Melobot : A Last Song – PS5 Review

Melobot – A Last Song is, as the name might suggest, something of a musical odyssey across multiple planets and biomes. You play as the titular Melobot departing from a rocket that acts as your headquarters that you head out from, a little like the Trailblazer in one of our recent reviews, Star Wars Outlaws.

Though unlike Ubisoft’s unexpectedly proficient gem, Melobot – A Last Song doesn’t quite manage to stick the landing. The introductory stage where you’re introduced to the game mechanics is frustratingly vague in terms of how it introduces the way you play your instruments. It’s a little like venerable old electronic bleepy game Simon where you have to match the tones.

Only dissimilar to the the game of our distant childhood, there’s no obvious thing like flashing lights to tell you what to do, not to mention that you had to use the d-pad as well as the face buttons. At no point in the introduction is this communicated. We felt genuinely baffled and almost abandoned our playthrough at this point.

But then we managed to work it out and somehow progressed. More through luck than judgement then. Hardly the most auspicious start then. It was at this point that the game introduces the grading for healing a Meloplant with a melody. If you manage to roughly match a tune, you get credited with a one-star Musician grading, if you’re a little better with timing pretty much nailed, you’ll garner a two-star Expert grading. But if you happen to nail a track perfectly, at least according to the way Melobot – A Last Song scores, you’ll get a three-star Virtuoso mark.

On multiple occasions we thought we’d fudged a musical sequence, only to garner a Virtuoso rating. To our ears it sounded discordant, but we managed it anyway.

Upon finishing the tutorial stage, you’re given the option to play by ear alone or go with tooltips telling you what buttons you need to tap. We chose the latter option to aid expediency and to see as much of Melobot – A Last Song had to offer before penning this review. However, this has made our playthrough somewhat shorter than it might have been had we gone for the playing by ear option.

The story, such as it is, is that an ecological disaster of sorts has befallen the multiple planets that you traverse. The big bad is dark matter, it might as well be toxic waste or lack of water. Your job is to clear out the respective biomes of the contagion, only by doing so you invoke the ire of so-called guardians. We think the story might hint at an alternative angle, but we hit one of those tropes that we hate in games.

Yes, the delightful point of no return. We don’t know if we have to finish everything up otherwise before doing so. It’d not be a problem had we got all the stars on all the planets. We got them on all but the penultimate planet you see. We don’t fancy replaying through again if we don’t have to.

The problem is that the penultimate planet, Mixolydia, is harder to nail than the final one is, mainly due to it introducing another bête noir of ours, a tone button mapping to R3! It really breaks the rhythm of tapping out a rhythm that would otherwise be fairly pleasurable. For example, one sequence is something like L, , , R, L, D, R3, then . It’s horrible and is just as bad even if you use the tooltips showing the sequence you need to tap out. R3 is fair enough when it’s a map or something, but less so, if you break your otherwise fair control scheme with it, it’s bad. A line has been crossed.

If you could map an alternative button to use instead, that’d be fine. But there’s no option to since the controls are pretty much set in stone and the shoulder buttons that would be an OK option instead are mapped already.  is an action button rather than the usual or , is the help page and is your jetpack/sprint. is unused but there’s no option to remap it. A request to the devs, please assign the annoying use of R3 to instead to make it less jolting. Ta.

While we’re griping, we’ve a few annoyances that crop up. When you beat the guardian in an effectively unskippable confrontation, you’re bumped back to your ship for some plot exposition. Or if you succumb to your wounds. You’re bumped back to your ship. Which would be fine if the objectives were all fairly close by. Except in many cases, they’re bloody miles away and you have to head all the way back. It’s not quite so cursed a death retread as any number of roguelikes we’ve played, but it is almost as tedious.

Also, it’s only really a concern on Mixolydia, but there’s no tracking to show that you’ve not got the maximum score on a Meloplant. Yes, the plantopedia or Melodex as it’s called shows it, but not the location. The minimap shows where a plant is and changes colour from white to yellow if you’ve completed it, even with one star. It makes revisiting to get a better rating far more of a ballache than it really ought to be.

Sometimes we play review games on a less than optimal display, a non-smart Toshiba HD set in fact. So we’re grateful when UI scaling is a possibility. It’s not the case here, making seeing text as challenging as it was playing Dead Rising on a CRT back when. Not to mention when the typeface colour is hard to make out due to poor background colour choices. It’s like the absolute worst articles in Edge magazine which committed similar choices in the print edition with typesetting that would be just fine if you read the iPad edition.

Getting back to the guardian aka boss, the level of threat escalates up each time you encounter it, along with your sense of unease as to your role in the whole sorry affair. Again, just as with the horrible R3 inclusion on Mixolydia, the boss levels are exacerbated by absurd modifiers like the orbital laser cannon that doesn’t show up subsequently, making latter guardian encounters easier than earlier ones.

For the most part, Melobot – A Last Song is fun enough, but a few daft design choices like R3 being used for tunes and the being bumped back to your ship after a successful guardian encounter is annoying. The fact that the respective one, two or three star ratings aren’t shown on the minimap is an unnecessary annoyance. Why not colour code the ratings? It’s almost as if there’s a need for a three colour system. It’s a shame nothing of that sort exists in the real world. RGB? Or Red Amber Green like a traffic light. Nope, just a binary pass/fail. Not much help.

Post-publication addendum: it turns out that the star is only shown on the minimap once you’ve completed a plant at Virtuoso level, those you’ve visited are marked with a diamond, but it still highlights how much UI scaling would be a help as we simply didn’t see it on our screen.

In conclusion, Melobot – A Last Song is a nice enough rhythm action puzzler with an ecological bent but it commits some baffling design faux pas and the tutorial level isn’t really a great deal of use. There is no incentive to go with the non-tooltip prompts, so many will choose the easy option instead. It’d be nice if you could practice with the prompts in a note-bashing fashion to learn the ropes, then toggle the help off with a button push as opposed to having to switch it off via the menu. Even with the prompts, R3 has no place in any rational control scheme.