by Sean Booker

Created on: June 12, 2009   Last Updated: June 16, 2009

Review: Rhythm Heaven - 8

Rhythm Heaven is a fun and exciting way to spend brief periods of time with your DS and still feel like you've completed something. It captures the sense of the more main-stream rhythm games but still sets itself up as a mini-game collection. With more than 50 songs ranging from very different types of music, you're in for a great time. Though one may find themselves a little thrown off when faced against its sharp learning curve and immediate difficulty.

The basis of the game play comes down to playing along with the game's music by three main tasks: tapping, holding and flicking. At first glance this would appear as a very simple and an almost too minimalist style of game play as it gets too close to the style of mini-game collections. And though Rhythm Heaven is mainly a collection of mini-games, it structures them in a way that makes almost every one of them unique and engaging.

This brings up the best part of Rhythm Heaven: the music. The music can range from country and jazz all the way to rock or techno. Every song you play will be very different than the last and they're all upbeat and enjoyable. It will be quite hard to go through the entire game and not find a song you really like. This truly makes Rhythm Heaven a game for everyone.

While listening to the music, you job is to perform actions that play along to the song's beat. However, Rhythm Heaven actually has quite a high level of difficulty to it that makes itself relevant right from the get go. It becomes quite a difficult game due to its demand for a high level of precision when timing your taps or flicks. This steep learning curve is also the game's biggest down fall. Going into a game aimed more towards the casual gamer and finding it this hard immediately isn't a good thing. Even veteran gamers may fine themselves failing a couple times on the very first level.

To add to the difficulty, the game doesn't do a very good job of teaching you what you need to do for each individual task. There is a practice mode that plays before each game (which you can skip if you wish) and for the most part it gives you a good understanding of what needs to be done. Though, there are some cases where I found that even though they told me what motion to perform, I still couldn't get it. The problem is, Rhythm Heaven will tell you what to hit, but they don't narrow down enough of when exactly you need to hit it. The majority of the time you'll be faced with tap after you hear 'Yeah!'

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