Bass roppin’ Shootn’
By Julie Morley
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To be frank, Dubstep was not a genre I particularly favor. In the recent years, it has risen to popularity quite strongly and it seems just about everyone I know is knowledgeable of Dubstep. But there is something about it that I just had a difficult time attaching to. Maybe I wasn’t emotionally prepared to accept it or maybe it was a matter of situation and setting. Sit me down, play a song from that genre, I would scowl at you until stops. Please, for the love of god, why are there Wubs in a Coldplay song? Why does this sound like I’m in an awful Transformers movie?
I just did not like it in the slightest. But then something opened my mind a little and changed my opinion.
Why did DUBWARS catch my attention? Well, I had never considered Dubstep in a game and how effective it may be. Plenty of games utilize music from the Electronica genre and along with its sub-genres, so why would Dubstep be any different? Surely there is a way to utilize each element that identifies Dubstep and apply it to gameplay to enhance it.
The MURA Interactive LLC team decided to take Dubstep and make it an interactive experience. This is where the glorious idea of Dubwars was created. They’ve designed a top-down shooter where you are a ship fending off various intruders coming at you. Rather than being able to control when the shooting occurs, you can merely rely on your movement across the space available to you. The shooting is all about the Dubstep.
Your weaponry will shoot in accordance to whatever is happening in the song. Bass drops, massive red laser of doom appears. Wubs, you have a multitude of multicolored lasers shooting in all directions. Different waves of sound will have a particles moving in a snake-like pattern towards whatever direction you will your mouse. It’s a marvelous sight.
But you’re not able to shoot frequently. There will be lull times nothing happening. The player must flee from the invaders coming. Suddenly, the wubs are the savior and you start to like them.
It is all about attentiveness to the music, syncing up with it, and gauging when you think it will change on you. This keeps the player on their toes and creates an interactive experience.
It’s as if Galaga mated with the entire genre of Dubstep and that is all sorts of freaking awesome.
Back in July, Dubwars was funded on Kickstarter for $34, 509 and the community for it grows bigger and bigger. Since then, MURA Interactive LLC has released their demo for Dubwars which includes five different songs/levels to play on, each with four difficulty levels. Since then, Dubwars has gained quite a following and was recently Greenlit on Steam.
There is much anticipation for the release, which has not been stated yet. Dubwars is not only engaging but gives people the opportunity to experience Dubstep in a whole new way, just like I did.
[divider]While you download the Dubwars demo be sure to read our interview with Joe Albrethsen, the man behind Dubwars.
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[author image=”http://cliqist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/julie.jpg” ]Julie Morley is a freelance writer and comic artist from Spring, Texas. She attended the Academy of Art University for two years, studying Animation and Illustration. Whilst here, she learned about writing comic scripts, storyboards, and general storytelling. Since leaving college, she has been working on personal comic projects, stories, and illustrations. She aspires to release a self published comic within two years. For the majority of her life, she has been playing console games, typically being third-person shooters and sandboxes. Her favorite game of existence is Dark Cloud II (Dark Chronicle) and her favorite Indie game is Gone Home.[/author]
