Published: 31 Aug 2024
Last updated: 1 Sep 2024
- Developed and Published by: Dean Herbert
- Released on: 2007
- Genres: Rhythm, User Generated Content
- Rating: 3/5
- Originally written: ~30th December 2023
Certainly one of the rhythm games of all time! In the abstract, I would say its a perfectly good free rhythm game, with multiple game modes (with osu!standard being the… standard one taken from Elite Beat Agents, and the one I’ll implicitly reference in criticism) and an absolute crap-load of user-generated content since its release. I spent quite a few years with it and definitely had some good fun playing and sinking several hundred hours into it, but there are some weaknesses.
A lot of them unfortunately derive from the initial concept of just cloning/‘’emulating" Elite Beat Agents, with some wonky concepts such as:
- Using combo scoring as the primary way to rank scores on the leaderboards (as opposed to ranking them by no. of misses or pure accuracy)
- Notelock, which prevents the ability to hit notes ‘out of order’ when another note is still active (sensible enough on paper, but over-punishes when you miss one note in a big burst)
- Passive health drain
There are also others which stem from the unenviable task of trying to algorithmically determine the difficulty of each beatmap, and the reward of performance points (the main metric of ranking players) each play should be associated with. It will never be perfect, but it does highlight one of the positives of having a rhythm game be more tailored in what it offers.
Despite that though, if you enjoy the fusion of aim and rhythm that osu!standard demands from you, then there’s a veritable limitless well of content to pull from, and a limitless skill ceiling to try and climb towards, all rather easily downloadable and all free - and not many rhythm games can compete with that value proposition up-front, especially as a broke teenager wanting something fun to kill time with.
