Parents' Guide to Beat Arena

While this rhythmic combat game is entertaining, it could rock more. In Beat Arena, you have to protect the residents of a formerly peaceful valley from angry animals, weird monsters, and big jerks. To do this, you have to tap the screen at just the right musical moments to both attack your enemies and to block their attacks on you. As with other fantasy adventure games, you constantly earn new weapons and armor (or can buy them with money you earn by playing), while facing off against increasingly tougher opponents...or, rather, increasingly more complicated patterns to follow.

All of which makes this rhythmic combat game rather fun. Especially since the patterns you have to follow can get rather complicated. That said, there are spots that could be improved. The ads pushing you to buy packs of in-game currency come up way too often between matches. The music also needs more variety; it all sounds like generic electronic music, like someone wrote an homage to Tangerine Dream and left it at that. Getting to fight the wild boar while Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" rages, for instance, would've added a lot. But these are minor quibbles -- the ads, for instance, are easily dismissed with the tap of a finger -- leaving Beat Arena as a fun if simple bit of funky fantasy fighting.