A unique game that music and rhythm game enthusiasts should not miss!
For people who are unfamiliar with Elite Beat Agents, the game can be described as a music rhythm game like Dance Dance Revolution, but played with a stylus instead with your feet. Still, even this description does not do Elite Beat Agents’ unique and highly addictive gameplay justice.
Unlike other music rhythm games where you are limited to hitting controller or floor pad buttons, Elite Beat Agents requires you to use your stylus to touch markers, move across sliders and spin wheels on the touch screen. This interface provides a sense of openness in rhythm gameplay that other titles lack. As you progress through the difficulty levels, your tapping, sliding and spinning need to be more precise and be faster. However, the level-to-level difficulty scales nicely and you would usually find yourself well trained to take on higher difficulty levels.
In the game, you play a trio of agents assigned to boost other people’s spirits through song and dance. The game presents itself as a series of individual missions with silly yet fun storylines, presented in the exaggerated visual styles of anime. But the real appeal of the game is the way the gameplay is tightly meshed with each piece of music. The music selection in Elite Beat Agents consists of cover versions of pop and rock tunes from the 70s to the contemporary. The eclectic selection includes David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, Village People’s YMCA, Stereogram’s Walkie Talkie Man, Stray Cat’s Rock This Town, Jamiroquai’s Canned Heat and Sum 41’s Makes No Difference. The cover artists who performed these songs did a more-than-competent job. In fact for some songs, I like the cover version more than the original.
Elite Beat Agents’ multiplayer gaming modes are extremely fun to play and add to the game’s already high replay value. You can play against your friend or play cooperatively against the computer. You can also save your performance from single-player missions and challenge yourself in the multiplayer mode. The multiplayer modes have their own unique storylines, but they are just limited to a few compared to the larger variety offered in the single-player mode. Still, the multiplayer aspect of the game is solid.
Any music enthusiast would enjoy Elite Beat Agents. You will enjoy it even more if you are goal-driven gamer who enjoys unlocking every single secret, bonus missions and characters because there are plenty of those in the game. There are 3 bonus missions in single-player mode as well as new characters to unlock for both single and multiplayer modes as you move up the ranks. If you good and ambitious enough, you may be able to open up a new difficulty level, too. Trying to unlock all of them and trying to best your previous high scores will certainly keep you glued to the game.
I would love to see a sequel to Elite Beat Agents that features a wider genre of music. It would be pretty wild to play the game to classical music, reggae, rap and hip-hop. (Imagine “dancing” to old school hits by MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice and to recognizable ballets like Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. Wouldn’t that be something?) But until that happens, you can count on me revisiting Elite Beat Agents whenever I need a break from play New Super Mario Bros.