Music is usually a background element in most games. If done well, it's a composition that cleverly creates atmosphere, sets pace and draws out key moments in the title. Games like Radio Flare have the music in the foreground - where your onscreen actions directly correlate to what's being fed through the speaker. It's not a new concept, but when it works, it works well. The synergy between the music and the game will determine how much pleasure you can grab from the title.

So in this game, you'll be desynchronising space debris and enemies from the screen. Doing this triggers a hi-hat hit to play, and releases a small red dot called a 'radio flare' onto the field. When collected, this dot triggers another synth sound and increases your level progress meter (the white bar at the top). When the bar is filled, the music will intensify, adding new elements into the soundscape, and the bar will lengthen. More obstacles will then appear, and once you've collected enough flares the stage will be completed. The game feeds you as many enemies as it takes to collect the required dots.

Collecting the dots is a matter of guiding your ship there with your left thumb. They don't stay there for very long, so it can be frustrating when there are many creeps on screen at once. This also highlights a problem with the game's controls - as your ship is directly underneath your thumb, it can be all too easy to obscure the left hand portion of the screen. You don't really get this with the right thumb (used for targeting) as it's usually a quick swipe across the screen, but it is often possible to hear the 'ship destroyed' clip even when you didn't know what hit you. As you can only desynchronise a maximum of four enemies at once, the field can be littered with debris that's hard to navigate through. It doesn't make the game too difficult, but we always felt that we were fighting the controls, rather than the creeps.

As you only trigger a couple of tracks (the aforementioned pair), the music can get repetitive. Intensifying the music is a nice touch, but it usually boils down to adding a non-requisite element, or reintroducing the bass drum to the tune. We would have liked to see a more complex track with a few more different dynamic elements, possibly even one that's running faster than the slow minimal techno we get here. Another gripe is that in arcade mode, you have to start over from the beginning again if you want to progress through the game - you can't start from the last level you failed on. This can make the game a bore, especially if you get to one of the later stages and lose all your lives.

Graphics aren't bad, but we feel that a little more 'wow factor' would go a long way with this game. The backgrounds are mostly sterile, but the creeps and debris look good, and we like the white targeting mechanism that Radio Flare uses. But the draw here is the music, and so the presentation feels more like a means to an end. Achievements are present in the game, as is save state.- so no complaints there. We wouldn't expect a music based game to let us play our own iPod tracks anyway.

The bottom line: We're happy with our purchase of Radio Flare, but think it has too many outstanding issues. Your own thumbs get in the way of the game, and perhaps that's due to the somewhat forced flare collection mechanic. Dropping this and letting the player concentrate on dodging bullets and maneuvering through tricky passages would be more welcome. The music, while good in short bursts, can start to get tiresome, as you aren't as involved with it as you think you might be. And the presentation could be better. We'd hesitate to recommend it, but it just may be worth a look if you're searching for something new.

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