I'm a sucker for interactive-music games like Rez and so on, so I've been looking forward to this ever since I got to play a preview over a year ago.
There's no story or plot at all, just a theme: You control a particle within a particle accelerator. As such, your job is to go fast and smash into other particles.
There are a bunch of stages you play through sequentially. Scoring one star out of three will unlock the next stage; scoring three stars unlocks a trophy challenge. This is very different from the preview I played, which was one long game like an arcade racer where you had to repeatedly make it to the next check-point before time ran out. Each stage has a different goal and uses different mechanics, with the final stages using all the mechanics at once. These mechanics are:
- Hook onto an enemy in front of you with X to pull yourself forward.
- Hook onto another enemy of the same color to create a pair and get a speed boost.
- Creating a pair creates a path between the two enemies, and following the path speeds you up even more. There are also special enemies you can hook to create these paths.
- Hooking enemies causes a circle to appear around them. Graze the enemy by passing through this circle to charge your Lance meter.
- Press square to use a Lance, boosting forward and smashing through and enemies you hit. Lancing enemies and hitting lance boosters lets you keep the lance going for long combos. If you're not lancing, hitting an enemy will slow you down and take away life energy.
That's pretty much it! As you can see the grazing mechanic feels like it was taken straight out of a shmup. All together there's a pretty unique arcade game beneath all the trippy visuals. I blasted through the stages pretty quickly, but could tell that getting 3 stars and completing trophy challenges on the later levels will be tough. So it's not as hard just to survive as a shmup, but the high score tables should turn out to be pretty competitive. The only thing that disappointed me was that the infinite mode unlocked at the end is just a "play forever with no goal" mode, rather than an infinite race or survival mode. I'd have liked there to be a mode like the preview I played, or a mode where you try to lance as many enemies as possible before crashing -- something like that. But look at me, asking for more content when I haven't even completed what's already there. That's a sign of a fun game.
Finally, I should comment on the visuals and the 'interactive music' element of Dyad. The visual effects are some of the best I've seen in this style. At first they're not so complex, but the later stages really ramp up the psychedelic effects. Moving sideways around the tunnel causes the straight lines of the tunnel walls to spin around into spirals and then fractals, speeding up and slowing down creates blurs and rainbows, going fast enough causes the illusion that you're going backwards. It's all very pretty and gives you the feeling of approaching the speed of light. The music is also pretty decent. Dyad works similarly to Rez, in that everything you do causes different musical notes or sound effects. Some of the stages work better than others, but when you play well you end up playing along with the rhythm of the level and it's a cool effect. I'm a little disappointed that Dyad doesn't go beyond the sort of "tone matrix" idea of "here's a pentatonic scale, everything you do will play a random note along it" and provide events that trigger more complex sounds like chords and arpeggios or apply effects to the music. Then again, I may not have played long or well enough to hear all Dyad has to offer. Also, I quite enjoyed the backing tracks. It's your standard trippy electronic music fare, but at least it's not dubstep! There's enough variety to keep things interesting, from more ambient pieces to clubby techno beats, but it's not exactly Squarepusher. Keep in mind that I crave unique and experimental music, so I was digging the more dissonant and jarring sounds while some of my friends were cringing or shaking their heads.
Okay, I think that about covers my first impressions from Dyad's release day. Ignore any review that says "I've never done drugs, but I imagine this is what it feels like!" Those people are idiots who should take some drugs.
I feel good about recommending this to shmup fans. Maybe we can get some high score competitions going! I'll let you know if I make into the top 10 on any of the later stages, which shouldn't be too hard since the game just came out.
