Retro/Grade Review

     After beating Retro/Grade once on one of its medium difficulties, I was sick of it, and sat down to write a nasty review giving it a low score. Before I began writing, I decided to play 1 more level. Many days later, I am here writing my positive review. Retro/Grade is different, and therefore takes some getting used to, but once you fully understand it, it's pretty ingenious.

     Retro/Grade is 80% rhythm game and 20% shmup. The story begins as Rick Rocket takes out the last boss of his final mission. You pilot his space ship during the last section of the final fight. Once he defeats this enemy, the flow of time starts to reverse. In order to prevent damage to the space-time continuum, Rick must undo all of his actions and ensure that his enemies actions are undone in exactly reverse order. So he must catch his shots back in his guns as they fly back at him from the right side of the screen and dodge enemy fire from the left side of the screen as it flies back into the guns of his enemies. All of this catching and dodging is timed perfectly to the game's music.

     Your shots fly back at you in 2-5 rows, depending on the difficulty you choose. In order to catch a shot, you must move to the row it is in and press cross when it reaches your ship. At the same time, you must move out of the path of enemy bullets as they come at you from the left side of the screen and then progress back into the enemy ships' guns. You must be in a different row when these shots reach your ship. If you fail to catch a shot back in your gun or if an enemy bullet hits you, then events have been changed and the space-time continuum is damaged. Space-time has a health bar in the upper left side of your screen, and if it is depleted, then space-time has been altered too much and collapses, causing a game over.

     Enemy fire can contain power-downs, such as score penalties and temporarily disabling your retro/fuel (explained in a minute, don't worry!). There are a few twists on this basic formula as well, such as bosses with melee attacks and gravity bombs, and rapid-fire missiles and sustained lasers you need to catch with your ship. The game also puts its basic mechanics through their paces. Harder levels are a dense maze of enemy fire and a complex pattern of friendly fire coming at you from two directions at once. Some patterns also play with your expectations, sending waves of enemy fire at you that make you move in bizarre patterns that don't make sense if you were just trying to catch all of your fire. When moments like this match up with the music perfectly, the results are magical.

     Some of your shots contain power-ups, such as a shield that protects space-time from damage, multiplier boosters (which ups your points multiplier by a few levels (normally your multiplier builds up slowly as you progress without making a mistake)), overthrusters (this is a power-up that temporarily doubles your multiplier. You activate it by pressing R1), health for the space-time continuum, score bonuses (your score starts high and goes down since time is reversed!) or retro/fuel refills. Retro/fuel is the mechanic that really sets this game apart from a lot of other rhythm games in my opinion. You have a retro/fuel meter that you can drain at any time by holding down circle. As long as it is held down, time reverses. Well actually, time is already reversed, so time moves forward. So if you make a mistake or are about to die, you can use retro/fuel to rewind the level a bit and try again. If you get a game over and still have retro/fuel left, you can rewind out of the game over screen and back into the level to go at it again. This mechanic really lets you wrestle with the game's levels in a way that most rhythm games don't. Even if you are on a level that is really hard for you, if you use your retro/fuel intelligently, you might have a shot at beating it. You can use it to go back and get power-ups you missed, for example, allowing you to continually heal up after your mistakes. A lot of rhythm games seem to demand perfection and that's it, but retro/fuel allows you to make mistakes but then wrestle your way through a level.

     Another way that this game differentiates itself from other rhythm games is in the music department. You'll remember that I dinged Patapon for not have enough good music. Retro/Grade does not have this problem. It's electronic music soundtrack is one of the best in gaming. If your into that type of music, it's very much worth listening to even if you're not going to play the game (the soundtrack is available on PSN). It's the kind of high quality electronic music I associate with groups like Daft Punk and Justice: so good it makes other electronic music sound lazy. Rhythm games often suck you in and make you feel like you are part of the music. Retro/Grade does that too, but it's music is of such high quality that the experience is even greater than many other games. These songs will be stuck in your head forever, and that's a great thing. Picking a favorite is impossible. When I tried to think of which is my favorite, I'd play through a level and say, “That's the best song.” Then I'd do another and say, “That's actually just as good as the last.” Then I did that again. And again. In all about five of the ten songs are all equally in first place in my mind, and the other five are really great too. Walking around at work, I sometimes imagine the whole place lit up in the neon aesthetic of Retro/Grade, each cubicle-dweller bobbing their head to the beat.

     After you beat the ten level campaign, which doesn't take that long, there are other difficulties to try (six in total). There is also the extensive challenge mode, which is a large map of levels you can fly through. There are over 100 levels on this map. Each throws you into a level at a certain difficulty and with some alternate rules. These can range from reversing the level so that it appears backward to making all enemy shots have power-downs to increasing or decreasing the speed (the music sounds amazing slowed down or sped up!) to making you beat the level without any mistakes or hitting every shot dead on (as there are a few degrees of accuracy for hitting each note). This sounds like it might get boring as there are only ten songs, but amazingly the little variations the special rules add keep things fresh throughout the whole map. Beating certain tracks of these levels will unlock secret stuff, such as cheats (big head mode and level modifications), a music player, concept art (including some cool progressions from art to final models), and most interestingly to me, different player ships. There's quite a few ships to unlock, including a bunch of cool characters from other indy games such as Octodad and Super Meat Boy. Much like Bit.Trip Runner 2, these other ships play the same but are new characters with new animations; they are really to cool to unlock and experience. Completing challenge mode is a lengthy process, and the final stages are super-hard, but doable (and fun!).

     Trying to get the trophies for high ranks on campaign mode are the game's ultimate challenges. At their worst, they require you to do perfect runs of the hardest difficulty. After a few days of trying, I was only very slowly making my way toward this goal. So I decided to go out in a blaze of fun and got the trophy for getting the 2^nd best ranks on the hardest difficulty. If you are super-hardcore though, the perfect run challenge awaits you.

     Retro/Grade can be controlled with a traditional controller or a guitar controller. Months after first publishing this review, my sister-in-law bought a guitar controller, so I borrowed it to try it out with this game. When using a guitar, you press the fret buttons to jump to the lane you want to be in and then strum to un-fire your shots. The whammy bar controls your retro fuel, and overboost seems to go off by itself whenever you get it. The guitar was fun to mess around with for a few levels, and it's different enough from Guitar Hero or Rock Band (especially dodging enemy fire), but since I learned how to play the hardest levels on a controller, I'm not interested in learning all over again with the guitar. If you're looking for another guitar game to play though, going through the game from the beginning and learning how to un-fire and dodge shots would probably be a lot of fun. Although I'm not sure how you would beat certain score challenges with overboost activating automatically. Unless my guitar is busted or I was holding it at too steep an angle, I don't understand why you don't activate overboost by tilting the guitar up...
     Some of the harder stages at first seem like they aren't possible to do with a conventional controller and that they were made for guitar. But once I got a little more experience with the game, I came back to these levels and was able to do them with a controller. I've never mashed on a controller more than I have on this game. The hardest levels are physically exhausting to play on a controller. I mashed on it so hard, I could feel the plastic creaking under the stress. At one point, I actually had to quit in the middle of a level. My forearms were burning and my hands refused to move. It reminded me of the way I mash on the controller to play hard levels in Wipeout HD, only way worse. This is, of course, really awesome.

     I wanted to give a shout-out to the vibration in this game. I am so used to vibration in games that I often don't notice it. You would expect the vibration to just be a steady beat for a rhythm game, but this game's vibration sends subtle signals to you that actually match the notes rather than just the tempo. It's doesn't vibrate on every note, just a subtle buzz here or there that matches what you are hearing. It's really the first innovative use of vibration I've seen in many years, so kudos for the polish on that.

     Kudos to the polish on everything in the game, actually. If you've read anything about the game's developer, Matt Gilgenbach (check out this Polygon article), you know that he worked really, really, really hard on it, and it shows. With a few little exceptions, it runs like a dream. There are no loading times, and the graphics are stunning. The attention to detail in the graphics and interface are really remarkable. Much like Wipeout HD, the backgrounds are crazy detailed and gorgeous looking even though you will never have time to look at them. Check out the way the lights on the ship and stuff in the background and shots all flash to the tattoo of the level. Check out the shadows the boss casts in level 4 or the stunning sunrise in level 8 (which is actually a sunset in reverse!), or the textures on the big-head mode versions of the ship pilots. The story is minimal, but the level descriptions and song names are all clever/hilarious. I know Mr. Gilgenbach says he made some mistakes with his priorities and work ethic (basically he felt he neglected his wife a bit during development), but his hard work shows. I wish him all the best in balancing development of his new game Neverending Nightmares and his family life.

     Once you get used to Retro/Grade's high concept and slight spin on traditional rhythm gaming, it becomes an addictive and wonderful experience. I don't know how the idea for this game was thought up, but it works brilliantly. The music is the real clincher. The seriously excellent soundtrack would make even a bad game worth playing. Fortunately the mechanics and feel of the game, and especially the retro/fuel system, are really good too. I kind of don't like rhythm games too much because they just tell you what to do and you have to do it exactly, but I loved Retro/Grade. It's a great game, tier 2.