Beat Souls [Xbox]

Developed by Zoo Corporation, Beat Souls is a rhythm game where you start off as Mikoto, a female priest trained to relieve the stress of the Yokai. With two Otomo companions, that naturally rest by your side but can be guided from left to right, you will pick up the Spirits - the Beat Souls - along each level. Each level sees you facing off against one of three Yokai: Mei, NeNe and Rinko, who you can unlock to play as, each with extra skills that prevent you from losing out on combos from missing souls or by taking damage, depending on who you choose.

Additional moves and hazards are implemented along the way, with the BPM increasing enough to make it a manageable learning curve, but still keep a level of challenge there. Learning the patterns feels intuitive for the most part, and as a veteran dance mat player, I found the rhythm to be well paced. There were a few moments where the symmetry of moves caught me off guard, after a few too many repeating moves followed by something unexpected to get me to break my combo. These were surprisingly well integrated too, as it wasn’t even like it would catch me out the first time; it would lull me into the same false sense of security time and time again, forcing me to make the exact same mistake. This wasn’t confined to a single level either, this would catch me out often - and as much as this might sound like I’m phrasing it as a downside, it’s actually a good thing. Keeping you on your toes is all part and parcel with rhythm games, and as you learn to manage these areas, you get better - improving your reaction time in the process.

Visually, Beat Souls is very eye-catching, with a vivid, colourful look and a grid-like level structure, with beats and hazards moving towards you. Each of the characters have cute, pastel-Chibi models within the level, with more anime-styled looks within the main menu. There’s a lot of flashing and quite intense patterns on screen during levels, so I did find myself getting a headache pretty quickly - thankfully, within the options in the Pause menu, you can change a lot of these display patterns and turn some of it off, though the ‘FEVER!’ sections of each level still gain a bit more of a psychedelic look to them that had my eyes throbbing.

The soundtrack is made up of a variety of different styled tunes, with each of the Yokai bosses having their own sort of music genre that dominates their levels. Some of the tracks are super familiar, although I don’t recognise the artists and titles, and I can’t quite place where I’ve heard the tracks before. They are really catchy though, and make playing through the levels really enjoyable.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Beat Souls, and have found it to be one of the more entertaining rhythm games I’ve played recently. With 45 levels, each with two difficulty modes to play through, as well as endless ‘Hell’ modes for each of the rhythm Yokai to see how long you can last, there’s plenty to keep you busy. There’s also a good feeling of achievement as you improve over the course of the game, due to the steadily increasing difficulty and additional things to learn, and this keeps things feeling fresh and interesting over the course of the game. And at £8.39 on the Xbox Store, (with a saving currently bringing it down to £6.71 for a limited time), it’s well worth it if you’re a fan of rhythm based titles.

In the end, we decided to give Beat Souls the Collecting Asylum rating of 8.5/10.

Are you interested in Beat Souls? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to EastAsiaSoft for the Beat Souls Xbox review code!