Take A Wave Trip Into A Game Made Of Songs [Review]

By

Makin' music
Makin' music

New on the App Store today from Lucky Frame is a fantastic musical adventure called Wave Trip. And what a trip it is: a trip into amazing.

It combines a huge selection of different ideas into one. It’s a tactical avoid-the-obstacles game. It’s a generative music player. It’s a colorful strategic platformer with an identity all of its own. It’s a chance to make something of your own and share it with the world. From the team who brought you the equally gorgeous Bad Hotel tower defense game a few months ago, it’s exactly what you’d expect.

Taps on the right side of the screen are what help you fly. Tap longer to go higher. Lift your finger and you start to fall back down to the ground. Hovering in mid-air are all manner of strangely-shaped objects that help or hinder your flight.

Now a lot of games would just stop there. “Collect stars!” they would say. “Get your triangle home safely!”

Levels with interesting names
Levels with interesting names.

But Wave Trip adds more. As you fly, you gather objects. As you gather them, the background music changes. It adds new notes, new beats and blips and bloops. And the game becomes something altogether more interesting.

Music is central to the game’s success. Your goal isn’t so much to complete the level as to create ever more interesting sounds. The better you get at playing the game, the more fun the music becomes.

Delve deeper into the settings and you discover something even cooler: a level editor. “Huh,” you might say, “so what? Lots of games have level editors.”

True. But have you seen a level editor that’s a sequencer before?

Editing a level = writing a song
Editing a level = writing a song.

That’s what you get here. You design what you want your level to sound like, not what you want it to look like. Drag in objects to represent sounds. Adjust the tempo by setting the BPM. Upload and share your creations for others to enjoy. Browse and download stuff other people have made. These are just levels you’re creating; they’re songs in their own right. Listening to them requires a bit more effort than just hitting the Play button in iTunes.

This is fantastic because you’re building with sound but you end up making something visually interesting without even trying. The sounds inhabit and shape the environment you play in. Wave Trip combines sound and vision in thoroughly unique and ingenious way.

Wave Trip works because it’s different, because it experiments with new ideas and lets you experiment with the results. It’s fun, clever, and a delight to play or listen to. Or both. Highly recommended.

Source: Lucky Frame
Thanks: Yann!

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