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The Humble Indie Bundle has been one of the biggest blessings for Linux gaming as well as a very crucial positive change catalyst in the Linux gaming revolution of the past three years. I have been a fan of the Humble Indie Bundle since its early humble beginnings (pun intended). On May 27 2014, the video game Symphony made its debut on Linux and Mac OS X as part of the Humble Indie Bundle. Symphony had originally been released for Microsoft Windows in 2012, and almost immediately became a big indie hit and received rave reviews from both critics and fans alike. The Humble Indie Bundle folks wasted no time and got to work to bring Symphony to Linux as well as Mac OS X.
Symphony is a shoot 'em up video game produced by Empty Clip Studios. In Symphony, you control a ship which must shoot other enemy ships sort of reminiscent of classic video games like Asteroids and Galaga. The main concept that sets Symphony apart from other shoot 'em up games is that the enemy ships, as well as the layout of the levels, are based on patterns found in the game's music. In addition, you can add your entire music library to the video game, or, if you prefer, you can add only select songs from your library. As the game states, “your music is under attack” and it's up to you to protect it. A slow, classical song will generate a slow-paced level, whereas a fast upbeat dance tune will give you a really fast-paced level with more enemy ships that you'll need to shoot down. The game concept is not entirely original, as there's already been other games that have used music in a similar fashion. Regardless, Symphony is a great game to play.
To play Symphony, you can go to symphonygame.com which is the official game website, or you can also get it from Desura and Steam. Symphony is small in size, it needs only about ½GB (500MB) of hard drive space, which makes the downloading and installation a breeze. You can control your ship with your mouse, and supposedly with a controller, even though my controller hasn't been able to work with this game.
The game is fun to play, but, because it’s music driven, and especially for having a name like Symphony, I would expect music to play a leading role in this game. Contrary to what the name implies, you can actually turn the volume all the way down and probably get the same scores you get if you're actually listening to the music and moving according to what you hear. A music driven game should be easier to play if you're paying attention to the music, which is something that this game fails to do. Besides the music playing a rather minor role in this game, there were some graphics problems I encountered which seem to be related to the proprietary AMD driver that Steam requires me to use in order to play games. At random times, the entire screen, or part of it, would turn white even though the game would go on as if nothing wrong had happened. I researched my problem and found it to be actually quite common among gamers who use AMD graphics cards with proprietary drivers. I hope this is addressed in the future and the game becomes more enjoyable to play.
Minimum System Requirements OS: Major Linux distributions from 2012 Processor: Dual core, 2 GHz or faster Memory: 2 GB RAM Graphics: OpenGL 2.1 (with shader model 3 video card or higher) Not recommended for any integrated graphics GPUs Hard drive: 500 MB available space
Conclusion
Here's my Pro's and Con's for the game Symphony as well as my rating for this game.
Pro's • Interesting concept of using your own music as the princess that needs to be rescued. • Very easy to play, yet it doesn't get boring quickly. I could keep playing the game again and again.
Con's • The way the music is used, unfortunately, doesn't play a more prominent role, and in fact the game could very well be played with the volume off. • Glitches with graphics on computers with AMD graphics cards. • Although it claims to have controller support, my two controllers did not work with this game.
Unfortunately, I have to give this game a mere 2½ out of 5 stars. The con's just flat outweigh the pro's; especially the glitch with AMD graphics cards is a deal buster (if you happen to have such kind of graphics card).