Bullet Hazard 2 brings chaos and tunes to your screen in classic bullet hell fashion. Music makes the action!

By Wyatt Meffert

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The Game:

“Asteroids meets Windows Media Player’s Visualizer” is how some might describe Beat Hazard 2. On the surface, that’s accurate. You have a space ship that, at the beginning of every mission, starts in the center of the screen. From there, the battle’s momentum goes according to the rhythm of the music being played in the background (your own music collection). Enemy ships and asteroids’ appear, as well as gusts of laser beams and missiles shooting from your ship, alongside the beat and length of the song. In Beat Hazard 2, the music makes the action.

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Throughout every track or mission, money drops besides the income your character receives from completing missions. You can then use your money to purchase upgrades, score multipliers, and more. There are even ships available to purchase, bringing a nice amount of variation to play.

As an added bonus, you can level up each ship and complete missions specifically assigned to those ships to unlock modules, which help your damage output and survivability. With those modifications applied, you can more easily compete with other players on a competitive scoreboard.

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Up to three local players can join you in your missions to acquire more money for ships, those ships’ modules, and higher scores. When it comes to determining which modules you equip, you can end up sacrificing mobility for damage. You will also have to think of which features to compromise over or skimp on if you want to make your own ship customization. Between ship size, speed, fire rate, and weapon types there is a lot of variation with the different values you can assign those qualities.

As you progress through your music library, you might be surprised at what you find for purchasable ships and the challenges they provide via missions, especially if it’s an eclectic collection.

Speaking of challenges, there are ‘Daily,’ every 24 hours, and ‘Lightning’ challenges every four hours that come with pre-chosen (Music taken from popular tracks played by the community) songs to complete and high scores to beat. Besides pride, the incentive for beating those high scores include exclusive elite ships for the top 10 players

The Good:

The integration of whatever music you want to play the game to works really well. Between slower-paced songs like Black Sabbath’s Solitude and faster ones like Dance Dance Revolution’s Butterfly, I felt engaged and able to pay attention to the visuals despite all the glare pulsing from my ship’s missiles and the great music that might have otherwise grabbed too much of my attention.

All the ships handle differently, and four of the five I tried handled very responsively. Though I seem to have a preference for smaller, faster ships so I can duck in and out of bullet hell type corners, I like that there are ships of all sizes and speeds. And, the game’s music detection, powered by ARCloud, is impressive and able to tell when a track begins and ends. The visuals can be fun. Described below, there is a caveat to those visuals though.

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The Mixed:

If you’re prone to seizures and want to play competitively, I would not recommend this game. To be fair, the game warns photo sensitive people away before the main menu appears. The game even jokingly tells you to “Get ready to seizure!” at the beginning of some missions. But, the background and the aforementioned glare from your ships’ missiles can really be blinding. You can turn those visual effects down, but that will result in lower-than-possible score multipliers.

The Bad:

This is a minor complaint; it has to do with Steam Achievements. I was playing some high BPM songs from DDR, and many different tracks did not count towards the “__ number of tracks played” progress achievement on Steam. I assume that’s because the songs were less than two minutes long? While it makes sense that since they aren’t long enough to allow more than one (sometimes none) boss to show up, it’s a little disappointing that I can’t enjoy music I might be in the mood for without sacrificing progress on my achievements.

Also, after selecting a track in the Manage Music area, it would have been great to be able to pause and maybe even control the in-game audio from the main menu, so while navigating anywhere other than audio options, or just having the game idle for a moment, I could pause the game’s music or turn it down and up. There is room for those options, but they just aren’t present.

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The Verdict:

Anyone looking for a high quality bullet hell should buy Beat Hazard 2. The deep ship customization, ability to sync your own music collection to missions, and the community behind it all are cherries atop this delicious, rhythmic sundae of a video game. There are a couple of quirks, like its somewhat unpolished main menu and what some might consider too-intense of visual effects, but I find them easy to get past while experiencing an immersive and excellent music driven bullet hell game.

Beat Hazard 2 comes to us from indie developer Cold Beam Games, and is available on Steam for 18.99$.