Rhythm Heaven Groove Review
I can barely even spell rhythm, so it’s not a quality I consider myself to have an abundance of. But that is one of the reasons I’m so attracted to rhythm games. Games like Dance Dance Revolution and Elite Beat Agents build a scaffolding of music and interaction around you as a player to make it easier to find and play with the beat. The new Rhythm Heaven Groove for the Nintendo Switch is part of that tradition, but without some of the charm that the series and genre is known for.
Rhythm Heaven Groove has all of the fun music-based minigames and interactive toys that the series is known for. The primary single-player experience has you playing through multiple levels with 4 different stages that are then mushed together in a final remix stage. All of the strength of the experience comes from just how fun, goofy, and catchy these rhythmic minigames are. And they deliver on that front.
Whether you’re flinging frogs into the sky, rolling cat statues along the floor, or trundling through hoops with a crew of round boys, Groove delivers on its core promise of simple music games with absurd premises. It also builds on previous games by upping the complexity of the inputs without spoiling that simplicity.
Complexity and simplicity might seem at odds with one another, but they work in unison in Rhythm Heaven Groove. At most, you’ll only ever have two inputs through the main campaign. In Stop N Go N Stop, you control a sports car that needs to pull off cool moves for a special commercial. Those moves include quick braking by pressing down on D-pad or speeding up by pressing the A button.
That’s simple.
Of course, Groove demands that braking and acceleration in fast, unpredictable patterns, and that’s where the complexity comes from. And that interplay between basic inputs and deep, difficult timing, meanwhile, is where the joy comes from.
None of this is new to Rhythm Heaven Groove on Nintendo Switch, but it delivers enough variety and quirkiness to stand alongside the other excellent entries in the series.
Where things don’t quite measure up is in the presentation. Groove has a lot of great-looking levels. I love the goofy guys in Hoop Trundling and the dorky kids in Alien Alphabet. But many of the levels have a flat, generic look to their art. And even the menus sometimes look like basic placeholders.
So much of what has made Rhythm Heaven work in the past is its oodles of charm. This one carries that forward, but it’s not a new zenith for the series. It’s maybe even a step back.
Nintendo has also traditionally filled these games with a plethora of interactive music toys as bonuses. Groove is no different except for maybe having my favorite one of these ever. If you do especially well on a stage in the campaign, you’ll earn a medal. These medals will unlock bonuses like the Rhythm Toy Box that features soundboard synthesizers and the like. These are usually good for messing around between the main meat of the game.
But then there’s Beatspell.
Beatspell is a quasi mini RPG built into Groove. You control a magician character that can cast different spells depending on how you press inputs to the beat. If you tap A and then B on 1 and 2 (or 3 and 4), you can cast fire. All the spells work this way, but they have various timing and input complexity. Maybe the lightning spell is more powerful, but it requires way more precise timing and even takes longer, so it has a risk and a reward to it.
Using these spells, you take on monsters in a dungeon. You just need to manage your health while also dishing up damage, and the result is a really engaging rhythm battle system. Don’t buy Groove just for Beatspell, but it is definitely a welcome extra that was fun to go back to between stages.
The extra content also includes a bucketload of multiplayer games. These are more party games that come either in a cooperative or competitive variety. The kids and I really enjoyed Cake Wait – a game where you have to wait until exactly three o’clock to grab a piece of cake. Whoever has the best timing wins the slice and the round. The first person to get three pieces of cake wins the game.
These multiplayer experiences do as much as Beatspell to expand Groove’s value proposition. Basically, you do feel like you’re getting quite a bit more game as long as you have someone to play with (locally – no online multiplayer or gameshare).
Rhythm Heaven Groove is a worthy successor to Rhythm Heaven and Rhythm Heaven Fever. It occasionally misses in terms of presentation, but it is far from charmless. And its endless parade of excellent tunes (and robust bonuses) will keep you bopping your head to the right beat.
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