Beat Hazard

Beat Hazard is a shoot 'em up where the player controls a small spaceship that must fend off waves of hostile ships and asteroids that spawns around randomly. Destroying ships and asteroids will earn points and sometimes spawn power-ups that can be collected to increase the score multiplier and boost the FX and Sound of the music that is playing. During gameplay, larger enemies known as bosses will occasionally appear. Destroying bosses rewards more points and causes multiple power-ups to appear.

During each music sequence, the main goal is to earn as many points before the song that is playing in the background ends. When the song is finished, a screen then shows how many points was earned and is used as experience to move up ranks. When the player ranks up, a variety of gameplay options can be unlocked, including harder difficulty options and starting with a higher multiplier.

After being made redundant at his previous employer, director Steve Hunt chose to go indie instead of work for another company. He conceived Beat Hazard because of his interest in music visualizers, leading him to turn the idea into a video game. He was further influenced by the music video game Audiosurf.

A demo of the game was produced over the span of a few days.

The PC version of Beat Hazard has a rating of 70/100 on Metacritic based on 11 critic reviews. The PlayStation 3 version of Beat Hazard Ultra has a Metacritic rating of 63/100 based on 7 critic reviews, while the iOS version has a rating of 91/100 based on 6 critic reviews.