With how loose and hectic first-person shooters can get, it can be hard to imagine the genre mixing well with that of rhythm games, where most of the gameplay tends to be structured more linearly to make it easier for players to know when to time their actions. But developer Dan Da Rocha has an idea for how to put the two together, and the result so far is surprisingly impressive.
Da Rocha, the developer behind indie hits like Hue and the Q.U.B.E. series, shared a quick video showing off a rhythm-driven FPS that his studio has been “messing around” with. It shows a fairly typical fast-paced shootout against placeholder models in a temple-like room, but with the intriguing twist that the player’s gun only fires when notes crawling up from the bottom of the screen reach the reticle.
The result is action that’s elegantly synced to the Doom-esque heavy metal music while still affording the freedom of movement a good FPS demands. Da Rocha’s tweet has since been met with plenty of praise, including from Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski, who called it “the most innovative FPS idea” since the time-bending indie shooter Superhot.
This isn’t the first time someone has tried to create a rhythm game/FPS hybrid. There was also Harmonix’s cancelled project Chroma, which was once planned to offer arena-style gameplay where the effectiveness of players’ actions, like moving and shooting, would depend on how well they could stick to the beat.