Beat It!, a new music creation game from Glu Mobile, is live in the app store. Combining Tenori-on style music creation with puzzle elements and a funky bustling cityscape backdrop creates a unique gameplay twist that sets it apart from the recent slew of music apps we’ve seen.

Not long ago, several music creation apps were released, allowing you to create fun and interesting beats by activating squares on a matrix. Columns represent notes and rows form the measures. A bar would pass over the screen and play the corresponding notes, repeating to form a loop. You would always start with a blank board and create images or patterns to hear how they correspond to the music. Beat It! builds on that model, but turns it on its head. Instead of creating random musical sequences, Beat It! plays a looped track that you must then recreate on a matrix using only the auditory clues you’ve received.

The Beat It! matrix is slightly different that that of Tenori-on apps like Melodica or Tone Grid. In Beat It!, each line represents a different musical instrument, be it a drum, clapping hands, a high-hat, a tambourine, etc. The grid is 16 squares long, representing a 4-bar track sectioned into 4-square chunks. The game starts out pretty easy, with only one instrument creating sound. Each completed level adds another instrument and the beat becomes more complex. Each track is considered to be a single level. There are 5 worlds, with 10 levels each. At the start of each level, the target track plays 3 or 4 times to give you a sense of what you are supposed to create. There is a nice visual cue with a tiny iDevice structure that has a blue bar swipe across the screen while the music plays, mimicking the actual gameplay to give you a sense of the positioning of the notes. Another helpful visual clue is an indicator that all notes for an instrument within one of the four bars are correct. When this happens, the notes will receive a twinkling overlay. This allows you to break the track into smaller, more digestible pieces and pinpoint where you might be missing a note or have a note mismarked.

While you are creating, the full looped track is muted as a bar passes over your grid and plays the notes that you have placed. There is a button below the grid that switches back and forth from your partially completed track to the target track. You can also hold any of the instrument icons to mute that instrument and hear only certain elements of the target track. Another fun game element involves the use of bonuses. Occasionally, an icon will appear in the upper right corner and one instrument row will glow. If you can complete that instrument’s row before the icon disappears and the row stops glowing, you will be rewarded with that bonus. One bonus adds in a couple of corrected notes. Another removes some squares that do not contain notes in the completed form. Your speed, accuracy, and any bonuses earned all factor in to your final score on each level.

Graphically, Beat It! features a fun pixel art cityscape that contains some fun animations, such as a rooftop drummer and growing plants, that become more lively and complex as you progress through each level. Though it doesn’t seem to add anything to the core gameplay, it is a characteristic element of the game. The gameboard itself shows nice polish, a pleasing color scheme, and a clean interface. The audio is clear, as it must be if you are to distinguish different instruments in order to recreate the sound. Headphones are recommended. Beats are unique and catchy. There is a Free Play mode that also lets you create and save your own work using any of the unlocked instruments. Controls work wonderfully. Simply tap on a square to turn it on or off. It’s as easy as that.

Replay value is good, buoyed mostly by the Free Play option, though the complexity of the tracks in later stages should still give the player a challenge on repeated playthroughs. Since scores correspond to accuracy and time, repeated plays can greatly improve scores, as well. We really liked how Beat It! built on an already successful formula by creating a game with a purpose, as opposed to just a noise-making app. At $2.99, we felt that this was a good value and worth plunking down the cash for the experience. Beat It! is a 5-Dimple toe-tapper.

Beat It! gets our AppSmile 5-Dimple rating: