Just Shapes & Beats
BANGER · Action · 2018
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $19.99.
- Length
- 3.3h
- Value
- $6.06/hr
- Reviews
- 98% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, DirectX 11-compatible graphics card with at least 512MB of video memory, 1 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
"Just Shapes & Beats" is a chaotic co-op musical bullet-hell based on three simple things: avoid Shapes, move to the kick-ass Beats, and die, repeatedly.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $11.99, set in December 2024. 60 discounts in the 8 years on record. They run about 30 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and the best reviewed. Among the games that feel like it, Beat Hazard ($9.99, scores 93) beats it on value, while it beats Crypt of the NecroDancer ($14.99, scores 88).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $27.46. It costs $19.99.
21 of the 776 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 88 percent of the 1,596 reviews written there were positive, against 98 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
3.3 hours to finish it, 34 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 10 times the campaign.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 3.3 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
76% start to 8% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
220 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
amazing game and amazing story! after 100%ing the game i think it is safe to say its fun.
I Remember being a kid and watching this game on my moms phone and had no idea where and how do i play it. but here i am now. and im proud to say it, THE BEST MONEY I HAVE EVER SPENT IN MY LIFE! HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!!!
good, just wish this game had crossplay, custom levels/editor. This way online mode would be way less dead.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Just Shapes & Beats scores 91/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/531510/just-shapes-beatsThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 14, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.