Filed under Games You Might Have Missed, it's Super Beat Sports! Produced by Harmonix (the Guitar Hero devs) in 2015 and released exclusively for... Apple TV and Nintendo Switch? Not even an Android port, dang. That's why you might have missed it I suppose! But trust me, this one is worth the trouble to get your hands on.
Highlights:
- Rhythm game with polished 2-player co-op campaign that honestly feels like the main game and not an afterthought
- Five different game modes (two of which are good and the other three are not awful)
- Over twenty original songs with thematic consistency and motifs (which I cannot find an OST of anywhere sorry)
- Non-binary player character with customizable clothing and skin tone
- Cute blobby alien critters!
As I said in the top bit, there are five different game modes, two of which are good. Those two are 'Whacky Bat' and 'Buddy Ball', which are respectively a 2-player co-op campaign and a 2-4 player party game.
In Whacky Bat, the musical alien blobs (named simply 'Musicalians') throw space baseballs (spaceballs?) at you from one of five lanes. Use d-pad or joystick to switch lanes, and press (A) to hit the ball. You can also use the shoulder buttons to move two lanes at once, if you need to quickly cross the entire field. This looks like a Guitar Hero clone, but it actually plays as a Rhythm Heaven-like. The balls are thrown at different speeds, to make both the 'throw' and the 'hit' line up with the music. Some patterns are longer than other patterns and the only indication you'll get are that the ball pops up high and it just 'sounds right' for it to be a longer pattern. And it works! I never felt like the game was doing this to troll me, it always felt like it made the music better!
In co-op mode, the patterns are adjusted so there can be up to two balls thrown at once. Some of them are plain white space baseballs, others are color-coded red and blue. Player 1 hits the red balls, player 2 hits the blue ones, and anybody can hit the white balls. Sometimes a ball will be thrown 'high' and you have to climb on your partner's head to hit it! While you're totem'd, the lower player can move left or right to move the entire totem, and the top player can push (down) to swap places with them! This is, I cannot stress enough, an extremely polished mechanic that does not feel like it was tacked on. This is a good multiplayer experience and my partner and I completed the entire co-op campaign on hard mode and had a blast.
Buddy Ball, the 'party mode' I mentioned, is similar -- aliens throw balls at you and you hit them back. However, in this mode, when you hit the ball back, you also choose one of three targets with left, middle, or right, and that determines what pattern the next player will have to hit. This is probably the best possible way to make a 'competitive' rhythm game -- because the patterns are pre-baked, they all sound good with the music, but there's still an element of skill and strategy since you can try to catch other players with a fastball when they're not expecting it. Each player gets three lives, last one standing wins.
There's also three other modes, which I'll mention briefly, but they don't really feel as polished. There's a volley ball game which is basically the same as the baseball game except that the patterns aren't telegraphed as much so you have to memorize patterns more. There's a golf game which is slower paced and is a "simon says" game where you have to remember longer patterns. And there's an air hockey game where the ball bounces chaotically and rhythmically off obstacles, but you don't really interact directly with the music. These are all "good enough to ship" but I don't think any of them stand alone. Whacky Bat and Buddy Ball on the other hand would each qualify as a solid $20 game in their own right.
This game is still available to buy legally, and with the right tools I was able to dump my copy into the Ryujinx emulator to play on my steam deck, and it runs great there, so I'll be keeping this in my party game playlist for years to come. Highly recommended to fans of rhythm games and couch co-op.