Game Reviews

Beat Stomper - Good if you've got rhythm in your boots

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| Beat Stomper
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Beat Stomper - Good if you've got rhythm in your boots
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| Beat Stomper

Beat Stomper is ostensibly an endless one-touch platformer. But it's got a little more going for it than that, and its mix of ideas is, at least, pretty intriguing.

Rather than the usual one touch controls, here you get two. You tap once to fly into the air, and then tap again to smash down. Hopefully you've positioned yourself so that you hit a platform when you land.

There's a rhythm action component here as well. Timing your jumps to the beat of the booming track going on behind the action gives you a much better chance than tapping randomly.

But while there's more going on here than usual, there's still the sense that the game is a little one-note. It's fun while it lasts, but you'll wander off to something a little meatier pretty quickly.

You're just tapping the screen then?

Pretty much, yeah. Although I guess that really describes any mobile game if you think about it. Anyway in this one you're controlling a pudgy neon block who's trying to ascend a series of platforms.

Tap once and you'll jump into the air. But that isn't enough. You need to tap again to shoot downwards into the welcoming flatness of one of the platforms.

In practice it's a lot more complex than that. The platforms move as you bounce around, and it's easy to fire yourself off into a wall and end up spinning out of control to an untimely death.

The deeper you get into the game, the more songs you unlock to stomp to. There is a connection between the music and the action, but sometimes it can act more as a hindrance than a help.

When you're in the zone it's great, but miss a few beats and you'll find it pretty difficult to get that rhythm back.

The game has a bright, vaguely chaotic style, and it's pretty easy to get to grips with the basics of play in a couple of games. There's a quick restart time too, and since it's paid there aren't any annoying ads popping up between rounds.

But is it worth forking out for?

I guess so, yeah. It's pretty simple, all told, and there's a part of me that thinks it'd benefit from ad supported rather than premium. It's hard to find anything new here that really warrants throwing any cash down for it.

If you're into quick-fire arcade platformers then sure, give it a go, but there are more interesting implementations of the genre on mobile.

While Beat Stomper does fizz and bubble from time to time, it doesn't quite have the staying power to really make that price point feasible for any but the most ardent of platforming fans.

Beat Stomper - Good if you've got rhythm in your boots

There are some neat ideas here, and Beat Stomper is fun, but it doesn't quite justify the investment it asks from you
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.