BPM: Bullets Per Minute

BPM is a great concept somewhat fumbled, redeemed when it breaks its own rules.

Awe Interactive's hellbound original finds the music at the heart of the first-person shooter

We really like BPM; it’s a great game, but perhaps it’s one best experienced on another platform — especially if you play in docked mode.

Despite its shortcomings, we were always drawn to come back for 'one more run'. It nails the roguelite gameplay hook and has a unique gameplay mechanic to support it all. While it at times feels as though the game's fighting against you when everything comes together, there's nothing quite like it. Clearing a room of monsters in time to the guitar shredding soundtrack never gets old and the constant progression of unlocking new characters and skills is an incentive to keep trying. It's not a home run, but those who buy into BPM: Bullet Per Minute's charm will certainly have a good time.

BPM: Bullets Per Minute is an old-school shooter with a twist, adding in roguelike mechanics as well as rhythm-based gameplay. Jump, dash, shoot and reload to the beat to advance through a host of monster-filled levels, collecting keys, coins, equipment, and stats to try and get through the seven stages that constitute each playthrough. The gameplay is fun, fast, and frantic, it looks good and sounds great, with a perfect heavy-metal soundtrack, though there are a few flaws. A lack of enemy variety, particularly bosses, as well as level variety starts to show quickly.

That satisfying flow and well-tuned gameplay make the lack of big-budget polish a negligible issue. The game is also only $20, making it well worth every cent, and further excusing some of the repetition and lack of polish. The biggest complaints with the game are not that the concept and execution aren't good enough, the issue is that the game deserves more content, more attention, and more development of its great ideas.

On one hand, BPM: Bullets Per Minute is a neat mix of FPS and rhythm gameplay. On the other one, it's a terribly unbalanced roguelike that is also in dire need of variety. Throw all these in a bowl, and the end result is a soup with a couple of ingredients that shouldn't be here… but, somehow the taste remains pretty darn good. After all, how can you go wrong with a game where you are in control of a Valkyrie that blasts monsters in Asgard with her shotgun, in sync with some fine heavy metal.

It’s seriously not as if BPM is a bad game. Since its release, so many other games have come out doing roughly the same thing, but building upon it. It runs well on Switch, but definitely is hindered by the limitations of the system, especially in handheld mode. That definitely doesn’t mean don’t play it, because it is easy to pick up and play for one or two runs, and pick up to play on a daily basis. It’s the perfect style game for the Switch, it just needs a little bit of tweaking in order to be fully enjoyed.

A good idea sadly not executed in the best way.

A cool idea gets bogged down by a lack of visual clarity, an unfortunately casualty specific to the Switch