Avicii Invector (2019)

Reached Credits

Thoughts: Glorious tribute to AVICII that made me a bigger fan of his music. The game feels more like it prioritizes being a visual musical experience similar in veins to Tetris Effect. I still do find the "triangle tube" disorienting even after beating the game. The game starts out easy where I can do the first songs in Hard, but the later songs get really challenging to the point I struggle doing them on Medium. I do appreciate the "story" even if the cutscenes are unrelated to the experience.

In search of a new rhythm game to play, I downloaded this game based on looks despite not being familiar with any of Avicii’s music and thinking the name and cover image are kinda weird. It ended up being a lot more fun and challenging than expected and I think people should definitely check it out at its current sale price of $11.99 USD.

Soundtrack

Wasn’t really sure what to expect here, but what I got was a surprisingly varied, enjoyable tracklist that offers a deep dive into the producer’s work. The only misstep is not crediting any of the many entertaining vocalists in-game, while hilariously crediting Avicii at the start of each track (we know...). My personal highlight is “What Would I Change It To” featuring AlunaGeorge, a fun acoustic-driven song early in the game. Whether they’re more relaxed or full bangers, the songs work well in a rhythm game context, each having a finely crafted rise and fall momentum that plays well with the gameplay (more on that in a second).

Gameplay

At its most basic, Invector’s gameplay involves pressing or holding one of 3-5 buttons (depending on difficulty) in rhythm while moving horizontally between 3 “lanes” of a track. Outside of the most straightforward verses, the first twist comes in as the 3 lanes are folded into a triangle whose sides you hop between. On Medium and Hard, this really forces you to pay attention to upcoming notes to jump to the right side of the shape, and can make it really challenging to get back on track if you mess up. In each song, when the beat drops out, you’re set free from the track to fly around in 3D space and must dodge obstacles and fly through rings before dropping you back down when the beat drops. Many songs have really nice unique patterns that are tough to get down but satisfying to pull off. Altogether it shows the developer’s understanding of their songs, what makes each unique, and what makes them work in terms of the flow and narrative of the music. The difficulties each offer different levels of complexity, but its the progression of the track list itself from start to finish that bumps up the difficulty the most. On medium, I started getting S ranks and could barely pass some of the later songs.

Presentation

By far the weakest and most pointless aspect of the game is the story (yeah, there’s really a story and it doesn’t involve Avicii at all) which tries to justify the “spaceship flying through a bunch of different zones” vibe of the game. By the halfway point I was insta-skipping it, sorry to say. But the star of the show is those great-looking zones and backgrounds that you fly though, which have nice variation and are easy on the eyes without distracting from play. The only real problem is the winding track that occasionally hides what’s next a bit too much—hard to tell how intentional that is.

Conclusion

This is a really fun game that has already made me a fan of an artist I knew nothing about. Since Avicii has sadly passed away, this game is a great way to introduce his music to a new audience and honor his goal of making a game while he was alive. It’s clear that a lot of care was put into presenting these songs and offering a fun challenge. It even has splitscreen multiplayer as a nice bonus. Definitely recommended!