Hooked on Soundmap
Hooked on Soundmap
[NOTE: This is not soundmap propaganda or anything, I just find the game very interesting and play it very often. Add me @sushitrash and see for yourself)
Remember Pokémon Go? The game you and your friends probably downloaded in 2016? Some of us grew up on Pokemon; Maybe you lost interest in games, shows, or it was too childish for you in the end. But that can't happen with music. You will always find someone you are interested in listening to as long as you live. Alvin and the Chipmunks sounded so good when you were 3, but now Future, SZA and Travis Scott sound good on TELEKINESIS. The thing is, you can't grow tired of Soundmap. Instead of collecting Pokemon, you collect music. All the artists, albums or songs you want are there. Since the death of Pokémon Go around 2017, the gaming community has been quite inactive, and even games like Clash of Clans have lost many active players due to hardly any new concepts coming out. Everything is garbage made for the bottom of the TikTok videos.
Soundmap is a very simple game: go outside, collect a song or two and collect coins. In addition to the rarity system, songs cannot be purchased directly from the game, and each song on the map is a random drop. The game offers profile customization, leagues and a trading system. Collecting outside, it's pretty hard to collect tracks without premium, but it increases your radius to collect tracks by 3x if you have premium, which can be bought for a price ($15? Haven't checked in a while) or you can get it by inviting 8 people for free and having them play, even if it's only for a short time. They will probably stay active too, speaking from personal experience. You use coins to trade with people and buy their songs. Some songs can cost 100 coins, but rarer ones can cost 500,000 or more. The reason it gets so expensive is because the songs have different rarities: commons, which are the cheapest and easiest to get, rares, which are still pretty cheap but harder to collect on the map, rares that literally glow on the map, because they're pretty hard to get and usually pretty expensive on the market, and shiny/epic, which are just shiny versions of whatever rarity (eg TELEKINESIS is a rare song, but shiny makes it a shiny rare), and epics, which are their own rarity, but numerically whoever collects it first (whoever gets the first TELEKINESIS Epic gets them Epic #1, the second person who gets the TELEKINESIS Epic gets them Epic #2, and so on).
If you dive deeper, they have a daily login bonus system that starts at 200 coins per day and increases by 20 coins per day (I currently have a 27 day streak so my reward is 720 coins today and 740 tomorrow), you get a free daily song, which is a random drop that doesn't change rarity just because of your login date sequence. You can open very expensive loot boxes, such as the "Best of the Best" loot box, which costs 2000 coins, but will most likely give you a random ass Russian song worth 10 coins in the trading system. They have a discord server so you can sell your super rare songs or just common songs if there is a demand or find cheaper sellers for the song you want, as there is very little interaction in the actual app, although you can add friends.
The profile system is also a really cool feature; you level up with an XP system that pays coins each level up. As you level up or collect more XP, you will rank higher on the global leaderboard and in your league. Your profile can have custom profile music (if you have the song in-game), you can set a custom background and profile picture (with gif support) and profile picture borders with their own shop that changes every 48 hours and range from 5,000 to 10,000 per border. You can make your own playlists with your owned songs and have 5 featured ones that show on your profile before you click the see more button. The game also has a really awesome community run gambling server (no links will be provided) with thousands of members and offers coin flips, rock paper scissors and dice rolls that you can wager against other players. The server recently let their mods mods do live table games. All in all, it's a good time and so much more fun if you dive deeper into the community. Please try it yourself, it's in the app store and recently came to the google play store (yuck, androids). I really think you'll like it.
In conclusion, recent games just don't hit for me and I'd prefer to watch YouTube after about 2019, when games changed and got really greedy and boring, but it's a nice combination of the things I love, a community, music, and it's just a fun game. The game gets regular bug fixes and they listen to the community about what to add or remove next. There's so much more you won't know unless you play it yourself. I'm hooked on soundmap.
[NOTE 2: I won't be making another one of these again; it does feel like an ad read but it's an exception just because I love the game so much and I really do think you will too.]
