Virtual pets never go out of style. From those old-school electronic Tamagotchis we’ve moved on over the years to keeping digital creatures on our smartphones. In fact, even Tamagotchis now have their own adaptation for Android, not to mention the successful (and terribly simple) Pou, which remains to this day one of the most downloaded apps on Uptodown. BeatNiks for iOS and Android aims to take this concept a bit further by making creatures evolve based on the music you listen to on your device.
The fact that the game is developed by Harmonix, the same people behind Rock Band and the Guitar Hero saga, is nothing to sniff at, given their long experience in musical gaming. To start, the BeatNiks behave and require care no different from what you usually find in games of this type: you feed them, play minigames to entertain them, and dress them up in cute outfits and accessories. But where their appeal really lies is that how they evolve depends enormously on which music genre you listen to.
By linking your game account to your Facebook, and that in turn to your music service (be it Spotify, Pandora, or iHeartRadio), the game will take into account all the music you stream. It’s also compatible with Google Play Music, as it will soon also be with Rdio, Rhapsody, and Beats. You can even listen to your locally stored music right from the app itself.
In any case, you don’t even need to have the game open, you just carry on listening to your music as usual, except that your playback information will be logged to your BeatNik. As that happens new objects will be unlocked and your pet’s personality and appearance will change. Clichés aside, it’s not the same thing to listen to Wagner as to Pitbull.
