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iPod games are pretty few and far between, but if you’ve played one recently you’ll understand why. Harmonix recently sacked up and stepped up to the plate to release a brand new original game to the palm of your hand(s) in the form of Phase. To nobody’s surprise, the game is yet another music-based rhythm tapper. More in the vain of Amplitude/Frequency than its Guitar Hero cousin, Phase has you tapping three buttons: left, right and center all in time with notes that appear on screen which are synchronized with the music playing in the background. These notes scroll towards the bottom of your screen and tapping the correct buttons at the right time earns you points. When the blue “sweeps” come along, the iPod wheel acts as the musical equivalent to Pac-Man, gobbling up all the notes for bonus points. The screen above should give you a straightforward idea of how it goes.

The game comes with around 10 songs to play (one of which is Harmonix veterans, Freezepop) and all of them sync pretty well with the notes on screen, but the iPod’s troublesome button interface provide control issues that have lead me to failure on more than one occasion however. With a Quick-Spin (one song) or Marathon (5 songs) dilemma of gameplay you can play for anywhere from a couple minutes to over an hour at a time depending on your songs and how many Marathons you complete. Complete enough songs and you’ll unlock more difficulties past the “Easy, Medium and Hard”, thus making the notes on screen more representative of the music being played and turning your thumbs in to ground beef.

In the bottom left corner are your hearts, which equate to your lives. The bottom right corner houses your star-meter. Each checkpoint in a song, of which there are many depending on song length, demands a certain amount of stars be acquired. Stars are obtained by playing well, and playing excellent rewards you with more hearts, but if you play poorly and don’t make the star-demand by the checkpoint, you’ll lose a heart; lose all the hearts and it’s game over. To make things easier for you, you can rack up a 5x multiplier which will have you scoring more hearts than you can handle (up to a max of 4, really).

The interface and gameplay are what we’ve come to expect from these kinds of games lately, but what really sets Phase apart from other iPod games, hell, games in general, is its ability to sync your iPod music in to the game. I immediately loaded up the most face-melting solo I could find in my iTunes and failed on hard immediately. After a couple hours of playtime with both my own playlist and the one provided for me, I can safely say that the game is addictive and very well done. Your music doesn’t always sync perfectly but it’s a step in the most absolute right direction. There’s tons of fun to be had here and for 5 dollars you’ll get your moneys worth even if there’s some nagging issues with the iPod control interface. The colorful visuals and helpful tips will have you tapping along in solemn content to some classical… but more likely you’ll find the first Slayer song in your iTunes and go ballistic with hard mode.

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