Audiosurf Videos

Audiosurf is an IGF Award winning puzzle/rhythm hybrid game created by Invisible Handlebar. Its track-like stages visually mimic the music the player chooses, while the player races across several lanes collecting colored blocks that appear in sync with the music. Currently, the full version is only available for purchase through Steam and includes the entire Orange Box soundtrack files to play. Audiosurf is the first game to use Valve's Steamworks technology. The game was released on February 15, 2008 over Steam.

In Audiosurf the player controls a levitating spaceship-like craft similar to those found in Wipeout or F-Zero. The player then maneuvers it down a colorful multi-laned highway, collecting blocks in a manner similar to Klax. The ship is controlled either by a mouse, the arrow keys, the number keys, or a Gamepad. The game also supports the rumble feature of the Xbox 360 controller.

I was sorta bored so I thought I'd download Audiosurf and try it out. It's not too bad, especially given the price tag ($10) . The best thing about the game is that you can choose any audio file that you might have on your hard drive and successfully create a playable level based on the tempo of the song. However, after a couple hours I think I've already had my fill of it. It seems to cater to a very specific group of people into this type of music/rhythm gameplay; but if it's your thing, this is one of the better ones on the market.

Here are some clips of me playing some songs (very poorly), notice that the tempo of the song affects the difficulty about as much as the actual difficulty setting does:


Robyn - Bum Like you (Easy Difficulty)



In medium difficulty you get some new abilities: the left click button allows you to collect blocks on all columns and the right click makes the ship jump.


Coheed and Cambria - The Running Free (Medium Difficulty)



R.E.M. - Orange Crush (Hard Difficulty)



There are many other kinds of modes in which you can choose to play with, but the 'mono' ship (where you just have to concentrate on avoiding the gray blocks) was the only one where I seemed to know how to play with intuitively.