Radio Hammer Station
PS4, Switch, Vita
To be honest, we’d happily have paid £7 for the title screen. Radio Hammer Station’s main menu music is a solid-gold, diamond-encrusted banger, an immaculate slice of electro-disco-jazz that wouldn’t feel out of place at the start of a Persona game. It’s a fitting introduction for a game whose style and soundtrack are almost beyond reproach. If only the rest of the game could match it.
Mechanically, this is an astonishingly simple rhythm game. The note-chart targets are styled as enemies that must be whacked away with the protagonist’s weapon – a hammer, an umbrella, an electric guitar. Yet they only attack on one of two planes, high or low. A curveball never comes – finishing a story mission unlocks a variant called Another Mode, but this merely sees enemies sprinting towards you instead of sauntering.
The only spanner in the works comes from gifts, which have a percentage chance of appearing behind you at the end of every four-bar phrase. They’re designed to put you off, diverting your attention from the field of play, and they certainly do their job, like someone tapping you on the shoulder to ask if you want a cuppa during a Guitar Hero solo. For the most part, they can be safely ignored – indeed, it’s often smarter to do so. Gift-box bonuses are minor, topping up either a health bar that’s never really an issue because of the game’s simplicity, or a super meter that’s barely worthy of the name. Yes, the super’s combo protection and guaranteed perfect hits are useful in theory. But since you have no control over it – it triggers automatically as soon as the bar is filled – it has no strategic benefits.
As such you’ll likely only bother with gift boxes when the secondary objectives tell you to. If you want a three-star rating for a stage, you might need a certain number of perfect hits, or a clear with no misses; to pick up every gift box, or ignore all the traps. Whether you’ll bother is another matter: this is a generous enough game as it is, with almost 100 songs, and it’ll take a rare sort of obsessive to want to max everything out.
It’s a little too simplistic, and repetitive, to stick with for long, but in short bursts the style of the thing comes to the fore. The music, spanning jazz, disco, reggae, hip-hop, anime-battle heavy metal and just about anything you can name, is top drawer. The setting is modern-day Japan, and while a little off-putting in places – a young girl fending off a perverts’ convention in a theme park is a bit much, if we’re honest – it’s presented with such vim and colour that it’s hard to dislike too much. And when you do tire of it all, you can just drop back to the main menu, and leave it on loop for a while.