Your music library as a battlefield
Beat Hazard 3 is a twin stick shooter where each of your songs drives the action. The music sets the pace, the ebb and flow of a track shapes what happens on screen, and when the music power peaks your weapons flare. You blast through hordes of enemy fighters from a top-down 3D view, in a style that sits between shoot 'em up and bullet hell. The game maps your music collection onto a huge galaxy you can explore, with different phases to move through, including Lock & Load, Ancient Aliens, and galaxy gameplay. Ships are built by a 3D procedural generation system, so your craft comes out of that process rather than being picked from a fixed list.
Fighting with the beat
Combat leans on the rhythm of whatever you are listening to. Alongside the standard twin stick shooting, there is a 'fold' ability that lets you dodge enemy fire and at the same time pull your weapons into a tight beam, which is the tool for pushing through dense waves quickly. Because levels are generated from music, two songs will not play out the same way; the intensity, enemy pressure and general feel follow the track underneath it. That makes the shooting and the listening one experience rather than two separate things.
Playing together
Beat Hazard 3 lists Remote Play Together on Steam, so one person who owns the game can invite others along through that feature and the group plays on the same screen from wherever they are. Set it up before everyone joins so you spend the session shooting rather than sorting out the connection. Picking a shared playlist matters too, since the galaxy, ship behaviour and pacing all come from the music being played.
Before you start
The game works with your own music files and is also compatible with music streaming services through an improved 'Open Mic' system that listens in to any music source, so you are not limited to local files. Get that working first, since the whole game reacts to what it hears. Expect a colourful, hectic top-down shooter where difficulty and spectacle rise and fall with the track, and where choosing what to play next is part of choosing what to fight through.