Beat da Beat is a great game on iOS, it's a bullet-hell like shooter where music dictates when enemies and bullets are going to spawn. With a great soundtrack, precise controls and a few good customization systems layered over it, I had a ton of fun with this game. It's not entirely perfect, but if you enjoy shooters or music games, this one is a custom-tailored experience for that platform, and it works.
The basic controls are quite simple, you hold your ship and you move around by moving your finger on the screen. The ship automatically fires so you don't have to do anything else in order to play. Releasing your finger from the screen brings up a menu where you can choose to use your special ability - which varies by ship - or use bombs. This made it a bit difficult to take screenshots of the actual gameplay, so bear with me. The controls are precise enough and your ship only has a small hitbox that can actually get you damaged so even in the more intense bullet hell segments where there are tons of projectiles on-screen, you still have good control over what's happening. That being said, I only played on casual because I found normal a bit too difficult for me.
The soundtrack is great and this makes the game work; You play various stages all associated with specific tunes and at specific points enemies will spawn and shoot following some rhythm. It works really well and you learn the levels as you do them over and over. Most enemies can be defeated, but some are invulnerable and only act as obstacles that yield some money when defeated. You use that money to buy more ships and upgrade them, also to revive when you die.
Ships have a few statistics, health, number of bombs and 'weapons'. The game kinda lost me here, what does the 'weapon' stat do? Does it improve auto-shot damage? My special skill? That's not surfaced very well. Each ship also has a special ability and a different firing pattern. I didn't enjoy upgrading from one ship to another because you restart with only two health points, buying a new ship is expensive and you might not enjoy playing as them. I kinda wish you would keep upgrading the same ship instead of buying new ones with iffy at best special abilities. I just kept the second ship I got, even if I unlocked more of them, none were particularly interesting to me.
There isn't much more to say about Beat da Beat because it gets summed up easily by my first few paragraphs; It's a really good music game, it's a good shooter and it controls well. The bosses and the levels are good - and you get better at them as you replay them - and there are some upgrades you can get to help progress through the game, so there's enough stuff to keep you interested for a good while.
