Game Reviews
Review: Rhythm Heaven
By Sean Booker April 24, 2009 - 16:00
Studios: Nintendo
Publisher(s): Nintendo
Rating: E
Genre: Music/Rhythm
Platform: Nintendo DS
Players: 1
Rhythm
Heaven is a fun and exciting way to spend brief periods of time
with your Nintendo DS and still feel like you’ve accomplished something. It
captures the sense of the more main-stream music/rhythm games but still
sets itself up as a mini-game collection. With more than 50 songs
ranging from very different types of music, you’re in for a great
time. Though one may find themselves a little thrown off when faced
against its sharp learning curve and immediate difficulty.
The
basis of the game play comes down to playing along with the game’s
music with three main moves – tapping, holding and flicking. At first
glance this would appear as a very simple and an almost too
minimalist style of game play as it gets too close to the style of
mini-game collections. And though Rhythm Heaven is mainly a
collection of mini-games, it structures them in a way that makes
almost every one of them unique and engaging.
This
brings up the best part of Rhythm Heaven – the music. The music
can range from styles like country and jazz all the way to rock or techno. Every
song you play will be very different from the last and they’re all
upbeat and enjoyable. It will be quite hard to go through the entire
game and not find a song you really like. This truly makes Rhythm
Heaven a game for everyone.
Shoot bolts through nuts to the beat.
To
add to the music you must play along with, there will be short
animations running on the opposite screen that replicates whether you
hit the note on time or not. These range from all kinds of different
subject matter and are different in almost every song. The animations
are presented in an almost hand drawn style of work and look great
when the colors are being shown through the DS’s built in back
light. This makes every game not only fun to listen to, but great to
watch.
While
listening to the music, your job is to perform actions that play along
to the song’s beat. However, Rhythm Heaven actually has
quite a high level of difficulty to it, which makes itself relevant
right from the get go. It becomes quite a difficult game due to its
demand for a high level of precision when timing your taps or flicks.
This steep learning curve is also the game’s biggest down fall.
Going into a game aimed more towards the “casual” gamer and
finding it this hard immediately isn’t a good thing. Even veteran
gamers may fine themselves failing a couple times on the very first
level.
Aaaa, Aaaa, Aaaa!
To
add to the difficulty, the game doesn’t do a very good job of
teaching you what you need to do for each individual task. However, there is a
practice mode that plays before each game (which you can skip if you
wish) and for the most part it gives you a good understanding of what
needs to be done. Though there are some cases where I found that,
even though the game told me what motion to perform, I still couldn’t
get it. The problem is, Rhythm Heaven will tell you what to
hit, but it doesn’t narrow down enough of when exactly you need to
hit it. The majority of the time you’ll be faced with “tap after
you hear ‘Yeah!’” And in game, this will sometimes mean to tap
on the beat of “Yeah!” or the beat just after – the game
doesn’t tell you which. There was even a case where it told me to
tap on a beat that registered one too soon. This didn’t help the
game as I was struggling on some of the tasks already.
Though
it may be hard to first get into, once you have the basics down,it
gets very fun. You will be ranked on each game and getting almost a
perfect will net you a superb score along with a medal. You use these
medals to unlock more mini-games to play with and, just like the main
game, these games will require a sense of rhythm to play as well.
These games can range from an entirely new song to play along with,
or a variation on one you've already come across.
There are also a ton of different games to choose from in the main menu.
Rhythm Heaven sets itself up in columns and after you play
four songs, the fifth is a combination of the previous ones called
the Remix. This lets you revisit the tasks you had to do in a new,
fused together song. It also adds different images playing on the
screen than the original song had. This adds up to the Remix
mini-games being a great idea.
Table tennis tapfest.
Along
with the chance to play more than the main section of the game, you
will be constantly reminded that you should try and score a perfect
rating on past songs. Any time you achieve a superb score, the game
will notify you after a while that you are good enough to try for a
perfect. Playing the song perfectly will unlock the song for you to
listen to in the game’s playback feature. Though, it also comes
with a bit of a risk. You only get one chance to play the song while
going for a perfect score. This means that a perfect score can only
be gotten when the game has notified you of it. So if you got 100%
the first time you played, you won’t unlock the song. It also means
that if you mess up your one chance, you need to wait till the game
notifies you again. This was a bit of a disappointment as I found
myself really enjoying a few specific songs and though I played them
enough to achieve a 100% rating, I wasn’t unlocking my favorite
songs.
Overall,
Rhythm Heaven is a great game that, with enough practice,
everyone can get into. It features a huge selection of music and wide
variety of games to play. And though the game may start off a bit on
the difficult side, it makes up for it with being fun and humorous.
And the level of enjoyment you will get out of it will overcomes the
difficulty as you will be playing the songs many times. The songs are
all catchy and easy to enjoy while the inclusion of fun animations
playing along with the music makes for a great time. Rhythm Heaven
is a game that shouldn't be missed by any fan of the rhythm and music
genre and will provide hours of entertainment.