Musical Vibes

Genre: Music-Rhythm

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Musical Vibes is a Music-Rhythm game released on PC in 2023 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game lets players take on the game’s rhythms using standard gamepad controls, or lets them sync up with the game’s smartphone app to use body-sensing motion controls. The game also boasts compatibility with the Philips Hue smart lighting system for synchronized lighting, but I do not have this so I couldn’t test it with the game.

The presentation here is okay, but it definitely feels like this game’s designers are trying to present something that’s beyond their capabilities – the 3D visuals have a nice modern look with some good effects, but they have some underwhelming character models for the dancers and the backgrounds suffer from some nasty aliasing. This is joined by a dance/pop soundtrack that’s not terrible, but far from great, with tunes players aren’t likely to be familiar with. And that’s before you take into consideration that there are only 8 music tracks in the entire game. oh, and there are some pretty bad loading screens with what seems like AI-generated art.

When it comes to the standard gamepad gameplay, Musical Vibes is equal parts bland and frustrating. This style of gameplay simply has players pressing a direction on the left analog stick in time with the music. This doesn’t feel great, and it creates problems when you have two notes one right after the other, as you’ll have difficulty moving the stick fast enough to hit both notes.

However, it’s clear that the star here is meant to be the motion tracking using your smartphone. You’ll need to download the game’s smartphone app and use a QR code to set it up with the game and with your network. Even after you do this, the app is extremely picky about what it considers a usable camera image – you’ll need your entire body in frame, the lighting conditions will need to be right… basically, if you need a large room that’s well lit but doesn’t have any lighting in the actual camera shot.

Even once you get all of this lined up… it doesn’t seem to matter. The game kept moving up my score regardless of whether I was imitating the dancing on-screen or standing perfectly still doing nothing. All that trouble to get this all set up, and it is an absolute waste.

I really feel like Musical Vibes had a lot of ambition to deliver something unique and special here, but that ambition went well beyond the means of the folks making this game. The terrible gamepad controls, the busted camera controls, the pathetically small song list, long loading times, and the use of AI art in menus all point to a game that just could not keep up with its creator’s intentions. And the result is something that just isn’t fun at all to play. Skip it.

tl;dr – Musical Vibes is a Music-Rhythm game that boasts the use of your smartphone’s camera to give players a motion-controlled experience, but whether you’re using your smartphone or a controller, you’re in for a terrible Music-Rhythm game with awful controls, questionable design choices, a tiny song list, and terrible loading times. As ambitious as this game is, it is not worth your time or money.

Grade: D

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