Avicii Invector Review – Veni Vidi Avicii

It doesn’t matter how old you are, where your tastes might lie or the era you come from, because music has the power to be a transformative aspect in your life. It can be the tune that pushes you to go the distance on a morning run, it can perfectly frame an intimate night on the town or it can set your mind at ease in a world that is always walking on the razor’s edge.

At its very core, music also makes for a great game. You take the rhythm and cadence of a good track, the beat of a single tune and you distill the essence of it into a game that tasks your fingers with matching up what your ears perceive, and the result is usually…harmonious. It eventually ends up creating an experience that is deeply personal, but with Avicii Invector? That journey through an electronic dreamscape of audio bliss feels like a love letter to a turntable genius.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tim Berling AKA Avicii, then you’ve missed out on some of the EDM tracks of the decade, with the DJ sadly passsing back in 2018 when he was at the prime point of his career. It was a shock to the system back then, that the man behind some of the most technically superb dancefloor tracks had left this realm in such a shocking fashion.

Avicii Invector then, is a tribute to his magic.

On the surface, the game doesn’t do anything to shake up the genre. It’s you, quick thumbs and a spaceship that trips the light fantastic while Avicii’s greatest contributions to music plays around you, framing your journey through a cosmos that feels as if it was plucked directly from the golden age of Harmonix’s best rhythm games.

There’s a beat to the trek across the stars, that generally require you to match the flow of the music with a series of button presses that range from gentle cruising to frantic button mashing when the action heats up, strumming your way with a series of consistent taps of the buttons depending on the difficulty level chosen as you climb through the leaderboards.

Where Avicii Invector throws a curveball your way, is through its central track. While you’re always on a rail, rotating through the triangle of your path is the key to a high score as you continually change your position on the plane. You’re always shifting through them, building up your score multiplier and eventually breathing a sigh of relief.

It’s good stuff! Avicii Invector perfects an age-old formula of speed and precision, its various difficulty levels ramping up the challenge in a way that feels organic and breathtaking when you nail a note and speed through a kaleidoscopic universe of possibility that is gorgeous to look at. More than that though, the game feels like an absolutely touching tribute to the man who inspired it.

With 25 of Avicii’s tracks on offer, forged on an anvil of foot-tapping beats in collaboration with many of the finest voices in music today, Avicii Invector feels tender…and inspirational. The shift between EDM and the plucky pulls of a country guitar in his underrated folk tracks all gel together to create a game that celebrates a man whose contributions towards society were audio euphoria. Some of those tracks hit home especially hard in the wake of his passing, but combined with the core gameplay loop they serve not just as a reminder of his mark on the industry.

They’re an interstellar legacy that’s just waiting to be explored.

Last Updated: December 18, 2019