My nerves were shot playing “Rhythm Heaven Groove,” the first entry in more than a decade in the fast-paced rhythm game series.
Timing is everything in the latest title, released Thursday on the Nintendo Switch. Gamers will have to listen closely to the beats and have a perfectly precise internal metronome as they attempt a gauntlet of 80 single-player games and 30 multiplayer challenges.
The series began with Japan’s “Rhythm Tengoku” in 2006 on the GameBoy Advance, which introduced gamers to the musical minigames that were simple yet difficult to master. The franchise came to the rest of the world with “Rhythm Heaven” on the Nintendo DS a couple years later. The games had a lot in common, including a developer, with the popular “WarioWare” games, which starred Mario’s nemesis in his own series of funny, rhythm-based micro-games. Then, “Rhythm Heaven Fever” added motion controls the Wii in 2011 and returned to handhelds with the “Megamix” compilation in 2015.
Now 11 years later, “Rhythm Heaven Groove” can take full control of the Switch’s high-fidelity motion controls. Players will be hopping, throwing, rolling, shooting and more in a broad test of their reflexes. In a hands-on demo, some of the games involved opening and closing your adorable character’s umbrella in line with three others; tossing a frisbee to a dog on the beach running at various speeds; and chopping vegetables in quick succession to make a finely-sliced salad. All of the games were easy to pick up, but nearly impossible to get a perfect score. Plus, all of the songs put you in a nearly hypnotic trance that forces you to count in your head or tap your foot along to the beats. By the end of your playtime, you’ll likely be counting in four-beat or even seven-beat rhythms for the rest of the day.
