It’s always a nice surprise to find games that I enjoy in the most unlikely of places, like the community games section of the Xbox Live Marketplace. I checked out the demos of the community games early on after the new dashboard was launched last fall, but I never really found any games that made me want to spend points on them. I happened to end up with 400 points recently from a McDonalds promotion about a month or so ago and I decided to see if any community games caught my eye since I couldn’t really buy any XBLA games with just 400 points.

I heard of Groov when 1up’s GameNight covered a few of the best Xbox Live community games a few weeks ago, so I downloaded the demo to try it out and wound up buying it for 200 points after a few rounds in the demo. If you want comparisons, Groov is like a mix of Everyday Shooter‘s music-based shooter gameplay and Geometry Wars‘ simple visual style. Instead of having enemies die instantly and then emit music, enemies turn white when shot while still moving around without being able to hurt you so that they die to the beat while adding to the music in a more meaningful way without sounding like a cacophony of sound in the vague shape of a song.

Groov offers a few modes, with the basic Original Mix mode, a Expert Mix survival mode, and a Jam Session mode where the latter two are unlocked by getting high scores in the mode that precedes it. The song that the Original Mix mode consists of starts off slow until you open up the second wave, where your gun can shoot faster to speed up the beat of the song as new enemies come into play and add to the song until things die down as it waits for you to use up your lives so it can finish the song, which won’t last much longer than maybe five minutes or so at best. Expert Remix starts you off with full-powered weapons and every enemy type present from the start and challenges you to last as long as possible. Jam Session mode lets you just play around by shooting enemies, changing the music effects that occur, and without the pressure that the other two modes feature. I probably won’t play jam session much after the first time I tried it, but that would probably be the mode I would lets friends that stink at dual-stick shooters play to see what I like about the game.

The only negatives I see about the game are just the lack of more songs to play with, but I can’t complain much when it only cost me 200 points ($2.50 in real money). I would love to see this game be picked up by a publisher to be expanded upon for Xbox Live Arcade, maybe even with custom soundtrack support so I could play with the levels it could create based on the songs I choose to import into it. Until that happens, I’m fine with enjoying the simple musical gameplay that Groov offers whenever I need to take a break from whatever else I’m playing. I do still have 200 points left, so I will be looking for another 200 point game to try out that may be my next love of the moment.

Groov on Xbox Live Marketplace

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About This Author: Chris Selogy

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