Rhythm Heaven

Platform:  Nintendo Wii
Developer:  Nintendo

Ostensibly a series of musical mini-games that are based around timing and ‘Simon-says’ repetition challenges, Rhythm Heaven has a charming presentation style and after the first two mini-games ‘Built to Scale’ and ‘Glee Club’, I was quickly won over.

Ten stages later however, I put the game down, all the goodwill was spoiled and didn’t come back to it.  I want to love this game but it is simply too difficult.  The Nintendo soft-touch is mysteriously absent here.  If you don’t complete a stage perfectly, even a single mistake will see you scored as ‘just okay’ and you are rewarded with a negative musical chord.  Then the later stages, the table tennis one in particular, are just stupidly hard and took me multiple attempts to complete.  This is completely at odds with the friendly and cheerful presentation and I think is a rather severe  misjudgment on the designer’s part.  The presentation appears to invite you in for some entertaining bite-sized levels that you could finish in a coffee break but the level of concentration and difficulty curve just kill it dead.