I like to pretend I can dance so anytime you stick a rhythm game in front of me I get to pretend that I can keep a beat. With the help of some nifty visual cues, I sometimes can. The Metronomicon developed by Puuba caught my eye when I was looking to fill in a fix. The idea of a rhythm game mixed with RPG elements seemed compelling.
The Game:
The Metronomicon takes you into the world of beats as students who just graduated from a magic school of dancing. You will have four dancers to start an adventure and you gain more along the way. Each dancer is unique and plays like your standard tank, healer, and DPS classes. They will have three moves that you can perform after a set number of beat hits in a combo. After performing a move, the dancer goes into a cool down phase requiring you to switch to another dancer.
Using the direction pad and buttons on the controller you will be hitting the corresponding buttons when direction indicators hit the bottom of the screen. If you time it correctly you will begin or add to a combo. Using the top left and right buttons you can move between dancers.
Each level is a song that comes with different enemies that are also dancing to the beat. You can choose between three difficulty levels which change the amount of buttons hits. Each one has an element that follows a rock, paper, scissors mechanic in which some elements are weak to others. After slaying an enemy, another will pop out until the song is over. Each level will have a boss that will give you a special medal at the end if you kill them. After completing each level your dancers will gain experience to help them level up.
There is gear that you can find through the game to enhance magic, health, and damage. There are also items with special abilities like resistance or effects that strengthen the dancer.
On top of the adventure mode, there is a challenge mode, free play mode, and when you beat the game an endless mode. There are also daily challenges for those who have finished the story.
My Thoughts:
There is a lot going for Metronomicon but at the same time, it falls a little flat. Playing with a controller reminds me of the old DDR days when you couldn't play on a dance pad for some reason. The problem is that because of the inherent repetitiveness of the game this can get a little boring. It helps that each hero has their own line of beat hits but at the same time it feels like it takes away from the possibility of getting really good at a song.It helps that the music selection is pretty good. There is a wide mix of genres and some of the songs were pretty catchy. Knowing little about the music industry I have to assume the curation of the music is not easy. None the less they found some gems and it fits this game.
The story is okay. I wasn't a huge fan of the humor or some of the characters. The animation style didn't bother me but the whole "look at how quirky and random I am" is eye role fodder. It might be my age but the "look how random I am" is not as great when you find that a lot of these individuals are just trying desperately to cover up how unhappy they are. Makes me feel sad for those characters. Still, don't like them.
I found the item distribution a bit weird. In the early game, the stat boosts from the items are paultry and they do mild jumps until the last map. Then items get incredibly good making all other previous items worthless and a waste of time. They also appeared independent of difficulty level. It just caused me to ignore the rest of the maps after I had beat the story and grind the final one. There is almost no incentive beyond the medal you get for completing a level to go back and play it again. That is unless you are a score junky.
All in all the game was okay. It's a decent play through but the game did not compel me enough to keep going for much after. I think this game has a lot of potential if a future one comes out and maybe they can make use of the joysticks. Like Gitaroo Man. They need to make another one of those. That was a really good game.
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