My first exposure to Harmonix came not through any of their more popular endeavors, but through their very first game, Frequency, which was published by Sony back in 2001. I didn’t even know what it was at the time, if we’re being honest; I’d stopped into a K-Mart that was going out of business and happened to see it amongst a pile of about a hundred copies ofConker’s Bad Fur Day, thought the cover looked cool, and picked it up on a whim. As it turned out, though, I ended up losing quite a bit of time to the game in the weeks that followed, and I enjoyed it so much that I immediately jumped on board with the original Amplitude, and basically followed the company’s works from that point forward.
Flash forward fifteen years and Harmonix is releasing their third game in the franchise, once again named Amplitude, after a successful Kickstarter to get it funded, and from the perspective of a long-time fan, that’s a pretty big deal. However, a decade and a half later, things have changed a bit; Harmonix themselves might only be three games deep into this specific franchise, but they’ve used this same gameplay structure for Rock Band Blitz and Rock Band Unplugged, and games like Rez and Child of Eden have done a lot with this sort of concept ( in their own way) as well. Further, Amplitude is no longer the same experience it used to be; instead of a simple rhythm game with a shooter motif, it’s a game featuring a soundtrack that’s a third in-house developed tunes for a concept project soundtrack, a third indie tracks and a third licensed tracks from other video game music creators. Is that a concept Harmonix can make into a functional experience effectively? Well, as it turns out, the answer to that question is “mostly yes, ” as Amplitude is mechanically the best version of the game in the series, though there are some caveats in that qualifier that, even at the twenty dollar price point it released at, might give one pause depending on what they’re hoping for from such a game.