Extremely disappointing – Soundtrack Attack - Steven Universe Rhythm Runner Review

Nothing about this game's design makes sense. For starters, from a music game perspective, there's absolutely no challenge to it whatsoever. The entire game is just a two-lane tapper with *extremely* lenient timing, and there's no real score ranking except for 1 to 3 stars which is measured by what percentage of life you have when you finish the song (and it's extremely easy to pass any song with full health). There's no incentive to perform well beyond that. To give you an idea of how easy I found this game to be... it felt like one really long tutorial for a full game that never actually came. The presentation of the game just gives each individual song as a "stage" - not even labeled with the name of the song it uses - so there's not even a way to choose a song, you just have to find the stage whatever song you want to play is on. (Oh, and the real kicker? Game Center wants you to beat the game THREE whole times, once with each "character", to get all the achievements.) The music itself is actually for the most part not related to Steven Universe's soundtrack at all - it's this weird electro-candy-rock mess that has nothing to do with Aivi & Surasshu's music, and over half of it is just generic instrumental tracks in this style with some "remixes" of vocal tracks from the show (in the same electro-candy-rock style, so a lot of the heartfelt ballads from the show are very out of touch with the original's tone). The instrumentals might have in fact been remixes of background tracks from SU, but they're just so drastically different in musical style that it's kind of impossible to single out any recognizable motifs (and if they were there, I'm sure they would have been noticable, given how iconic Aivi & Surasshu's music is). The game's visuals are a weird mix of very early series style art and even with a dash of the pilot's art style mixed in. The "story" might as well be written by someone who only read the Wikipedia blurb about the show's plot. I downloaded this game expecting it to be something akin to Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, but it's more like a Steven Universe-skinned endless runner that isn't actually endless. Don't bother with this game. The only reason I didn't give this a 1-star is because SOME of the music is actually kind of decent. And, well, at least they're not charging people for this. If you're a fan of either SU or rhythm games, this will just come off as a cheap cash-in... which it is. It's shameful that they would use the name of SU's incredible soundtrack to push this garbage.
Review by wohdin on Soundtrack Attack - Steven Universe Rhythm Runner.