What do you get when two former Harmonix employees go off on their own to make a minimalist rhythm game" You get something intense that feels as much like an action game as a rhythm one.
In Drool's Thumper, the player is a metallic beetle racing along a track through space. The game takes on a Guitar Hero vibe as soon as it starts, asking the player to press a button in time to hit lit-up blue squares racing at them from farther up the track. However, the similarities really don't go much farther than that.

It's not long before the game starts introducing obstacles such as curves with walls for players to crash into or red bars laying across the track that must be burst through. Fail to deal with an obstacle and the beetle loses its carapace; fail to deal with a second one while so unprotected and the player goes back to the most recent checkpoint. The only way to restore the carapace is to do well enough, either by hitting enough blue objects in time to the rhythm or making it to the next checkpoint, to earn it back.
The relationship between things the player wants to hit and things they need to avoid to survive is most apparent during boss fights. Bosses take a set number of hits to defeat and the only way to attack them is to successfully hit all of the squares on the track in a pre-arranged sequence. There are obstacles to impede the player's progress, but it's missing one of the squares on the track that removes the player's ability to attack, not taking...