Growing up playing Guitar Hero, I have a fondness for rhythm-based games. The genre has evolved over the years, mixing with others like first-person shooters, dungeon crawlers, and platformers. After trying many of them out, Hi-Fi Rush quickly rose to be my favorite rhythm game of recent years. But now, there may be a new contender on the horizon.
Dead as Disco exploded into the scene with a hugely popular demo last year touting a mixture of martial arts and funky beats, and setting itself up as a platform for players to build their own action scenes featuring their favorite music. Now, developer Brain Jar Games is bringing the game out to early access.
Under the flashy dance moves, out of this world bosses, and a journey to bring a band back together, I found a base of a game that, if built right, could bring in a community that can keep the project alive for years to come. Read on for my full review of this early access launch of Dead as Disco.
Disco is Back, For a Day
Featuring a long-dead superstar drummer that’s come back to life to have a final showdown, Dead as Disco holds nothing back when delivering its bombastic action fighting levels. The futuristic setting shows just how far corporations have gone to exploit music and artists and makes for a fantastic backdrop for this revenge comeback storyline. Also, what’s a better place to have a dance battle than inside a music video? The Dead as Disco campaign is a non-linear storyline that currently offers four missions, each one being a showdown against the biggest idols of the generation, and this is where the magic happens.
The storyline of a rhythm game is not something I was expecting to get interested in when jumping into Dead as Disco, but it turned out to be a satisfying and interesting hook. To give you the gist of it, the band Dead as Disco has been broken up for a decade after the death of its legendary drummer, Charlie Disco, scattering the rest of the members to their own corners and genres. Not being satisfied with how things were left off, our protagonist Charlie Disco is back from the dead for a single night, and he wants a reunion.
It"s so corny that I just couldn’t stop myself from liking it. The story slowly unfolds in a JRPG-like manner with a whole lot of conversations, expanding band member backstories and the mystery around Disco’s death. Not everything is resolved in this early access release, but it’s an enjoyable storyline so far, especially because Charlie has to beat his old gang at their peak all these years later.
Each of these battles focuses on its own genre, may it be fight against a cybernetically enhanced heavy metal guitar god or a surreal AI K-pop idol. The original tracks and remixes of classics featured in Dead as Disco are accompanied by a visual feast, which involves amazing arenas that shift and deform as the song, and the fight, goes on. There are multiple moments in each track when the camera angles to specific locations with impressive transitions to new stages.
One moment I’d be beating up goons inside a subway avoiding incoming trains, the next, I’m fighting inside train cars with a side view of the action. The direction behind these music video-inspired campaign levels is extraordinary, and each one is visually distinct from the other. Surviving to the end of one, the final 1vs1 boss fights can look like something straight from Elden Ring sometimes. Once I locked down the boss attack patterns, which are all tied to the beat and the section of the song that’s playing, there’s satisfaction in knowing exactly what’s about to happen and countering it.
I noticed a handful of odd camera stitches and lack of music cues in this release"s boss fights. I am going to chalk these up to the early access nature of the release. As new updates with more bosses and features come in, I am hoping the current levels get a polishing pass too.
Beat "Em Up to the Beat
Rhythm games live or die by how satisfying they can be to flow to the beat, and Dead as Disco is delivering its own approach that never kills the momentum and simply put, lets you be cool. If you’ve played action games like Batman Arkham or Sifu, this fighting formula should be a familiar one. One button handles simple attacks, one parries incoming hits, another is used for dodging, and the final one is used for finishers. He also sports the unique power-up ability that lets him beat on foes with his ghostly drumsticks, each hit flowing right with the beat for maximum satisfaction. I am glad to say that even when being swarmed by enemies and the entire arena transforming into something like the sky of a fireworks show, I could clearly make out the symbols on enemies that signifies incoming attacks or opportunities for finishers.
Enemy variety isn’t very high at the moment. Standard goons, tougher security personnel, and robots with long-range attacks took up the bulk of what I fought, with each type having their unique attack styles. This is plenty to keep battles interesting without descending into chaos in the early access build.
Disco’s skill trees are where I spent most of my collected points from dance battles instead of cosmetics, at least at the beginning. When a boss idol is taken down for the first time, Disco gains an ability from his returning band-mate to use inside battles from that point on. This can be a hit-blocking shield, a wide area attack involving a swinging guitar, a blackhole effect, and more. Four of these can be equipped at one time when going out for a battle and they are highly effective at controlling crowds.
Traditional rhythm games attach major downsides to missing the beat or sequences that can even result in a level restart. Here, things are kept light. Missing the beat by a wide margin or getting hit only resets the highscore counter, keeping the action and the music flowing, which was much more immersive. Hitting goons to the beat and activating powers right on track boosts the damage levels that Disco outputs, so it’s never a bad idea to brush up on tempo skills.
Only Easy and Normal options are available for the early access launch of Dead as Disco. I don’t imagine Easy will be a problem for even the most casual gamers, as just vibing to the song and appreciating the visuals is almost effortless by mashing buttons and reacting to the exaggerated, slow-motion attacks of enemies. Plenty of healing pickups also spawn inside arenas if the going gets too tough.
Normal difficulty, by comparison, isn’t a cakewalk. Enemies attack more often, take more hits to go down. Bosses also hit harder, and I am pretty sure that they have more health too. However, as I got used to the button combos and the available moves expanded, within an hour of playing I could go through entire songs without worrying about breaking my combo. I hope when Hard difficulty comes around, it won’t just bump up the enemy health and damage and call it a day.
Infinite and Custom Disco
After quickly completing the campaign missions, I dived into what else Dead as Disco offers, and this is where the Infinite Disco mode spreads its wings. Leaving behind the hand-made levels, this mode delivers what you expect from a standard rhythm action game, offering survival challenges and high-score competitions to unlock more songs from the soundtrack to fight to. However, the user tools here impressed me the most.
There is a custom song addition feature built right into this mode, and fiddling around with it, I was able to jam to several soundtracks from other games. The beats per minute can be adjusted with an in-game audio editor to make sure each section of the added custom song is matched correctly across the entire track. There is even a playlist mode to go through multiple songs in one session.
I am hoping a community develops around this custom mode, and the available tools develop over time to make the imports easier to configure. This is still a manual process that players will have to go out of their way to grab MP3s and configure in-game. Perhaps integration with streaming services that automate the process could be one way of simplifying the process.
To touch on performance for a moment, my RX 9070 XT 16GB-equipped Windows 11 machine runs the game beautifully. With every setting maxed out and playing at 1440p, there wasn"t even a whisper of a stutter to be found, and frame rates always stayed above 100.
Conclusion
Brain Jar Games has taken the rhythm genre and injected it straight into an action game in a way I didn’t think was possible. Dead as Disco’s resurrected protagonist bends the beat to his will as he battles his former band members to make a comeback of a lifetime, making for a sweet revenge story. Whether it be a beat down with drum sticks, a flashy counter to send goons flying, or a smooth jazz split in the middle of a combo to keep up the momentum, the game never loses its style. I was also not expecting the song selection to be this strong. The music-video inspired levels are directed beautifully, using forced camera changes to showcase hype moments and transitions right as the beat drops. Even casual players won’t have problems vibing to the music and showing off their dance moves.
However, the idol challenges, which is the prime chunk of the current early access content, did run out quickly before I had to settle for doing dance battles against leaderboards. The highest available difficulty (Standard) is also something I got used to fairly quickly in this time. The studio is promising constant updates going forward, adding licensed songs, more bosses to beat, and even co-op battles. I can see already that the studio is keen on supporting the community for creating their own beat-mapped songs and mods.
Still, if you’re not into grinding cosmetics, or diving into custom song tools, I suspect the playtime of the early access build to experience all the content could be less than three or four hours for some players jumping in. The $24.99 price tag ($19.99 with launch discount) can seem steep for this amount of content. But if you do get hooked, I don’t think you’d be looking for other rhythm games anytime soon.
Dead as Disco is releasing on May 5, 2026, as an early access title on Steam and Epic Games Store for $19.99 with a 20% launch discount that will run for two weeks. It will cost $24.99 following that.
This review was conducted on a pre-release PC copy of the game provided by Brain Jar Games.
