Reviewed by Brandy Shaul
Many of you are probably familiar with Nintendo’s celebrity filled television campaign, which includes appearances from the likes of Carrie Underwood and Lisa Kudrow, nonchalantly sitting on a couch playing their DS. While in the past these commercials have focused on racing or cooking games, more recently, the ads have switched their focus to singer Beyonce and Rhythm Heaven.
As Beyonce makes her way through Rhythm Heaven’s various mini-games, her face contorts and changes expression to represent her mood, with one overarching look of “well crap, I’m screwed” remaining forever at the forefront. Get used to that look, as it’s one you’ll undoubtedly share before all is said and done.
As the name suggests, Rhythm Heaven focuses all on a player’s rhythm, and ability to keep time with musical pieces of varying tempos and genres. The game is played while holding the DS like a book, and, in theory, requires only a few taps or slides on the touch screen to carry out any action in the game.
Depending on the mini-game (with dozens of games in all, each lasting only a few minutes), you will find yourself either tapping on the screen to make your character clap or sing, open or close their mouth, and bend over, among other actions, or utilizing the “flicking” mechanic, which has you sliding your stylus across the touch screen in a motion that the game equates to writing a checkmark.
As timing is obviously everything in a rhythm game, this flicking motion is much easier said than done. After a short tutorial supposedly teaches you to flick at a lightning fast pace, you are set loose on the first mini-game, which takes place on a factory assembly line, with your flicking action forcing a dowel to lodge in between too circular cutouts that move horizontally across the screen. While the game reports that simply flicking the stylus in time with the music (in this mini-game, on every fifth beat) will accomplish the task, getting the game to actually register your flicks is like pulling teeth.
Whether flicking diagonally, horizontally or vertically, it seems that the game has a mind of its own, and will only accept your actions around fifty percent of the time. The other half of the game is then spent screaming at your DS, as you are forced to repeatedly bash on your touch screen (with enough power to break the screen if you happen to be unlucky) in the hopes of getting into some sort of rhythm (no pun intended) where the game will actually do what your actions in theory should be making it do.
Luckily, with so many mini-games to unlock, you will find some that do not utilize the flicking mechanic, with these mini-games being the only thing that keeps the game actually playable, rather than dooming it to a level of absolute frustration.
These non-flicking games come in various forms, some requiring you to either quickly tap or tap and hold your stylus on the screen in order to make tiki heads sing or toss dumplings into a monk’s mouth, or slowly slide your stylus along the screen in time with a Latin soundtrack that has you controlling the movement of a lizard’s tale (a sort of mating ritual).
After completing each set of four new mini-games, a Remix game is unlocked. A boss battle of sorts, these Remix stages combine all of the tasks you have previously completed in that set into a longer, more intense, and more critically judged offering that truly test your skills and patience before allowing you to move onto the next set of games.
The difficulty of the games throughout and the severe penalties for each mistake on your part combine to require an almost perfect performance on these stages, with, as you might have already guessed, a perfect performance being incredibly difficult to achieve. Luckily, you have the option of skipping certain levels, if you fail them numerous times and are fortunate enough to be given the option when entering the game’s menu area.
Either way, whether you are lucky enough to be blessed by appropriately responding controls or not, the game does offer some incentive to play each game more than once. Depending on your skill level at each game, challenges will appear at random intervals that require you to achieve a perfect performance on one of your previously completed mini-games. By achieving said “perfect” status, you unlock extra content, songs and so on, that can be listened to from the game’s menu.
Regardless of the fact that the game did frequently try my patience, these perfection runs are incredibly satisfying, if you can actually pull them off.
Another aspect that helps the game tremendously is the soundtrack, which is incredibly addictive, and is some of the highest quality work I’ve heard on the DS to date, filled with short, repetitive snippets from genres spanning the entire spectrum of music that become lodged in your head for hours, sometimes days at a time, depending on how often you play the game (or how many times you are forced to play a single mini-game due to the aforementioned flicking problems).
The graphics, on the other hand, take a bit of a backseat to the sound department. While the cartoony graphics fit well with the absurdity of some of the tasks placed before you, there is nothing extraordinary here that requires a second look. In fact, with the game requiring such precision in movements, it’s often better to play the game sans visuals, by simply closing your eyes and concentrating solely on the music, thereby removing any outside distractions.
All in all, Rhythm Heaven is a bit of a double-edged sword, a victim of its own ambition. While offering so many mini-games in one small package is a great treat for fans of the rhythm game genre, the flicking mechanic is seriously lacking, forcing the game’s quality to rest solely on those games that don’t utilize it. And while children may look at the cartoon presentation as something they would want to try out, the game’s difficulty all but entirely eliminates that portion of potential players, and in the end earns the game a spot in the rental category at best.
Special thanks to Allison Guillen and Nintendo for providing a copy of this title.