BeatRider Touch

Though we all feel like we're in the groove at 2am, in the sober light of day we know in our hearts that we probably looked rather daft.

It's because a vast number of us are inflicted with a distinct lack of rhythm. It's a debilitating condition, and one that the rash of rhythm tap games flooding the App Store has been trying to battle by instilling that vital sense of timing into our veins.

The one downer, of course, has been an inability to tap into our own music collection - a rather antagonistic result of Apple's set of rules, blocking any direct link from apps to the music files on your iPhone or iPod.

Those at The Music Co. have thought up a nifty bypass for their own rhythm rumble. Free registration on the web allows you to upload tunes to the official BeatRider Touch website. Ticked tracks download into the game itself.

The only problem is, while BeatRider Touch might think its new moves are rather swish, it makes one misstep after another, stumbling over most of the tracks you upload like a clubber whose had one two many lagers.

It's perhaps not fair to compare the game directly to the likes of Tap Tap Revenge and DJ Mix Tour, given their focus on the beat. BeatRider instead attempts to fix on the bass and the melody, offering up five strings of notes to tap along to rather than just three.

The actual method of play remains tight to that offered by its rivals, with notes dropping down a fretboard from the top. The idea is to tap the corresponding pad when they reach the bottom of the screen to add points to your score.

The variety of notes on offer is also rather familiar, with single taps balanced out by long notes, which require you to hold your finger down for a set period, and sliding notes, where shifting between two or more notes is the challenge.

BeatRider Touch comes with stacks of longevity, not only because you're free to upload 20 tracks to play but because each track comes with six levels of difficulty, each upping both the number of notes and the difficulty of the patterns.

With the option of uploading your scores to the 'net, there's also plenty of scope here to measure yourself against those with nimbler fingers than your own, dragging you back into play just to add a few hundred thousand to your score to keep up with the Joneses.

The problem is, once you extend out of the four short tester tracks that come with the package, any correlation between the music and the taps themselves is rather slight.

Though BeatRider Touch offers the kind of link-up with your music that its rivals should themselves be eyeing, play itself is a letdown. Played at its hardest, such is the hazardous nature of notes streaming down towards you that it's hard to tell what relationship they have with the music. In easier outings its painfully obvious that the two are barely linked.

Sadly, despite some truly admirable ambitions, this is another Tap Tap rival that plays best on mute.