Trombone Champ: Unflattened (2024)

Trombone Champ: Unflattened is the first game developed and released from the newly created Flat2VR Studio. They started off as a simple VR modding scene and quickly became so popular they ended up forming a studio and getting contracts with some publishers in the industry to create full on VR ports of some classic games.

As the title suggests, Trombone Champ: Unflattened lets you step into the shoes of a Trombonist as you play and toot your way through various classical and world songs infront of an audience. The audience reacts to your playing and how well (or poorly) you play accordingly, just like Guitar Hero or Rock Band.

I never played the original game, and only saw a couple minutes of gameplay of it, but seeing people bust up laughing as the songs were recognizable, but the notes sounded off made me want to try it out myself. When I loaded it up, I was instantly surprised with how VR focused the game was, as the tutorial was teaching me how to hold the instrument and use the slide. The next few minutes were all spent teaching me the way the game played and what to expect. Once I was ready, the curtain opened up and I was standing on a stage with a whole auditorium clapping and applauding my rendition of scales.

I then ended up just plowing through the campaign/song list at breakneck speed, only stopping to catch my virtual breath. I wasn’t too concerned with the scoring or leaderboard lists, and those have never been something I pay attention to (I don’t like retrying for slightly higher scores, and there will always be people who retry the same song hundreds of times to get that perfect score. That’s not me and never will be.

Instead I focused on going through the songs and trying to do the best I could while moving around like I was really performing on stage. Trying to make the audience feel like they were getting their money's worth. Honestly, playing in front of my wife was easily the best part, she not only enjoyed and encouraged my goofiness, but she also was laughing at how the game perfectly melds both the serious tone of some of the songs, with the absurdity of the sounds the trombone makes.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time not only playing through the campaign, but even going back to get better scores and get the three challenge goals each song has. Things like “get a S ranking” or “complete the song without any nasty scores”, things of that nature. I did fairly well, well enough and ended up with all S rankings for the first half of the game, and the second half getting the A ranking on all the rest.

I loved being able to unlock new trombones with the points I accumulated in the campaign, and also being able to customize my trombone with a VR painting room section. Being able to hold up the instrument in VR, and then take spray paint or markers to it and customize the color of everything was a really neat touch that I wasn’t expecting. I did feel some of the extra characters (a devil and a baboon) felt a bit out of place and didn’t seem to have much of an impact, honestly I still don’t understand what purpose the baboon had at all. He shows up once, says a few lines and then disappears for the rest of the game, never to be seen again. It was odd.

My only criticisms of the game sparked from the oddly weird difficulty spikes and fluctuations. In the early parts of the game, I went from very long drawn out notes and slow paced songs, to full blown master level difficulty within ten minutes of starting up the game for the first time. Then it’s back down to insanely boring slow songs and classical pieces. I didn’t understand why some songs were placed in such an odd manner in the list. It removed some of the enjoyment when I was instantly required to do a 3 minute rendition of a ska song that I've never heard before with rapidly increasingly small tooting notes up and down the entire scale.

There should have been more of a balance with the songs, and placing the world and country national anthem section in the beginning also really was a bad choice. Most have never heard those other anthems and they are very slow paced and boring. I would have liked it better if there was a more normal and increasingly steady climb in difficulty. Where the classics, like Camp Town Races, Taps and Beethoven were in at the start and songs like the ska song and some more notoriously harder and more difficult songs were at the end. It just felt very unbalanced.

I loved my time with Trombone Champ: Unflattened, and feel like it’s not a necessary VR port, but one that was already spawned from a VR mod and broken out into a full fledged VR game. It’s an incredible accomplishment to the team at Flat2VR Studio and one that is a good first step in the gaming development scene. This is absolutely a blast to play with others around and a great party game too. Flat2VR has shown they know what they are doing, and if this first game is any indication of their skill, we are going to be blown away by what comes next!