Sound Shapes is an incredible adventure of sights and sounds, but a short campaign and lack of challenge hold it back.
Sound Shapes follows the basic formula that N+ and Super Meat Boy do: jump around obstacles while avoiding anything that's colored red. Whereas the characters of the aforementioned games are extremely agile utilizing wall kicks to go vertical, your character who is a nondescript ball can stick to surfaces and climb up and hang from them. He can only do it from light-colored surfaces, though, as he loses adhesion on dark surfaces. You can also hold the square button for a boost of speed, but that will cause you to lose adhesion as well.
Everything in the game is driven by music. The levels are grouped together into albums, usually four or five levels per album. Each level begins almost entirely mute. There are coins that you can collect as you move about, and each coin collected adds a new note to the music. After collecting enough coins, the music's layers become stitched together and the soundtrack comes alive. The music also changes depending on what screen you're in. New elements will be added while others will be taken away, and sometimes you just want to lay the Vita down for a few minutes and enjoy listening to what you've gathered up.
Your environment behaves differently depending on the song. Vocals might create temporary platforms that dissipate when the vocals do. File cabinets open and shut to the tunes of pianos as you roll across them. A row of moving platforms makes their way across the screen to the baseline. Enemies also add to the music as well. They pulsate and move about in patterns adding their own layer to the soundtrack. Nonlethal creatures emit their own sounds as you climb aboard them for a lift to the next part of the area. It's really captivating gameplay.
Unfortunately, it's not that challenging. Your only real challenge is clearing better times on the levels when you compete on leaderboards. The levels are also peppered with checkpoints, and some screens even have as many as three or four different ones. Each album introduces their own unique gameplay mechanic, such as using vehicles and cranes, but there isn't a very strong sense of culminating every skill you've learned to tackle really difficult objects. Once you beat the game, you unlock Death Mode, which takes one screen from each level and has you collecting a certain amount of coins in a given time limit. The problem with these levels is they are completely random with their coin placement, making it more of a test of luck than of skill.
The campaign is also rather short, containing only five albums with levels that last roughly five minutes each. To make up for this lack of content, the game has a robust level creator. As you finish levels in the campaign, you unlock new pieces to use in the creator. It's very easy to make levels by just holding where you want pieces on the screen, and then pinching the touch and rear screens to manipulate size and rotation. As with LittleBigPlanet, you can publish and share your levels for other gamers to play so when you finish the campaign, you may want to spend a few hours with the creator to see what you can come up with and try other people's levels.
The game has a wonderful visual style to it. Sharp angled geometric shapes make up some levels while puffs of clouds line others. One such album's levels are designed with an 8-bit theme and even has you going through a portion of its level fashioned after Breakthrough. Seeing animations of enemies in time with the music gives the presentation of the game a firm cohesiveness, while seeing lyrics manifest themselves as they're being sung gives the soundtrack some sentience.
The most vital component of Sound Shapes is of course the audio; it's simply superb. It contains music from real artists such as deadmau5 and Beck, and seeing how the developers incorporating every note into the gameplay is just beautiful. Collecting coins and adding notes to the songs makes it seem like you yourself are composing and as previously mentioned, sometimes you just want to put the Vita down and listen.
15 dollars for Sound Shapes may seem a bit steep if all you care about is the campaign. It's over in a few hours and Death Mode isn't a very compelling mode to keep you playing afterward. If you enjoy creating, sharing and playing other people's levels, you'll find the real value here since the possibilities are quite endless. At the heart of its gameplay, Sound Shapes is quite simple, but it's also a game that somehow manages to captivate your imagination. For that reason alone, Sound Shapes is worth looking into.