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jp's The Metronomicon: Slay the Dance Floor (PS4)

[September 24, 2018 03:25:19 PM]

There should probably be a name for the most common source of design innovation in indie games: the genre mashup! I don't say that pejoratively, but rather as it's the easiest way to describe a lot of the indie games I've been looking at.

Metronomicon is an RPG / DDR mashup. More like rockband meets RPG to be fair. It works quite well and I played it over the weekend first solo, and then co-op until we finished it (as in, played the last boss and succeeded). It's not very long, but it was quite enjoyable and most of the replayability comes from trying to best your own scores or play on the harder difficulty levels (we were usually playing on "Medium" - which was the middle of three difficulty options).

The core loop is as follows:

Select your team of four from available characters (you start with four, but find more along the way for a grand total of 8. Within a song, you pick a characters track and match symbols to controller buttons as they drop down from the top of the screen. There are up to three "levels" for a sequence - as soon as you hit the third one, an attack/action happens and you must swap over to another character to continue. You can also miss (the attack at the last level you completed occurs) and switch over. So, it's like Rock Band (PSP version) in that you swap between "tracks" (here characters) to try to nail their sequences. In turn, each character has different abililites which you can configure and select. The more you play, the more your characters level up (supposedly to do more damage? It seems like level was mostly about unlocking new skills/abilities) and you can also find and equip items (up to two per character) to boost/buff them in certain ways (increase stats, reduce damage from certain source, etc.).

The game works surprisingly well and there is both the beat matching to accomplish as well configuring your heroes. This last part is definitely more interesting than it looks because there is enough depth there for strategizing in fun ways. There's a trophy for clearing a level without healing and another for clearing without doing any attacks. It took us a few attempts to configure the party such that we could at least try to pull it off. There's also room for interesting tactical decisions - which character's skill should I try to pull off next AND to which level. A level 3 triggers a different skill, so sometimes you "bail" on a sequence "early" because you want to level 1 skill to trigger and not the 2nd or 3rd one.