Audica Critic Reviews

Audica morphs elements from several music genre bests, but putting a Harmonix spin on it. With a smooth pickup and play difficulty curve paired with a solid and ever-expanding soundtrack, Audica is another fantastic beat buster from Harmonix!

Harmonix delivers a stylish combination of rhythm game and shooter.

Audica is a fantastic rhythm-shooter but it does come with a small disclaimer. Playing it at its best took a certain amount of tweaking, adjusting various options until the game felt right. Thankfully those options are all waiting in the Settings screen and difficulty selection, but playing it vanilla/Standard felt kind of bland. Once corrected, though, Audica transformed into an incredibly fun and nicely challenging musical target range, where each new stretch of song brought a note pattern that lit up the sky with the pyrotechnics of its destruction. It’s an arcade light show set to an energetic soundtrack with note patterns that stream in from all around, keeping you constantly on your toes as the music comes to life through firepower.

If you love rhythm-action videogames and are looking for a proper challenge then you can’t go too far wrong with Audica. It lacks the flair and charisma of rivals which draw far more attention but Harmonix’s latest is not to be overlooked. The music selection and challenging gameplay are the big plus points here, working well with the wireless freedom Oculus Quest offers.

Audica is certainly unique, and provides a good change of pace alongside a more robust title like Beat Saber, but it isn't yet the industry innovator that it could be. It has a high skill floor and an even higher skill ceiling, but maintains the universal reward when you put the time in and improve.

Audica delivers on a super satisfying shooter/music game combo that is unique even among the throngs of VR rhythm games. I definitely recommend it, provided you skip the campaign and go in knowing it's a bit feature incomplete.

Although a wider mix of genres would be welcome, Audica’s primary disappointment is that the musical tracks and laser pistol shooting seem more like parallel elements instead of perfectly integrated and complementary aspects of the game. There’s plenty of content and challenge in Audica, just not the same joyous highs and sensation of being inside the music that a few other VR music games provide.

As it stands Audica is definitely something different, for better and for worse. The gameplay mechanics are enough to make it stand out, especially if you dedicate the time to really dig into it, but in a crowded VR rhythm game market the circumstances surrounding how and why it’s different aren’t always in its favor. If you’re a big fan of VR rhythm games, make no doubt: there is plenty to sink your teeth into and you’re gonna have fun, but if you’re picky about finding your flow in a game or already enamored with Beat Saber, there may not be enough to pull you in.