Click the (3D) circles... to the beat!
You've always dreamed of being a star, and now you're finally here! The big city - It's the place to be!
—The description.
RoBeats is a Roblox 4-key rhythm game, like osu!mania and Friday Night Funkin', but in 3D. It was made by spotco, releasing it under the name RobeatsDev. It can be accessed at robeats.net
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There are two types of notes: regular and long notes (also called LNs or hold notes). When you play, starting on top, going clockwise, there are bars that keep track of mission progress, rank, combo, fever, and a leaderboard-style tracker that tells you what place you're in currently. The combo count increases every time you hit a note. If you miss, it gets cut in half. Tied to it is the combo multiplier, which maxes out when you reach 100 notes hit consecutively. The fever bar is a bar near the bottom of the screen that fills up every time you hit a note. When it's full, your score gets multiplied for the duration of the fever draining.
You get songs in this game by buying them with in-game currency (coins) at the song shop, which has a randomly-generated selection of songs every day. You earn coins by completing missions, spectating people, talking with user-generated NPCs, spending event points, or voting positively on the radio. The star is a premium currency which can be obtained by completing certain missions, spending event points or finding an NPC that gives you one. Places to spend stars include a machine which gives you a random song, creating an NPC, paying a fee to sell items in the marketplace, and creating a team. Gears are clothing you put on your character which increase stats, and can also be upgraded; after a certain amount of upgrades, the chance of a successful upgrade goes down and keeps going down until you reached the Cap. Stats that can be upgraded are the rate your fever gets filled, how long it lasts, fever multiplier, combo multiplier, the base amount of points per note, and timing windows.
This game was made in the Roblox era where copyrighted songs used to roam freely. In the middle of 2018, Roblox no longer allowed those songs to exist on the platform, threatening the existence of early RoBeats. In response, spotco changed all the songs they had into Cover Versions, in which the updated was dubbed "REMIXbeats."
Three years later, spotco started the Licensing Phase, replacing every song that wasn't licensed or otherwise not legally allowed to use in a for-profit game with songs from artists he licensed.
This game contains examples of:
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: What the mashups boil down to. They are various songs combined into one giant mashup that's several minutes long.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Even if an upgrade fails it will still count for the upgrading gear mission.
- If you use upgrade boosts and fail an upgrade, the chance will increase based on how many boosts you used.
- Before it got changed, if a player left during a match it reduced the amount of players, reducing rewards and invalidating 4-player missions.
- You can hold regular notes as though they were long notes. This is useful in patterns where it is convenient to hold both types of notes at the same time.
- Bilingual Bonus: The hard version of Maboroshi references the Japanese numbers being said before the drop with long notes.
- Book Ends: The Best of Cametek Mashup starts and ends with a quad in both difficulties.
- Boring, but Practical: Doing ALL your missions. The missions with little rewards add up over time, and makes team contribution requirements easier.
- Button Mashing: You will miss if there's no notes in range, making this trope's strategy useless.
- However, if there's so many notes that you can't make what's going on at all, then you can "manip" to attempt to get through the pattern using only mashing.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: You can change your notes' regular and fever colors in the settings menu.
- Cover Version: When REMIXbeats took place, it (understandably) made a lot of people upset because many of their favorite songs were getting replaced.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Before the Compete and Casual update, a person with enough gear can be so overpowered that it's unfair.
- Determinator: "I heard someone with a bunny visor kept playing this one over again." This quote references mightybaseplate's no-miss run of the song 'Insight,' which he got after several days of attempts. Now, Mattie says something different when you select Insight from the Song Shop.
- Insight's description references this run by daring players to take the "mightybaseplate challenge and get a no-miss."
- Digital Piracy Is Evil: This game's community is against maps of songs currently in-game being stolen and reuploaded elsewhere. This is presumably so the game doesn't lose VIP sales because of exclusive songs not being exclusive anymore. When they are caught, they get permanently banned.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The older maps (e.g. Insight, Roblox Anthem, Wither) have more inconsistencies with the mapping and have a different feel to them than newer maps.
- Failure Is the Only Option: That is, if you choose Compete mode and someone who has more gear than you is actually good.
- Fan Game: Community servers, which host fan-made maps for various songs. You can make one by downloading the base project file here.
- Flawless Victory: A Ping (getting all perfects) is arguably the most impressive accomplishment you can achieve in this game. You have to hit every note within 60 msnote . A Ping with accuracy gear makes it less impressive, though.
- Gameplay Grading: RoBeats grades you based on your accuracy and how many misses you got. The maximum grade you can get is an A+, by getting an accuracy higher than 95.50%.
- Gimmick Level: There was once a map note which abused short LNs (the kind you have to tap instead of hold), and they were used all over the map, making you hit many in quick succession while also dealing with holding other long notes.
- Gold–Silver–Copper Standard: The most useful token is silver, second is gold, and last is brass.
- He Knows About Timed Hits: During the tutorial, Starlet (the person responsible for missions) teaches you how to play by pausing the game and telling you what keys to press.
- Improbably Female Cast: The only male characters in this game are the aliens, and male Minis.
- Infinity +1 Sword: The legendary sets require tokens to be crafted, and tokens are hard to come by. Completing weekly missionsnote and doing the leaderboardsnote give you tokens, but not very much. They're also chosen at random, which makes it much harder to craft a specific set without using the marketplace. Did I mention you need 58 to fully craft a set?!
- Konami Code: Given how much Konami has influenced this game, it was bound to happen. When the RB Battles event still took place, If you went on the Dance R-Volution Machine to the left of the Song Shop's entrance and enter the code, then you unlocked a new dance called Godlike.
- Little Green Men: The Helpful Alien and the Friendly Alien are the only alien characters in the game, which you can talk to to access the settings or become an NPC, respectively.
- Magikarp Power: Before the Reward Roulette update, if you sold a hard song, you spun 5 times for rare items. The higher the sold song's difficulty was, the better stuff you got. Some really low-difficulty songs ended up combining into surprisingly high-difficulty songs note .
- Marathon Level: "RE:Beats! RoBeats Mashup Marathon" and "The Best of Cametek Mashup" are both 6:58 long (which is 2 seconds under the Roblox audio upload limit, by the way).
- Microtransactions: The game has a Robux shop in which you can buy coins or stars for Robux (which is Roblox's premium currency). The shop owner even has a line which lampshades the fact this game has them, shown at the bottom of this page.
- No-Gear Level: In the first versions of the Compete/Casual update, everyone would be playing as if they had no gear if there were more casual votes than compete before the match started. Later versions would allow people to play either mode individually from others.
- No Plot? No Problem!: The closest thing to it this game has is some minor backstory about two of the shopkeepers.
- "Chroma Heavenly Mashup" has a hidden lore element, but most of it was meant for the first prerelease version. You can view it by clicking the labelnote below.
- "Chroma Heavenly Mashup" has a hidden lore element, but most of it was meant for the first prerelease version.
Chroma Heavenly Mashup PLOT.txt
- The Noseless: The game's art style renders the characters with no nose, both drawn and in-game.
- Obvious Rule Patch: When the Reward Roulette was announced, you could join a beta test server through Discord, and it's most likely someone found you can obtain VIP-exclusive songs through the roulette (or that spotco found out before beta testing). Whatever the case, you can't do it now.
- Officially Shortened Title: Kurokotei's song "\frac{\textup{sig}=\frac{821}{149}}{bpm\approx533}" got shortened to "BPM = RT" when it got added. The reason its title is so convoluted was because they posted a tweet, and its BPM = Retweets, and timing signature = likes.
- Pinball Scoring: The power of gear allows this trope to flourish. Players can get scores of over 100 million if they have maximum gear and play a really long song with a lot of notes. Even you can get a million, given you have enough gear.
- Production Throwback: Songs from spotco's other games have made it in RoBeats. Long-time players can recognize the games based off the cover.
- Rage Quit: You can tell if someone left a match based on if they suddenly lose their combo, and it stays that way for the rest of the match. Whenever someone leaves, the game still keeps the player's avatar in the match even though they left. You can check whether they really did leave by looking at the chat logs after the fact.
- Before this, if someone were to leave, then the game would remove them from the match, turning (for example) a 4-player match into 3. There were a lot of ways in which that was annoying, like not being able to do 4-player missions properly.
- Scoring Points: The scoring system used in this game is called 'score.' Score is important for winning in multiplayer matches and getting a high rank on the leaderboards. You can increase your score by upgrading your gears or by playing better and getting more "Perfect" hits.
- Serial Escalation: In 2017 the hardest difficulty was a 26. In 2021 the difficulty bar was raised so high that two difficulty 35s and a 36 were made that year.
- Socialization Bonus: The more people you have in a match, the higher the rewards at the end of it. Also, the weekly missions are next to impossible without people helping you.
- Special Guest: When an artist gets featured, there is usually an NPC of them right where you spawn.
- Sudden Soundtrack Stop: When you join a match, but the song doesn't load within the 15 seconds it's allowed, you still get to play, just without the music accompanying the gameplay. When the music finally loads, though, it can surprise you because you weren't expecting it.
- Stylistic Suck: The cover art for Retro Raceway looks like it was made in Microsoft Paint.
- Thick-Line Animation: All the characters are drawn in this style.
- Total Party Kill: A hard pattern (in a song) for most can make everyone's combo disappear.
- Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Some daily missions just tell you to play the song fully and you'll get the reward. In the spirit of this trope, you can literally do nothing and still get it. For missions with low scoring requirements, you just have to score enough and then do nothing for as long as the song's still playing.
- In the Reward Roulette update, you have to get 35% accuracy or higher to qualify for the roulette, making this trope less effective if you're going for all the rewards.
- In multiplayer, if your opponent has enough gear to make this trope work, and is feeling particularly cruel (or just had to go away from their computer) then they can just play half of the song and do nothing for the rest of the round, only winning because the point difference between them and their opponents is large enough.
- YouTuber Signicial made a couple of videos of him doing something similar, though it was all for fun (and a testament to how overpowered gears are in this game).
- When the RB Battles event was still in this game, during the part where you have to play the songs in order, the developers didn't add any scoring requirements (which was probably intended so that people who don't play this game could still get the items), which meant that someone could play the songs, leave their computer, and get the sword, without having to hit a single note.
"You calling me pay-to-win? I prefer the term... play to win!"
— Roxie, taking a jab at the common criticism people have with this game.
