Rhythm Paradise Groove review: you’ve got the music in you

Rhythm Paradise Groove, also known as Rhythm Heaven Groove in other territories, is a game that demands your attention. Whether locked onto the gaze of an all-seeing moon or bouncing fruits on the glistening pecs of a beach bodybuilder, you must give your all to accomplish its many musical tasks.

And if you have not a skerrick of rhythm in your body, you might quickly find yourself failing over and over – to the disappointment of the game’s tiny fairy mascot and all of its little, adorable people.

Feel the music in Rhythm Paradise Groove

In Rhythm Paradise Groove, your task is relatively simple. In sandbox fashion, you’re presented with an array of mini-games in allocated stages. Each gives you a rhythm-based problem to solve. Frogs need help leaping into the sky. Ghosts need to escape the wrath of a vengeful moon. A woman must chop vegetables in her kitchen. Little dolls need to perform a dance to satisfying their loving audience.

And of course, a beach bodybuilder needs to bounce fruit off his pecs.

Each of these activities relies on pressing a button to a firm beat at exactly the right moment – within a fraction of a second. Some mini-games are more generous with their time limit than others, but in every case you’ll need to pay attention to the audio cues and time your button presses to an incredibly unforgiving beat.

You’d be surprised by the sheer variety that this simplistic gameplay mechanic allows, and the creativity inherent in each and every mini-game here.

Sometimes you’re counting in your head. Sometimes, you’re unleashing magical spells by bopping your way through dungeons. Sometimes you’ll be having a blast as you tap-tap through a light-hearted, silly challenge. Other times you’ll feel the tension in your shoulders as you anxiously await the correct beat to fall.

There’s always an ebb and flow in these mini-games, so if one proves particularly hard – I had a terrible time waiting for the moon to sneeze, and timing my little ghost’s rolls to the achoo! – the next will be a bit kinder, offering a nice mix of variety and a real sense that you can achieve greatness, if only you try.

Remix modes and additional mini-games add flavour

What works so well about the flow of Rhythm Paradise Groove is that it understands pacing, even across its scattered array of mini-games. There’s no firm story here, but there is a structure, with multiple stages determining progress.

In each stage, you get a handful of mini-games to complete, with these capped off by a special Remix stage that functions as a high-energy mish-mash of all the mini-games of that stage, squashed together. These are the most delightful and most challenging parts of Rhythm Paradise Groove.

With each mini-game having its own cadence and mechanics – pushing down, pushing left, pressing A, pausing and waiting, or going at a rapid pace – these remixes are all about maintaining your rhythm and your nerve. You’ll need to be able to switch your flow sharply, paying attention to key and timing changes, and ensuring you’re keeping up at every turn.

If one particular mini-game proves challenging – the moon! – you may find your beats jarring. You’ll get a pause, a frown, and the game swiftly moves on. The Amazing-ranked trophy will evade you, and you’ll need to start the entire minutes-long remix again.

As hinted, I have trouble keeping a beat.

I did play cello, clarinet and guitar in high school, but it’s all escaped me now. The moment I miss a note, my steady concentration is no longer enough – it’s all chaos and flailing, and a deep sigh as I click ‘restart’.

But even in these challenges, Rhythm Paradise proves to be plenty of bright, bouncy fun. The game requires effort, but that’s rewarded in tiny little trophies, and a diverse string of clever mini-games, all of which play around with beats in novel ways.

It’s also consistently encouraging, leaving space for you to experiment, to learn, and to try again next time.

A refreshing variety keeps the beat pumping

In any mini-game collection like this, there are fair concerns about variety and longevity. But the Rhythm Paradise Groove development team clearly had this in mind from the start, with a robust array of unlockable mini-games to keep pace with player fervour.

The game doesn’t give you a moment to rest, with an ever-expanding array of new games to play, all with their own unique mechanics to keep you grooving. There are 80 single-player rhythm games included here, many of which are minutes long and require multiple tries to master, as well as 30 additional multiplayer games for those who want to groove alongside their friends.

You will unlock these mini-games at a rapid pace. But then you also get the joy of mastering them, with optional trophies for each mini-game and remix, and these unlocking even more content in other parts of the game.

One of the most interesting parts of Rhythm Paradise Groove, and a core reason why I doggedly pursued trophies across my favourite mini-games – frog-leaping, alien-speaking, fruit-bouncing and tomato chopping – was completing the game’s fantasy dungeon mode, Beatspell.

Across several trophy-locked chapters, you’re tasked with performing spells to take down roaming enemies. These are performed, as with other mechanics in the game, by tapping a beat to a set rhythm, visually depicted as a four-pointed diamond.

Jumping between B and A on a regular rhythm, you’ll be able to unleash a fire attack. If you can pull off a rhythm with an additional half-beat between, you can also heal yourself, and eventually perform other attacks. What results is a heart-pounding beat of slinging spells, with all sorts of things to pay attention to as you bop – how much health you have, how much health your enemy has, and how close you are to the end.

It’s frantic, it’s fun and it’s really, really challenging. That’s the perfect mix to keep you striving to be better, and to hit those cues exactly.

An entirely worthy follow-on to the Rhythm Paradise franchise

As one of the first major Rhythm Paradise / Rhythm Heaven games in quite some time, there was plenty of anticipation backing Rhythm Paradise Groove.

It more than meets those lofty expectations, with its slick mix of mini-games and creative use of catchy tunes making it a must-play for rhythm game fans. While those without rhythm may find its many challenges frustrating on occasion, there is a real variety here, and a patience to teach those in need of more time and generosity.

As a complete package, Rhythm Paradise Groove absolutely sings. It more than lives up to the legacy of its fan-favourite predecessors.

A code for Rhythm Paradise Groove on Nintendo Switch 2 was provided to ScreenHub for the purposes of this review.

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