YMMV / Beat Hazard

• Awesome Music: Be it some thumping techno, murderous metal or dizzy dance music, you'll surely find something for you. You choose the music it plays. Awesome Music is an assured part of the game.
• Game-Breaker: Super Bombs in the original. At point blank range, it decimates bosses in a single blast, usually giving you plenty of time to rack up Dare Devil bonuses gradually if nothing is around until the next wave of enemies show up.
• Polished Port:
  • The Steam version of Classic and Ultra. Sure Windows users do have to pay for relatively cheap add-ons for file support that the Macintosh users don't have to pay for, but beyond that they have access to internet radio for music, (optional) social feeds through RSS and Twitter, other possible configuration tweaks. In the case of Beat Hazard Classic on PC and Mac on Steam, it also has access to Beat Hazard Ultra's Suicidal difficulty if it's unlocked in the expansion pack.
  • The retail PC release by THQ has most of the same content as the original Xbox LIVE Indie Games version with some added songs and the addition of the Suicidal difficulty, which might be good for those who prefer the original.
• That One Boss: The Spider/Nyarlathotep boss from the Ultra DLC is this sometimes. It has the ability to curl up into a ball and repel ALL attacks, and can stay like this for any amount of time. This boss can also un-curl, fire, and re-curl in less than a second. Combine this with the fact that its numerous segments have a large amount of HP and, once they do this for while, there's a bunch of other enemies and/or bosses on-screen, and it becomes very frustrating. On the other hand, it only curls up when you're too close to it. Stay away, and you're (relatively) fine.
• This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Beat Hazard is Asteroids meets Audiosurf on a cocktail of speed and acid, and depending on your seizure resistance, bath salts.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Some players are willing to crank up the visual intensity of the game's strobing effects only to see how much Sensory Abuse their retinas can withstand, but the effects can also blanket enemy fire and use the sound cues their shots use in the later versions to determine how to dodge their attacks.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The PC streaming function of the original Beat Hazard for the Xbox 360. If your music takes too long for the game load, it will immediately terminate your game; other times the game will play an entirely different track from the one you wanted. The Xbox 360 version of Ultra is even worse as it flat out fails to scan any music stored on your computer.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A lot of things got changed in Beat Hazard Ultra, and people have already complained over:
  • The Perks system (and particularly being unable to get all the bonuses they previously had before the DLC due to needing more than the 3 slots allowed without Ultra).
  • The lack of the ship's inertia. The Xbox 360 version of Ultra does include an option for the ship's inertia though.
  • Insane and Suicidal having to be unlocked manually rather than just by leveling up.
  • The difficulty of the Easy difficulty.
  • And the visual intensity of the background being completely separate from the difficulty selected.
  • And in the case of the XBLIG version of the original game, an update that broke the game's ability to stream music from your PC (see Scrappy Mechanic above).

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