Reprise – Student Project Game

Reprise is an audio-reactive roguelike FPS that sees you blasting enemies with riffs and beats in a futuristic society that’s outlawed music.

In Reprise your aim is to make it through a procedurally generated facility that’s filled with enemies which you kill with your Orchestrator – a futuristic weapon that fires guitar riffs, bass notes, drum hits and Tom beats. Your weapon isn’t rhythm-action based though, it’s audio-reactive – meaning you don’t react to the music, the music reacts to you. To fire your gun you simply select which instrument you’d like to use and then hold down the fire button. The pulses of your gun will then fire along to the music.

As you make your way through the facility you’ll collect random upgrades such as speed increases and increases max health, but you’ll also unlock new instruments and ‘phrases’. You need to switch between instruments to destroy differently colored force fields. You use the phrases to upgrade and customize the tune your gun fires out, making it more powerful and sounding better as a result. You’ll really need those upgrades too – the later stages of the game can get pretty intense as they fill with a variety of enemies which require different tactics to defeat.

Reprise’s novel fusion of music, roguelike elements and run n’ gun first person arena combat works surprisingly well and it’s great fun blasting enemies with your Orchestrator. Your gun puts on one hell of a lightshow and hurls out some rocking tunes after you’ve upgraded it a bit. A music based run n’ gun FPS that you don’t play along to the soundtrack, you are the soundtrack.

Note: During play we encountered a bug which would trap you in the room you die in when you enter it again after respawning. It may not happen every time, but just think of it as a permadeath roguelike and try not to die!

Check Out a Gameplay Video Here

Download Reprise Here (Windows)