Hello! This is a review for the NGUAC competition.

I've gone over one or two general categories of issues specific to your song, and one section of things I think also deserve complimenting. I prefer being very direct with my critique, none of it is meant to offend. Thank you for your understanding!

Constructive Criticism:

- Dynamic variation is the first thing I'd like to discuss here. Right away, it's visibly obvious that this track doesn't have much variation in terms of dynamics. The volume and loudness is essentially the same through the entire piece after the introduction. There are a couple reasons why this is relevant, and it's not just about volume, but musical organization. Specifically, a wall of sound is particularly effective if it has a point of contrast. You seem to know this as you do have clearly differentiated sections showing variation. This is excellent, and it speaks directly to the point of having a bit of dynamic variance as well. The same sound can get boring, or even fatiguing - electronic music has breakdowns because of this, and many extremely intense metal epics still have breaks, such as in... this piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8KjwP22x2s Notice how it's absolutely full of various flavors of "intense" until about 2 minutes in, where it takes a relative break... and a much more clear and long break from the intensity at around 5 minutes, to give the listener a chance to breathe and process what they had just experienced.

- Let's look at your mix as well. There's a clear lack of bass throughout the track. There's some bass in the kick, but this genre really relies on having a solid bass guitar to give weight to the more detailed chords rather than basing it on the kick as much. Even in brighter mixes like the example before, the kick is relatively subdued in terms of bass and combines with the bass guitar in lower mids and bass frequencies to give weight to chords.

Compliments to the Composer:

- Your riffs are simple but solid, the guitar tone is pretty tasteful even if it could use more bass, and you don't overuse reverb or anything. This is clearly a really solid foundation, and I think you can continue your development of this genre to reach the heights of PirateCrab or other newgrounds metal producers for certain. You got this!

Final score: 7.5