going to be an incredible experience for a certain demographic. As I don't fall into this demographic I don't feel qualified to dismiss it. I also only feel entitled to recommend this game with the following caveats that :
a) You need to be good at FPS
b) You need to be good at rhythm games
c) You need to be patient and expect many, many deaths
d) You probably need to be under 40
I folded, cut my losses and gave up on BPM at around the 3 hour mark. Not for any reason other than I knew I was banging my head against a brick wall with it. I wasn't going to get any better and it wasn't' going to get any easier. We shook hands, agreed to disagree and promised to meet up occasionally on national holidays.
The takeaway for me was the original concept and the absolutely fantastic soundtrack (which my wife asked me to "turn down" so that's a box ticked).
I think if you have read this far you will already have an idea if this game is for you or not and my recommendation is to just go with that gut feeling. No % score or marks out of ten here. I'm going back to playing Monkey Island in my slippers while sipping cocoa and listening to Kenny G.
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