The soundtracks to a lot of mobile games aren’t necessarily something you want to listen to over and over again. A few games let you plug in your own music as the background, but Audionaut takes it a step further and uses your music to generate levels. We took it for a spin for a very specific reason.
As an Audionaut you fly along a musical staff collecting notes. The player switches between the five lines of the staff by tapping the left or right side of their screen. If you’re at the edge of the staff and tap one time further you fly off for a bit before landing back on the rails. It plays a little like the half-pipe bonus rounds of the old Sonic the Hedgehog games.
The game’s a little buggy. While navigating the menus to select our own songs random letters were missing from directory and file names, and it made it rather hard to navigate around:
The gameplay is smooth, but it’s hard to visually follow where the notes are with all the twisting and turning. The rails of the track light up to tell you where you need to be next, which helps but isn’t ideal. Overall it’s a pretty fun play, and it lets you interact with your music in a way we really haven’t before.
As for that very specific reason we mentioned…
In episode four of the Geekosystem Podcast we discussed how much fun it would be if someone made a video game version of Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements.” You would play as Lehrer, and you’d have to collect all the different elements in the song while the song itself plays in the background. Audionaut isn’t exactly that, but it did let us fly around collecting notes while listening to “The Elements” so we at least got to pretend.
The game also seems like the perfect reason to have the Anamanaguchi song “Jetpack Blues Sunset Hues” on your phone or tablet.
(via Horizon Productions, image via Audionaut)
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