Synth Riders releases Electro Swings Essentials pack

The “Electro Swing Essentials” is a brand new collection of songs that can be played in Kluge Interactive’s VR rhythm game Synth Riders. It features 10 different tracks, mostly in the jazz swing genre with influences from house and modern electronic dance music as well. It’s available both for Steam and on the Oculus Store right now – we tried it out on the Quest.

What’s especially great about this new collection of songs is that half of the songs in it are actually free to download for all owners of the game. That’s a pretty generous sample in a market where we’re used to paying for either a subscription or paying for a (selection of) song(s) individually. It’s a smart move too, because Synth Riders is a very open platform that encourages users to add their own productions to the game, possibly making paid expansions a hard sell.

Although the Electro Swing Essentials collection doesn’t feature any global superstars on the roster, it does feature a set of incredibly catchy ‘just try not to bop along’ kind of songs – one of which you can hear for yourself in the trailer right here. If that makes you curious about the rest of the collection, then Kluge continues their tradition of having a very open game by sharing the entire playlist on Spotify as well.

The most well-known artist featured in the pack is probably Parov Stelar, whose tracks “All Night” and “Booty Swing” are both included in the paid songs. But with the ability to include your own songs, what’s most important is how the individual track layouts have been designed and how they play. Here, you can tell that all 10 tracks were crafted by those who developed the original game, making great use of the mechanics that were already in place and should feel familiar to existing players. While in some user-generated content you feel like you’re playing just for that well-known song you wanted to try out, here the music and the gameplay are well suited to one another.

Even though I wasn’t familiar with the songs on offer before I started, I quickly got hooked on the catchy beats and upbeat jazzy sounds that are featured. Check out some of the songs through the links above and listen for yourself – I guarantee that if you enjoy their sound then you’ll love the new selection and the levels associated with them.