Sonar Beat is a clever rhythm game with a pleasant soundtrack and a good visual style.  It also gets very hard very fast, with the early songs showing accessible note tracks before things get out of hand around level six.  As the sonar arm speeds up on the more difficult songs it makes for less and less time to read the notes before it’s time to tap them away, so even if you’ve got a good head for the rhythm it’s hard to know what the song is going to ask of you.  When the later songs got too brutal, though, I’d go back and play one of the earlier ones to get a sense of what Sonar Beat could be.  There’s a good design in here but to make it work the note tracks needed to work with sonar’s layout and be a little more in tune with human-standard reactions.  The first several songs are good fun to play but then the difficulty wall chunks itself into place and instead of playing the music you end up flailing away, hoping to clear away as many outer notes as possible while guarding the center ring against the advancing missed ones.  You can survive that way, but it’s not particularly musical, and that’s a problem for a music-rhythm game.

Sonar Beat tries something new with the rhythm game genre, but the small tracklist and spartan stylings do not leave a lasting impression. When paired with its somewhat buggy nature, you have yourself a project that could have used more time in development.

Sonar Beat feels like a throwaway mobile game (which I guess you can say it is, since it’s on iOS and Android as well) that was ported half-heartedly to PC for some inexplicable reason. The game is running only $2.49 at the time of writing, but if you have to subject yourself to this game’s music, use that money on the mobile versions. Avoid the Steam release at all costs.