Stereo Aereo

It's a bad rhythm game, and I have nothing good to say about it.

Nice short little rhythm/shooter game. Unless you somehow want to get all the achievements or get some high scores (which I feel wouldn't be as fun as with similar rhythm games with more consistent mechanics throughout), the main attraction will likely be the story mode, which should last around an hour and a half if you don't fail or restart too much. The story itself is okay: it feels relatively accessory to the whole experience, yet serviceable and sometimes a tad funny. I must admit however that voices and dialogues do get annoying at times. Visuals are mostly still during cutscenes (again, they do what they're expected to well enough), but quite varied, bright and interesting during gameplay phases!

I enjoyed the mechanics, specifically being encouraged to evade obstacles at a precise moment (either at a specific distance in front or at the last minute). The only serious annoyance I had was with some obstacles having very different shapes, thus needing to be evaded at unclear times until you get the feel for each individual type (thankfully the music does help), and sometimes being tough to read altogether (like on which row you're supposed to be to evade them properly). As a side note, I particularly enjoyed the last two songs (out of ten), which reverted to more readable obstacles while still providing fast and significant challenge. Overall, it remains a well thought out, interesting and original enough concept.

The music does the job really: it has good rhythm and a light, chill vibe, like the story itself. All in all, for just a few dollars? I'd say why not!
8/10

If you're going to play Stereo Aereo I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you play on normal at first. The game is way more unforgiving on hard than on normal.

That being said, it's a fairly fun, challenging game. The music was very hit or miss, most songs were just okay, the two I liked the most happened to be the first, and last stage songs coincidentally. If you want a challenging music based game for cheap (4 dollars), you really can't go wrong with Stereo Aereo.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS, COMPLETE THE CAMPAIGN AT LEAST ONCE BEFORE CONTINUING TO THE IN-DEPTH REVIEW

Stereo Aereo is a special type of game in my eyes, a game that does a lot with so little. It's a rhythm based shooter game that turns into a true test of skill in its later stages. My short review is 8.5/10. The game has a few minor issues, but nothing that can't be fixed. My hope is that the team will go into the sequel strong in an attempt to fix the problems that keep this game from perfection.

GAMEPLAY - The gameplay, in my playing experience, was razor tight and I got no real problems from it, it was all my own mistakes. It's a type of gameplay that is certainly easy to learn and difficult to master, I found myself stumbling on certain levels due to the hiked difficulty curve, but pushed through with the perfect combination of muscle memory in order to remember what motions I need to do to avoid a certain barrier or enemy, and skill to help me anticipate the next move. I have seen people complain about the shooting being "delayed", but I think it works in the games favor to make the margin of error a little wider. Getting hits and rhythm combos in this game feels satisfying, while not taking the amount of dedication other rhythm games require, and I can praise it quite well for that.

VISUALS - Aesthetically, the game is beautiful. It captures a fond vibe of the 80's while injecting themes of space, resulting in a welcome Guardians of the Galaxy style of the world. all of the locations look fairly distinct and could fair nicely in a more realistic space movie, such as the junkyard and space prison levels. The art and graphic novel style of cutscenes and character animations is also an extremely well needed change from the traditional butt-ugly 3D models some of the other Unity centered games have. All of the characters are distinct and recognizable from silhouette alone, and it's a nice change of pace in terms of stylized graphics. As for the in-game graphics, they don't push the limits of PC as much as I feel it could, but at the same time, not much is needed in terms of visuals when the goal is to focus. The most of the flashy effects you'll get are the laser beams firing on the side of the screen, and it's a good way to indicate that you're on a streak.

STORY AND VOICE ACTING - I'll bunch these two together because it's rather a doozy. This game's biggest flaws, to me, were the story and the characters I had to listen to. It seems silly to criticize something of this nature, but it did suck me out from the immersion on occasion. In short, the story is overly convoluted with story elements coming and going as they so please (with the fourth member of the band being neglected and treated like a chore to rescue, and I STILL don't know his name) and the voice actors (with the exception of the girl) were either trying too hard or miss the mark on their deliveries miserably. I'm willing to excuse all of this, though. This is a smaller studio with a limited budget, and this is their first attempt (as far as I know) to write a story with voice acting like this. This is another problem easily fixed in the sequel, were one to come.

MUSIC - The music is amazing, period. It works in and out of the game, and works amazingly well given the aesthetics of the game. It's a soundtrack I'll be buying for sure.

CONTENT - There isn't much to speak of in terms of endgame content, you're able to replay the story with the other characters and boost the difficulty if you so please. The arcade mode is, sadly, individual story missions with customized ships and difficulty, and that's about it. I would've loved for the arcade mode to be an actual arcade mode, where you can loop the levels and play endlessly with a certain amount of lives. another thing that would have been amazing was a custom level builder, using song files on the heels of Audiosurf. Many things that will hopefully be seen in a sequel.

You may have noticed a pattern throughout this review. I keep on saying that the problems in this game can easily be rectified in a sequel, and I stand by those statements 100%. This is, in the end, a small studio running on Unity. They did amazing for their first outing with a new concept I've yet to see elsewhere, a story-driven rhythm-based shooter. If this formula is fleshed out over a sequel or two, it can be amazing. The game has issues, but it's nowhere near unplayable. The problems found here are nowhere near as egregious as if a triple A studio were to do it, and I'm confident that with a few tweaks, it can be the next big thing.

8.5/10.

This game has it all, Nice story mode , Awesome Rock music and it's Challenging as hell. I think it has some errors with achievements and leaderboard but that's nitpicking. Grab it!

Pleasantly surprised. Didn't expect much, but exceeded my wildest expectation. I bought it on sale, but worth the full price. Good music, nice story mode. Recommended.

Stereo Aereo is really fun. Very hard at times. But very satisfying.
Love the music and the art style.

wow wat a suprise, this game is awsome, amazing music and cool story mode..its like guitar hero mixed with raiden..excellent

A treat to fans of the 80's.

SHORT - I am a big fan of rhythm games, and I have like 10+ years experience, I was very excited to see a new rhythm game on steam but I've been left disappointed, from every single point of view.

If you want that kind of game, just buy Neon Drive instead.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/433910/Neon_Drive/

LONG -

-Visuals: while the characters, menu and cutscenes look like comix stuff, the game itself looks like cheap 3D thing, idk what was the problem to keep it the same or at least close style.

-Sound work: this game contains one of the most annoying voice works I've seen, if you add this to the fact that all those levels are pretty long, and every time you restart, you start from the very beginning and you HAVE to listen this nonsense over and over again, the only thing that saves the day is that you can mute the voices completely, If they would cut the amount of the voice remarks x4 or at least made them randomized so you dont have to listen to same stuff over and over again that would be OK but stilll nott good. Music is good but every other sound aspect is bad.

-No controls remap - speaks for itself

-Gameplay: what is the most important thing in the RHYTHM game is the perfect synchronization of the music and stuff that is going on on the screen. Here we have - a tutorial that doesn't explain how do you get Perfect/Good/Crazy marks. Offsynced audio/obstacles pair, and in addition to that there is NO sync feature like every single other game have - You know there are 55 various reasons your audio can be not in sync with video, but there is a simple and solid solution - add a manual sync button that allows you to move audio track relative to the obstacles. Here you have to press EARLIER than beat to get Perfects and LATER than beat to get CRAZY, while hitting perfectly in the beat gives you Good 90% of the time. Another problem is that. I ASSUME that the idea of getting perfects was by hitting buttons when obstacles are in the GREEN zone in the middle, but NO for me, from audio and video points of view I get Perfects for hitting buttons at the end of the very 1st light blue zone, it's just annoying, a rhythm game where you can't rely on the rhythm Jeez.

Picking characters provides nothing but your ship skin, you see all 3 characters the whole song anyway.

+It was cheap on sale
+Steam achievements
+Cards

I do not recommend it, doesn't matter if you like rhythm games or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I wanted to like Stereo Aereo. I really did. I thought the concept was interesting and it had a lot of potential. However, the bits of SA that shine are blotted out by all the painfully mediocre elements. (Full disclosure, the following breakdown is based on playtime up to level 6, as something happened there that made me unable to play any further. More details below.)

The music: The music in SA is pretty alright. Unfortunately, none of the songs I came across really stuck in my head or may me want to play levels again. True to the story of the band you play as, it sounds like it was made by a real small-time group. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the tracks for this game sound like background music rather than the driving force, which runs really counter to the idea of a rhythm game. Speaking of which...

The rhythm elements: The rhythm elements of this game are what really let me down. You control a ship which moves between 5 different lanes on a 'music highway'. Halfway up the highway from your ship are a set of translucent lines. It is *there* that you're supposed to be looking for to hit the 'notes', but your character is at the bottom of the screen dodging whatever you don't/can't shoot down. This is a little odd, but wouldn't be a problem if the timing was correct. The timing for notes in SA is so painfully inconsistent that it's frustrating. Sometimes a 'Perfect' is actually a little bit ahead of when you'd expect, sometimes it's behind, but rarely is it ever as a note is actually being played in the song. Not only that, it feels inconsistent even when you do the exact same thing over and over. To give what I'm saying here some actually credit, I've been playing musical instruments in real life for 10 years. I play rhythm games on a near daily basis, be it Guitar Hero, Love Live, Audiosurf, Osu, Beat Hazard, Riff Racer, Chunithm.. I can go on, but the point is that I know what rhythm is. I know timing, tempo, and how beats are supposed to fall in music. So it's incredibly aggravating when I do the same thing and get different results. Not just that, but sometimes to dodge you have to make more than one movement, which is more than one key press. This means that while you're moving to dodge something, you may miss your window to get a 'Good' or a 'Perfect'. You might not even get 'OK' cuz the game thinks you made the dodge too far in advance.

Aesthetics: The game looks good; I'm a fan of the 80's pop culture look and the bright neon aesthetics. The HUD is well laid out and puts everthing toward the bottom of the screen so you don't have to take your eyes off your ship or the hit line. It's nice.

Story and Voice Acting: Man, you'd think Stereo Aereo was an established franchise with how the writers toss around names and locations like they're common knowledge (if it is, let me know and I'll take this back.) I have literally no idea who these characters are or what they even do in the band. It's not really even mentioned until around level 4, though I suppose you could guess based on the shape of their ships. Anyway, these guys talk waaay too much. Get a high combo? Character quip. Get hit? Character quip. Do basically anything? You guessed it: character quip. I'd love to be able to turn this off, but that's not an option, which means you get to hear these mediocre lines spouted over and over again.

Length & Replayablity: Looking at the arcade mode, I believe that the game has 8 levels. That's 8 songs. And.. That's it. Seriously, there is so little content here it's hilarious. Not only that, if you're an achievement hunter it won't take you long at all to ace this game. I got 32% of the achievements in this game in under an hour, about 4 of those came while I was playing the tutorial. Unless you *really* like this game, you're probably only gonna get about 3-4 hours tops. That's laughably low for a rhythm game. So if it's so easy to finish, why didn't I? While playing level 6, I ran into a graphical error that made it impossible for me to continue playing. The things I was supposed to be dodging were straight up invisible. Not even sure why that's happening; I've never had any graphical error like that occur while I was playing any other game on this computer. Suffice it to say, I'm going to be asking for a refund for that reason alone.

To make a long review short, Stereo Aereo is a really cool idea that falls short in basically every category. Honestly, I feel like if they had focused on making a solid shooter and focused the rhythm elements to boss battles, this would have turned out a lot better. The boss fights were the most fun and polished part in this game. Maybe some big updates in the future can push Stereo Aereo into a more finished state, but I have a hard time recommending this game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZsHcWBz_q0