The Backlog: Beatstar

I chose to play Beatstar for mobile devices in this edition of the backlog. Beatstar is a rhythm game for select popular songs. You try to get through the song without making any mistakes akin to Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Bust a Groove, or Dance Dance Revolution. The difference from those popular franchises is that in Beatstar, if you miss only one beat, which are represented by these gray tiles that slide towards the player, you will need to pay a certain number of gems to continue the song. Depending on how often you have messed up in each song, the gem amount for continuing will increase. You do get some free gems when you start playing the game, but some songs are difficult to play perfectly. 

If players manage to get perfect beats by pressing the tiles at the right time, their score will increase. The higher the score, the more coins you get, which can be turned into music genre cards. If you get a full deck, which could be, for example, four cards, ten cards, or more, you get the chance to unlock a song that you either have wish listed or that exists in a genre you like, chosen at random. Every action in this game unlocks or gives you something. You're really incentivized to keep playing to unlock that one more reward. I was only a few coins and cards away from getting a song pack at the end of my two-hour game session, so I stayed on a little longer to unlock it. There is another task that needs to be completed though before unlocking more, a playable mobile game ad. For example, you'll be playing a song, and finishing that song will get you some music genre cards. But before you get those cards, you'll need to go through a tiny gameplay demo ad, and it will ask you if you want to download it, sometimes two or three times on different screens.

I was close to engaging with the games gambling mechanics as there are different phases in each song and usually the final phase is much harder. There were many times I was so close to finishing a song, only to have missed one beat, making my desire to spend gems and finish it higher than normal. I could just replay the song and try to finish it, which I can totally do, but just being able to continue where I was, was tempting. It's kind of unfortunate, if for example, you get three-hundred beats right, but you miss one tile, you must either spend gems or start the song over again. Dance Dance Revolution this is not. The game also encourages you to pay for a premium version that gives you songs I believe everyday out of a curated list. Beatstar constantly puts things in front of the user’s face, saying pay for this, or download that, and it's on the cusp of being very obnoxious

if you do want to put money into the game either for those gems as mentioned before, or for more songs, you can. I'm also not sure if you could play any song for free forever as an early game pop-up appeared saying I had free play for up to three days because of their 3rd anniversary. So, I'm guessing after that timeframe I might even have to pay real money, gems or some other in-game currency to continue playing. But in the beginning, they try to lure you in by making things pretty free.

The game's gambling mechanics I feel are not gambling per se because there are no loot boxes, besides receiving songs in a random fashion, even when paying. The player, mostly, knows what they are going to get if they pay using real world money. It only feels like gambling when the game prevents you from continuing and a screen pops up saying pay $2 for a hundred gems if you want to continue this song. Knowing what players are going to get, for the most part, I think disqualifies this game from having real gambling mechanics, but the game is one step away from it, if let’s say they wanted to make gem loot boxes instead of buying a certain number of gems.