Audiosurf is not only the most creative music game ever made, but also one of the best.
As you probably know if you are reading this review, AudioSurf is a game that allows you to import your favorite songs, and the game takes the songs various intensities and tempos and turns them into tunnels and elevations which drastically effect the speed of your vehicle. While on the way down, you must collect colored blocks in a way specific to the character that you have selected. It's a fairly simple concept, but it quickly grows on you, and becomes easily the most addictive rhythym game ever made.
The gameplay can be pretty straightforward, or pretty difficult, depending on which character you are. The basic game mechanic, however, is simple. You're trying to get at least four blocks of the same colour to line up, and once they line up, they dissappear, and give you points. You get more points for adding more blocks into the combos before they dissappear, and you get more points for warm coloured combos than cold coloured ones. Stacking too many blocks without producing combos causes that entire row to empty out, and causes a massive point loss. Some characters allow you to manipulate how you gather the blocks, and the mono character makes it so there are only two colours of blocks (Colour and grey, and you don't want to collect grey)
Overall, the basic mechanic of the game is pretty fun, but the things that make or break a rhythym game is how good the selection of songs is, and how interactive the game seems with the song. Song selection is not a problem with AudioSurf, because you'll always be playing one of your favorite songs. The game also comes with the soundtrack to The Orange Box, so it even gives you a few tunes to play around with.
Overall, it's surprising how well the gameplay matches up with your choice of song. Songs with more dynamic and changing tempos cause quite the challenges because the course becames faster and slower and different points, which can make it very hard to pay attention to what colours you're collecting. Songs with very intense moments produce tunnels, which can also distract you from your playing. This makes the difficulty feel very natural, because the difficulty is made by the song, not based on cheap note synthesizing or bad controls.
AudioSurf is not an incredibly complex game, but it is very fun and incredibly addicting. It can be a smooth, relaxing ride, or an incredibly difficult one depending on your choice of song, and that's a great thing to have in a rhythym game. It gives you absolute control over how you want to play the game. But no matter how you play, you're almost sure to have fun experiencing your favorite tunes in a way you've never played them before!