We posted about Riddim Ribbon back in January and were thoroughly impressed by the teaser trailer. However the one question we asked ourselves was: is this Audio Surf for the iPhone? Now after playing the game constantly for the last week we can finally answer it... No, it’s not quite Audio Surf for the iPhone, but it’s the closest you’re going to get.

Riddim Ribbon ventures into new territory as a music game, you control a spinning ball down a neon road which twists and turns to the song. Keeping your ball on the thin ribbon is the aim and if you veer off to the sides the song becomes distorted and you’ll lose potential points. To make things trickier throughout each song there are several checkpoints, and in order to pass through them you need to fill up the meter on the left. Collecting “pebbles”, jumping through hoops, racing up ramps and taking the alternate high roads all contribute to this. If you don’t manage to gain enough points before the checkpoint you’ll fall off the track and fail the song.

What makes Riddim Ribbon more than just a music game is the DJ-like control you have over the music. Each track contains two or three remixes you can trigger by taking different forks in the track. These come up many times in each song, allowing you to create different remixes each time. Following the ramp and taking the higher platform also warps the song and often remixes the remix itself. All of these clips manage to fit together perfectly and we found the music to be mostly enjoyable (bar the occasional distortion when we veered from the ribbon).

One thing we always hope for in a game are smooth controls, but unfortunately they aren’t to be found in Riddim Ribbon. In our first few runs through the game the controls seriously irritated us, and while we could pass the levels on the easy difficult, we found them much tougher on medium. Luckily practice pays off as we were soon completing the songs on hard, despite turning seeming a little forced. Nevertheless you have to be patient with the controls in Riddim Ribbon because they are no way near perfect and take some time to get used to. We really hope Tapulous will revise the controls in a future update to something as smooth as IMP: Surf the Music’s, because the rest of the game is extremely promising.

One thing that’s bound to bug many people is the fact that the game only includes three default songs and they’re all by the Black Eyed Peas. You get Meet Me Halfway, I Gotta Feeling and Boom Boom Pow for your $2.99 and while that sounds like a small amount, they will last you a long time, and the unique remixes you can create definitely help to justify their price. If you’re after more tracks you can purchase Escape Me and Louder Than Boom by Tiësto or Satisfaction by Ben Benassi for the expected 99¢ per track. This gives you some choice but it’s only a sliver, and the fact that they’re all the same genre doesn’t live up to the variety of the Tap Tap Revenge series.

If you’re looking for an Audio Surf clone you won’t find it here, but Tapulous have managed to create a fantastic music game that’s unlike any other on the App Store. With stylish psychedelic graphics, unique remixing abilities and some decent tracks, Riddim Ribbon is worth the money, just be aware of the imperfect controls.

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