I got to play Dead as Disco early, and it's a vivid, unrestrained romp that lets you brawl through music videos like a kung-fu Baby Driver

Dead as Disco is already proving to be a delightful grab-bag—I had the pleasure of toying with the game's demo back in June of last year, but nothing could've prepared me for the musical smorgasbord that awaited me while playing this early access romp. This thing isn't just a very solid rhythm action game, it's a buffet. A feast, to borrow a term, for the senses.

But first, context! Dead as Disco is a Beat 'Em Up action-rhythm game in the style of Hi-Fi: Rush, in that you're tasked with mopping up waves of stylised goons (including mosh-pit looneys, laser-firing androids, and vicious bouncers) to the beat. Attack and parry on-rhythm, and you get a higher score.

Story-wise, you follow the violent misadventures of Charlie Disco, who has woken up 10 years on from a mysterious accident that saw his surprisingly genre-diverse band fractured at the seams. Get it? Disco is dead. The man's name is Charlie Disco. He was dead—ah, you get it.

This is mostly an excuse to have him facing off against unique boss-rush setpieces with original, personally-tuned tunes. The experience is a lot like fighting your way through a music video—occasionally ferrying you to the next locale before your current melee is even finished.

While there are still some clear work-in-progress animations and transitions to iron out, Dead as Disco clearly has some absurdly talented people working on it. It's a lively, vivid romp inspired by everything from comic books to Max Headroom—bleeding with colour and neon wonders.

"It's music, it's graphic design, it's a little bit comic bookie, it's action," Adam Gershowitz, CCO of BrainJar games tells me. "One of the visual benchmarks for us was Into the Spider-Verse … They did a lot with funky shapes, half tone, stippling, all that stuff."

When it works, it's downright delightful—and even when it doesn't, mostly due to Early Access wrinkles yet to be ironed out, it's still a decent hair above most indie titles. I especially like the 2D animated sequences that'll occasionally break up the action.

Dex-terity

One of the bosses I'm pleased to share with you is Dex: A troubled artist suffering from chronic pain whose body has been laced with cybernetic enhancements to keep him playing music.

His battle starts in the middle of a club, sure, but quickly transports you through a brutalist architecture hellscape dominated by jagged shapes and black industrial ooze, one that morphs its strange walls into a street alley that transforms into a block of prison cells, a barge sailing across the inky black, and at one point a giant ziggurat where floods of enemies charge you up its sides.

It's something peeled straight from a grungy death metal album cover, and that's kind of the point. All of Dead as Disco's boss fights are like this, borrowing from their genres to have you kicking ass in liminal spaces that flow pleasantly into one another—surrealist cosmic glitterpop nightmares, mosh pits, and the obligatory Oldboy hallway reference crammed into a subway car.

What helps Dead as Disco is the fact that it's also a blast to play, especially once you crib special powers from each of your former bandmates. Each of which is so satisfying, I actually didn't have much reason to use Charlie's default disco-sticks: Hitting a sick riff to stun crowds of mooks with chain lightning or an uber-parry that can bypass even unblockable attacks and counter with a fierce uppercut.

Like most games of its ilk, the magic is in lacing this all together to the beat—a satisfying dance that's only interrupted by Dead as Disco's occasional camera issues, though these are few and far between. The only other petty complaint I have is that off-screen dangers aren't quite telegraphed clearly enough when you're locked into the action happening in the middle of your monitor.

But when you reach that Arkham-style flowstate, where you're drifting between enemies on tempo? Dead as Disco makes you feel very, very cool. That, according to Gershowitz, is the precise point:

"Our CEO puts it [like this]: I want to fulfill that fantasy I had as a kid, right? Where you saw Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee on the screen, or any action hero for that matter, just kicking butt to an amazing soundtrack, and it was all choreographed beautifully, and everybody felt cool. And you're like, man, I just want to be that.

"At the core, that lizard brain response is what we were building into Dead as Disco … Bruce Lee brawling to the beat of TikTok."

If you've read my Crimson Desert preview, you might know that I'm a sucker for this kind of power fantasy—I like to consider myself a sophisticated gent, but I'm weak to the dopamine loop of combo-focused fighting games. And rhythm games are a natural marriage to that: Sekiro is one of my favourite soulslikes, and I'll swear up and down that it's secretly DDR in disguise.

Getting back in the groove

That's not to say Dead as Disco is absent an emotional core. There's already a pretty promising story about fame, here—and when you beat one of your former band mates, disconnecting them from the hive-mind of Harmony, they arrive in a neat hideout to pull on the yarn.

At the moment, it's mostly vibes-based, but there's enough intrigue to at least have me paying attention to more than just the very gorgeous artwork and banging soundtrack. On that note, it's mighty impressive the amount of original music that Dead as Disco has pulled together, obtained from musician friends of the studio—some of which are actual, touring professionals with real industry experience under their belts, lending the whole thing a sense of legitimacy.

As far as other mechanics go, there's a skill tree—at the moment, it's mostly a tutorial function that drip-feeds you mechanics so you're not overwhelmed all at once, though each of your bandmates' powers do have a line of upgrades that add extra perks to them. You can also spend your cash on visual upgrades to the hideout once you're done with all that.

The real meat on the bone here is the endless mode—filled with challenges you can spend a healthy handful of hours grinding out full stars on. You can also use music (that you legally own, ahem) to make your own personal beat-'em-ups, so long as you spend some time figuring out their BPM, which is still exactly as cool as it was during the demo last summer.

Dead as Disco's already looking really promising, and as Gershowitz tells me, there's a lot more exciting stuff to come—a multiplayer component, a "harmony tower" where you need to fight through levels of mix-and-match genre challenges, with fights getting harder the higher you climb, custom player challenges and level creation tools, the works.

Really, this game seems put together by some very passionate people—and the enthusiasms' infectious, not in just talking to the studio's CCO, but in the vibrant pedal to the metal chaos of the game itself. Dead as Disco launches into early access May 5.