Muse Dash is a rhythm game for the PC. It sports a bright colorful anime aesthetic, and has a focus on Japanese and Chinese songs. The base game has 41 songs, which is actually quite a decent amount of content, and that’s without considering its low normal price. As it is, the bulk of the content is in its DLC, of which there is one pack and new songs are regularly added into the pack. There’s plenty of content as a result, but even without the DLC, the game does not ever feel like it skimps out on things to do.
The controls are easy to pick up. Starting the game automatically brings up the tutorial, where you learn that your character is effectively running through levels. During that time, enemies or objects will come in two rows. Pressing F will allow the character to jump and attack the object higher up, while pressing J will target the object on the ground. In additional, there are hold notes where you hold down the key and objects where you need to press both keys at the same time.
Despite the simple controls, it adds several things to keep the player on their toes. The objects or enemies comes in various forms, adding a lot of visual variety. What can catch you off guard are obstacles that require you to dodge by jumping instead of attacking it, or when hammers swing in where you’re supposed to hit them instead of dodging. Your natural reflex in both these scenarios is usually the opposite of what you should be doing, so it’ll take some time to learn the visual cues.
Furthermore, from time to time, there are “boss” enemies, who fires weaponry at you that you’re supposed to hit. Occasionally you can also mash the keys to hit the enemy as many times as possible to rack up points. During each level, you gain points from collecting music notes, hitting enemies, building up combos and not getting hit. You have a health bar, depleting as you get hit and if it gets to zero, you fail the level. Of course, all these actions are in the tune to the beat of the music of that level. At the end, you get scored and a letter rank.
The game has a leveling system based upon the score you get at the end of each level. Leveling up will unlock items, characters, and new tracks to play. Each track has varying levels of difficulty, but if you have any experience at all with rhythm games, it best to skip the Easy mode and start with the Hard mode of each track, as it’s more fun and more in the tune of the music. Getting S rank in certain tracks will unlock Master difficulty, and this is where visually it gets crazy crowded, so you will require practice to learn the stage.
You’re able to change the playable character once you’ve unlocked new ones. Each playable character has different abilities, one might make you invincible during Fever while another will boost your completion score at the end. You also get to choose an assistance that again, brings their own effects and benefits. This allows some variety to the gameplay and makes unlock certain things easier.
As with a lot of rhythm games, it eases you into getting used to it before slowly ramping up the difficulty as you unlock more tracks. Using only two keys helps you get the hang of things quickly, while the color coding of blue being the top and red being the bottom for enemy placements helps in those quicker tracks. That said, some of the higher difficulties can be crazy with the speed and constant shifts of the two keys. Worst are the ones with irregular tempo, where the enemies and obstacles come at you with variable speed. It can start to get frustrating at that point.
The music selection is decent, but as mentioned, it biases towards Japanese and Chinese pop. It’s not bad and most of the base game’s tracks are catchy enough, but there are definitely still a lot of forgettable songs. Each level has certain achievements attached to them too, to help with the replayability aspect. To be honest, it takes a few tracks before you really get the hang of things and get into the game. The base game is like a demo in that aspect, designed to suck you in so that you purchase the DLC with the massive amount of extra music.
There are around 60 tracks in the base game, with the only negative being that each track is fairly short. You hit the chorus and it will end, so there will be plenty of times where you wish the track was longer so you could continue racking up that combo. This is also the game’s killer aspect, as before you know it, an hour has passed, then two hours, etc. Playing every song once will take around four hours, and throughout that time, there’s minimal grinding required to continually unlock everything. After that’s done, you can either buy the DLC that’ll more than double the quantity of songs or play through the tracks again to gain those achievements, get higher scores and continuing to level up for further unlocks of new characters.
Overall, Muse Dash is an easy to learn but tough to master rhythm game. It’s surprising with the game’s price being so cheap, and even cheaper during a sale (easily less than $1), that it has so much content already. The gameplay loop is not addictive to the sense that you can’t stop playing, but it is enough for you to lose track of time as you go for yet another round. The colorful and upbeat aesthetics helps with the positive feel of the game. This is great value and a fun game if you like the rhythm genre.
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