Mind Symphony

The music is great, but that’s it.

The music choice is top notch, but that’s about it for this game. The rest is all about the poor user experience. If you look from a 3rd person point of view, the background animation during the battle is cool and artistic. But from the view of the person who is playing it, you will find it’s way too overwhelming. The theme color of the background is red, most of the enemies are red, their bullets or laser are also red. It’s so hard to identify them during a intense fight. Only after one game, my eyes feel hurt. The clam mode is pretty clam, but way too simple. The dots and background star falls are not connected to the rhythm of the music, the song feels too long compares the “tap one button” gameplay. After 2 songs, I feel more boring than calm. Even the main menu is confusing. I can understand, the creator of the game wants players to choose from 2 modes. But the button which is not been selected looks like it is disabled. The layout of the background is left and right, but the button layout is up and down, which is also conflicting with each other. I love the idea of connecting space shooting and awesome music. But it is not as simple as just mixed them together. It needs more work to make the game feeling decent. Apparently, there’s still a long way to go for this game.

Calm mode results in rage

Mind Symphony presents itself really well, and it’s an experience I want to love. However, after playing Calm mode for a few minutes, I’m just simply frustrated. As a musician, I want to tap the rings to the best. This is impossible, the rings need to be tapped purely randomly..during an up beat, in the middle of the best somewhere but it’s not a 16th note or 8th note or triplet..perhaps the rings are being placed automatically based on an analysis of the song’s wave file. If this is the case, it causes the rings to appear actually in non-intuitive timing. As the system exists right now, I don’t think I’ll ever feel calm playing calm mode!

Interesting

All in all a very nice addition to the Apple Arcade. This game shines in the release stress mode. The game is beautiful and chaotic with decent tracks to play along to. I got pretty into it and realized I was enjoying myself a lot. I tried both modes and calmness just didn’t feel right, I can’t figure out when to tap the stringy circles and it seems like you should make a much clearer activation area. It seems like every tap has no rhythm or reason to be where it is, and it’s actually a little frustrating haha. Calm should just flow and allow you to fly the ship and go through coronas, or just add anyway to make it more active instead of staring at a screen and tapping randomly. I’m one who enjoys sitting doing nothing during meditation and this seemed very boring even with all the cool effects, because the gameplay is so odd. I really like the menu music and I’m actually shocked there isn’t any actual SYMPHONIES, classical music, or instrumental tracks for this mode. Feature requests would be: - adding a way to use our Apple Music playlists - joystick controls instead of full swipes of the screen - making bullets and the enemy ships a bit more distinguishable would be helpful too

Won’t connect with Apple Music.

Seems like a good game but I don’t care for the included music. It says I can use my Apple Music subscription to play my own selection of music but keeps showing an error connecting to Apple Music. Support has not had a solution and said it’s an isolated issue. I have 4 other people that I personally know who have been told the same thing from support. If it were all free, I’d just delete it. Since they are both services I pay for, I expect a little more. But since Spire Blast came out with 2 levels and haven’t added any more since it came out, and now this, I think we might be due a discount. I wouldn’t use this forum for feedback such as this normally, but I’ve tried all other support options to no avail. I hope you can do better in the future.

Relax mode

Relax mode is a great idea with interesting possibilities but it needs some love for more intuitive usability. The spinning overlapping rings are a nice idea but if you stick with them as-is they’re too fine and need a visually distinctive cue. My approach would be something similar to a Photoshop blending more like dodge with the counter clockwise ring in one color, clockwise in another, and getting the visual cue as they interact to create a third color. If you want to go crazy with it, a simple particle starburst would further drive the point home of whatever final blended color you decide on. “It said good and there were a couple of green particles here and there but perfect showed a few dozen evenly distributed.” Test, test, test! :) Good luck!

Ok, needs some stuff

Got this today, and I have to say, this is a fire game! The controls don’t have a great tutorial on how they work, but once you figure it out, they are smooth! Calmness mode Pretty good, but the taps aren’t in sync with music. This shouldn’t be to hard to fix, as I’ve done similar stuff on another game called geometry dash. It may take a little trial and error, but I’m sure the devs will fix this. I mean, it only came out like a few days ago. Stress relief mode Pretty straight forward. You blast ships in time with the music. Again, it’s not totally in sync with the music, and in a few of the dance songs where the beat fizzles out, you stop blasting. Not hard to fix, but it will take a little time. Final thing! Please make it to where I can have my own Apple Music songs on here. I’d love to blast aliens in sync with jaykode and pixel terrors “dystopia”, or peacefully tap the screen to foresters “radio show”. Thanks for taking the time to read this🙏🏻

Not a Rhythm Game

This game looks cool and sounds cool on paper, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how the gameplay interacts with the music at all. I’ve played rhythm games since the first Guitar Hero and am pretty decent, but trying to play “Calm” mode is frustrating and unsatisfying. The hits don’t line up with the music at all or seem to fall on silent downbeats, and the hit indicators only give you a split second to even react or realize they’re happening. Release mode is just a Schmup. The music seems largely inconsequential to the gameplay other than a few enemy patterns lining up. But it doesn’t feel the music actually has an impact or importance, you could just as easily play the game on silent and not lose anything. I really wanted to like this, but either my phone is lagging or something isn’t right because even in the mode that’s meant to play like a rhythm game, I can’t consistently figure out what the game wants.

Buggy and opaque, but has potential

As a rhythm game, it’s a bit perplexing. As other reviews have pointed out, there doesn’t seem to be much relationship between the music and the tap cadence required to play the game as intended. As a meditation tool, it requires a bit too much focus, so it’s not all that relaxing. Nonetheless, it’s possible to see the potential here, if the game’s execution can be fine-tuned a bit. The “Apple Music Selections” option doesn’t work at all (I subscribe to Apple Music). The only thing that happens after selecting a song is that the gameplay screen appears, and then the level ends abruptly. One more thing: I’d love to see an option to export the playlists for the various levels to my Apple Music account! From what I can tell, the game designers have great taste in music and are definitely helping me discover new artists!

Doesn’t load…

I was REALLY excited to play this game! But alas, I can’t… Every time I try to play the game, it simply crashes and exits the game. I’ve re-downloaded multiple times, reset my phone, all of the normal tech troubleshooting tricks but none of them work. The game starts to load to a black screen, flickers, then goes back to the phone menu. The app stays active, but if I select it, it just does the same thing of going to black screen, flicker, then phone menu. I’m using an iPhone 13 Pro Max, latest iOS, and don’t have this issue with any other Arcade games.

Issues with Apple Music

Really enjoyed this game at first. Interesting concept enjoyed the music when playing. However when I finished all the songs that come with the game I went and clicked on the Apple Music option. Well it does not connect at all just says there is an issues. Looking online at other forums it look like this has been happening when it came out in 2019. Very disappointing! Game has some potential but I will be moving on from this game until they can fix the Apple Music issue. One star because I finished all he songs in like an hour and now have nothing.

Stainless Games' ShockRods, a “kill or be killed” vehicular arena shooter; Rogue Games' Mind Symphony, a music-based “shoot-em-up” that'll “make...

Polygon Wed Oct 23 2019