When I was first acquainted with Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven series in 2011, it felt like I had discovered a hidden artifact from an alien planet. During my senior year of college, I woke up one morning to find my roommate playing a bizarre game I’d never heard of on the Wii that looked like a series of playable doodles. It was unlike anything I had seen at the time — full of mumbling luchadores and weird birds rhythmically bouncing along to the beat of bubbly pop music. One-of-a-kind games like that have a way of sticking in your memory for decades.
A lot has changed between the launch of Rhythm Heaven Fever in 2011 and Rhythm Heaven Groove, the latest installment in the quirky music series on Nintendo Switch. While the series once felt like the wackiest thing in the world, Rhythm Heaven Groove is now fairly average on the weird-o-meter. Its brand of musical minigames isn’t unique anymore either; plenty of games inspired by Rhythm Heaven have sprouted out in the past 15 years, and even raised the bar it set in every way.
That leaves Rhythm Heaven Groove in a tricky spot. It’s a content-rich collection of delightful minigames, but it’s missing the freshness that once made the series a standout oddity. As fun as it is as a digital music toy, Groove is just one duck in the flock rather than the bird setting the rhythm of the flight formation.
The Rhythm Heaven formula hasn’t changed a bit in Groove. Its primary single-player mode has you tapping your way through playlists of musical minigames, each culminating in a Remix stage that pulls everything together into one pop quiz. Each minigame drops you into a small cartoon, where you need to hit buttons in time to the music using telegraphed audio cues and visual indicators. Most levels only revolve around two or three rhythmic cues, throwing curveballs at you by mixing them together in the context of a song and placing cues on offbeats. It’s a test of both your rhythm and reaction time, set against playfully silly animations that occasionally try to distract you from your goal of clearing stages, and perfecting them with practice to earn medals. (If this sounds like a long-winded introduction to simple rules, know that each minigame starts with its own skippable tutorial that’s sometimes as long as the game itself.)
The strength of a Rhythm Heaven game is directly tied to how goofy the toons are, and Groove is mostly middle-of-the-road in its absurdity. Many of the minigames are fairly tame: a woman catching veggies on beat, a trio of cars accelerating and braking together, frogs jumping on lily pads. They’re full of punchy sound cues that are easy to follow, but sometimes unmemorable as comedy routines. More successful games find their groove by messing with you; one stage that has you bouncing macarons between crabs gets a little devilish when someone on the beach places a soda can right in front of the action for a few beats.
Only a handful of games got full-on laughs out of me, in the way that the series’ iconic wrestling interview or screaming choir minigames once did. The best of the batch puts me in a row of high-fiving robots who dance as stock photos of buff construction workers flash on screen. That’s the ideal Rhythm Heaven level: where the challenge is staying on beat while trying not to crack up. A few stages nail that perfect formula, but plenty of others are charming enough with their cast of weirdo cartoons.
Some minigames spice up an old formula with unusual rhythm patterns; one has me catching frisbees as a dog, but I need to press A on the seventh beat so the pup nabs it on the eighth. Others play with two-button setups, like one standout game that has me controlling two little freaks hopping over windshield wipers. Ideas like that keep Groove varied enough in its limited rhythm premise, as do some true earworm bops that are a joy to tap along to. But there are times when it feels like the series has hit its ceiling. How do you iterate on an idea like this and keep it fresh over decades? Maybe Groove is about as good as it can get for Rhythm Heaven.
I know that’s not true, though. In the 11-year gap between Groove and the series’ last entry, Rhythm Heaven Megamix, we’ve seen plenty of independent developers take a stab at the format with great success. Melatonin stands out by tightly theming its minigames around the idea that you’re playing through a series of dreams. Last year’s wonderful Bits & Bops builds more narrative structure into its vignettes, turning them into short stories about chatting lovebirds and thieving ants. Rhythm Doctor is even more ambitious, borrowing Rhythm Heaven’s hook and turning it into a complex game built entirely around seven-note sequences. All of those ideas are exciting variations on a theme, where Groove is comfortable breaking out the same old song and dance. There’s a one-way conversation happening between Rhythm Heaven and the games it inspired, and the former could stand to talk back.
Rhythm Heaven Groove is a little too comfortable playing the hits.
Groove does find a little room to get experimental outside its primary run of solo playlists, at least. New to the package is Beatspell, an RPG dungeon crawler minigame where you cast magic and healing spells by hitting specific button combinations in time with music. A fire attack only requires you to press B and A on back-to-back beats, but more advanced spells are triggered by complicated patterns that mix in half-beats and rests. It’s the stroke of brilliance a series this static needs, though it also feels like a first draft of a more complete idea. Most of the levels in Beatspell feel more like tutorials for a rhythm roguelike that’s only teased at the very end.
I feel the same way about the package’s multiplayer offerings, made up of 10 co-op and competitive games with three variants each. There are some excellent ideas here that could fuel a robust party collection on par with WarioWare. One four-player game is a great RPG send-up, where a party of tennis players knock rows of approaching monsters back with timed shots. The competitive games are even better, though there are only a few to try out. My favorite in the batch has players sitting around a table and trying to nab a piece of cake by hitting A when a countdown ends. When the clock fades off-screen, everyone has to keep counting in their heads to get the timing just right. Tension and comedy ensue as everyone slaps the table completely out of sync with the rhythm. That’s the best laugh in the whole package.
Few of these experiences really get enough time to develop into something you’d play more than once or twice. A potentially excellent game where players need to blast blocks on beat to get to the center of a grid only flirts with the idea of a tactical minigame filled with special blocks that open the door for Bomberman-style strategy. I’d welcome a Rhythm Heaven game that fleshed out a few strong modes rather than one that tries to fill a chest with as many music toys as it can.
And there sure are a lot of toys to play with in Groove. You have a suite of high-score minigames, a set of beat pads that lets you make simple loops, a collection of tricky drum lessons that are unlocked as you gather gold medals, and more. That’s rounded out by a ton of collectible comic strips and story snippets that give you a lot to chase if you’re going for 100% perfection. It all makes for the series’ most robust minigame compilation yet, though a good chunk of the extras are little more than novelty noisemakers.
Considering that it’s been over a decade since the series’ last installment, it’s reasonable that Rhythm Heaven Groove acts as a reintroduction rather than a reinvention. It reheats some reliable, toe-tapping silliness for a new generation of Nintendo players, and packs in just enough curiosities to surprise old fans returning to a static series for the sixth time. But without the outsider charm that once made the series wholly unique, Groove is a little too comfortable playing the hits. A fresh sound, or at least a good remix, is in order if the series is going to keep sharing the stage with a new class of musical weirdos.
Rhythm Heaven Groove will be released July 2 on Nintendo Switch. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 using a prerelease download code provided by Nintendo. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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