Rhythm Heaven is a game that relies heavily on the player’s sense of… rhythm, of course! The basic gameplay involves tapping and sliding across the touch screen while following along with the music.
The main categories of playing the levels include:
-Be a member of a group and play your note when it’s your turn so that the song can continue to flow.
-Listen to your partner play some notes, and then play those same tunes using the correct timing.
-Simply follow the beat of the music.
You hold the DS in book-fashion, with the touch screen to your right, if you’re right handed.
You can also configure the touch screen to your left if you’re left handed.Each level is basically a music track or sometimes even a full-fledged song (with vocals), and you are scored based on well you hit all the correct notes. The method by which this is implemented is very creative, and some of the levels seem to cross over into entirely different genres. For example, one level is reminiscent of a space shooter, where enemy space ships pop up on the screen. Another level has you playing table tennis against an opponent.
Is it a space shooter?
Or a table tennis game?What’s interesting about the game is that the rhythm and sound are all you really need to succeed. The visuals in the game may seem to be another cue as to the correct timing of the notes, but they can become a distraction if you are trying to perfectly match the sounds to the action on-screen. This is a mistake I often made early on and I had to fight my instinct to play the game based on visual clues rather than the audio clues. Indeed, every piece of audio is critical, and you’ll notice that the music and sound effects from the ongoing action are all following the rhythm just nicely.
Obviously the music is the star of the show, and this game has a nice mix of tunes, spanning a variety of genres, from the standard J-pop to classic rock and ska, to jazz and hip-hop and many points in between. The music, created by legendary Japanese pop-star producer TSUNKU, is addictive and catchy.
As someone who is “rhythmically challenged,” I found the game becoming very frustrating when I couldn’t figure out what exactly I’m supposed to do. The good news is that each level has a basic tutorial to help you understand how to correctly follow the rhythm, but the bad news is you can still be scratching your head as to the timing and duration of your taps and flicks of the stylus. On some levels the game is pretty unforgiving if you’re slightly off, even just a little bit.
Presentation: The game uses very simple graphics, which is not a bad thing. In fact, one level is simply a white background where the characters are hand drawn black lines (see top screenshot for example).
Levels are weird and goofy, in a good way, and that same craziness is incorporated really well in how the game indicates if you’re playing correctly or not. For example, when you are in a group and perform badly, the other members all turn toward you with angry expressions on their face. It’s quite funny.
Replayability: The game has a surprising amount of content. In addition to the standard levels, you can progress in the game to unlock harder versions of the same levels. Also, getting perfects can net you some unlockables, though some of the unlockable content seems pretty mundane (like the business card), and you won’t spend a whole lot of time playing with these ‘toys.’ The game does show some mercy and allows you to occasionally skip levels that you have failed at multiple times.
Though the levels are fairly short (couple of minutes or less), you will spend most of your time just trying to get the song down, meaning you are likely to fail many times.
Bottom line: This game will be a hit-or-miss depending on whether you’re rhythmically inclined or not, or how much you like the rhythm genre. If you’re into quirky, simple-to-play yet difficult-to-finish, touch-based games which contain catchy music, then you will probably enjoy this game.
A perfect showcase of the game's crazy yet loveable nature, and its use of the tap controls.
Also one of my favorite levels.A Negative World review byEric LopezURL to share (right click and copy)