Circuits Review

​The Melody Machine
​By Taylor Wolfe
Reviewed on Xbox One
​Released on December 14th, 2017 for Xbox One (Also Available on PC)
​Developer: Digital Tentacle
​Publisher: Digital Tentacle

Come one, come all to the mystical Circus of Circuits. The only music-based theme park in the world. It's fun for the family, it's fun for the kids, everyone rocks at this place. Bring the kids down this weekend and test out our new attraction, The Melody Machine. An immersive experience where you compete to guess those wacky sounds. Remember, everyone has fun at Circuits. Circuits is a music-themed puzzler published and developed by Digital Tentacles. It was released for Xbox on December 14th, 2017 and costs $4.99.

In Circuits, your main objective is to recreate a song that has parts missing. You start the level by listening to the song in a preview mode then replicating it with your own sound bites. It starts off rather easy, only having one or two different nodes to select, but quickly gets more and more difficult. You see, it is not as easy as it sounds because they start adding a new element known as layers. The additional layers provide more of a challenge as each section of the layers can overlap and you can’t easily identify which sounds are playing. The sounds usually seem similar to each other but are often just up or down an octave or are in a slightly different order. The game does make it easier by introducing the option to select a specific layer in all but the last two levels. When changing the layers, you only hear the specific layer of the song, making it a lot easier to differentiate between the different sounds. However, those last two levels provide a very different and difficult task. You must listen to the whole song as one layer which makes it very had to identify where to place the different sound notes. Level 24 was the hardest for me because it has a section where you have to place twelve notes in a row with the notes all sounding very similar. The notes don’t play very long and there are also other parts of the song playing on top of the section. This stage took me forever to get and I ended up having to guess where to place each note and even then, I had to use a myriad of hints to see if I was right.
 
While this proposed quite a challenge, most of the earlier levels were pretty easy while you are able to switch layers. There are also a few other mechanics that are introduced earlier in the game like looping a note, branching note paths, and looping sections of notes. Telling how many time to loop a single note can be rather tricky at times, but most of them were fairly easy. The branching note paths can be annoying because most of the time two or three notes sound so similar. However, the looping sections of notes were rather easy in comparison.

Overall, Circuits is a fun and pretty unique puzzle game. I really like the concept of a puzzle game based around the idea of recreating a song with small pieces of notes. I only had one big problem with the game where the sound in the first few levels was really staticky; however, after I restarted the game, my issue went away entirely. The only other gripe I had was the overall length of the game. There are only twenty-five levels and I get that the game is only five dollars, but I wish there had been at least a few more levels. I was able to beat the game in around two to three hours, which wasn't bad but added to my urge to want more. I had a lot of fun playing through the first twenty-three levels, but I really struggled with the last two. I had a lot of fun with Circuits and I thought the actual songs were pretty great too. I would recommend playing it if you are looking for an interesting and cheap puzzle game.
 
*Note: A copy of the game was provided for the purpose of the review

Final Score: 8/10

+Unique Puzzles
 
+Good Songs

-Short Length