Rhythm Heaven isn’t Nintendo’s best-known series, nor its most prolific. Prior to the launch of Rhythm Heaven Groove on the Switch this week — it’s out on July 2nd — there were only four previous entries, one of which was exclusive to Japan. The most recent came out more than a decade ago. Even still, there’s a case to be made that this is Nintendo’s most consistent franchise. There are few guarantees in life, but a new Rhythm Heaven being great is one of them.
If you’re unfamiliar, Rhythm Heaven is sort of like a music-focused version of WarioWare. That means it’s a collection of short and bizarre minigames, except these ones all test your sense of, well, rhythm. In Groove, for instance, there’s a stage where you’re controlling a car’s brakes and gas, and another has you helping a crab throw macarons. But all of these actions need to be done on beat. Most of the levels seem simple, given that they usually only require one or two different buttons, but keeping the rhythm can be a challenge.
What makes the games work is a combination of great, catchy music — the series is produced by Japanese singer-songwriter Tsunku — and weirdo minigames. Groove’s levels will have you doing everything from avoiding a sneezing moon to chopping vegetables to serving as a background dancer during a J-pop concert. I always find myself tapping and singing along to help get myself into the right mindset. Even now as I write this, the beeping track from the car level is stuck in my head.
Groove may be the first new Rhythm Heaven title in quite some time, but it’s not some kind of drastic reinvention of the formula. The structure remains largely the same: you slowly unlock levels, and they get progressively more challenging. Each level is grouped into a series of four, and when you complete all of those you’re presented with a remix stage that blends all of them together. These can be particularly tough as they force you to jump back and forth between actions while dealing with an ever-changing beat. This generally works well, though the structure can be a little restrictive. If you ever find yourself really struggling with a level — it took me forever to get the hang of a can-smashing minigame — you can’t progress until you figure it out.
That said, Groove does offer some things to do outside of the main levels for those times when you’re stuck. There are musical toys you can play around with, which include bouncing a puffer fish on a tennis racket, along with a miniature musical RPG called Beatspell where you hit buttons to the beat to perform spells. I particularly enjoyed the RPG — I wish it was longer — but these modes do require progressing through the main game to unlock them. Eventually, I had to suck it up and learn to smash those cans.
My biggest issue with Groove is that when playing on my TV, no matter which controllers I used, there was a slight delay for button presses. The game does allow you to calibrate your controllers with the TV to try and address this, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get things to work properly. It may sound like a small detail, but any delay, no matter how slight, makes a huge difference in a rhythm game. I kept regularly failing levels I could beat handily in handheld mode, where the game worked perfectly fine for me.
Hopefully the TV issue gets fixed in a future update. Otherwise, Groove, like the rest of Rhythm Heaven series, is a near-perfect collection of bite-sized rhythm action. I always think of these games like albums, and Groove is a familiar yet new offering from one of my favorite bands.
