Cytus +4

A friend showed me VOEZ on his Switch, and that prompted me to try this. Having never played a Rayark game before, I was blown away by pretty much every aspect of this game.

From a design perspective, this is a lot more free flowing than the standard rhythm game. In many ways this plays like a smooth fusion of a puzzle game and a rhythm game. Doing well is visually rewarded by the charming and slick design of the user interface, so you do have an intrinsic reason to want to improve. To sum up the gameplay, if you grew up with Guitar Hero and DDR, this plays like nothing you have seen before.

As a final point, I’d like to point out how fairly this game is priced. Two dollars gets you almost 130 songs with no playtime limits or freemium tricks, each with multiple difficulties. Buying all the dlc runs about 35$, but boosts the song roster to 200+. I will absolutely invest in such a fair and robust product, and will be certainly watching this dev in the future.

This game in most aspects is by far my favorite music/rhythm game on the App Store due to the song lineup and beautiful artwork. Each and every chapter is handcrafted with beautiful and sometimes insane songs, along with amazing drawings as covers. And there are basically songs for everyone on here, including EDM, a mix on classical music, dubstep, and even songs with lyrics (mostly Japanese). I love the addition of the secret songs, where you have to interact with the song cover in order to play the alternate version. I do however run into a big problem while playing this while lounging. Whenever I play intense songs, sometimes my hands cover up the notes, making me unable to see them as they pass through (unfortunately though, this is the nature of the game). It would also be nice to have a song favorite system, which would make it easier to play the specific songs that you might be trying to practice , or just songs that you personally enjoy. It also kind of stinks that you have to pay for some of the new albums now, even though you already paid to download the game...

I nearly gave up on this game.... nearly gave it 1 star in frustration. It's very challenging, even on easy. But once I got into the flow of it and I stoped crashing and burning every 2 seconds then it's a good addictive flow.

A tip: You gotta stop worrying too much when your start missing a few. And don't fixate on getting every single one down, trying to laser in on each one individually and the line going up and down crazy fast. Just get the process/flow going. You gotta keep paying attention to the order in which the orbs pop out and use the line as a guide for the timing (as well as the music, such a no-brainer but I wasn't considering that at first when I was freaking out). Then once you're in a flow you can see the order they're coming at you and you're more or less keeping up with the speed of the music and the line. Voila.