‘Rhythm Heaven Groove’ Is Back After a Decade to Test Your Reflexes With Over 100 Games

My nerves were shot playing “Rhythm Heaven Groove,” the first entry in more than a decade in the fast-paced rhythm game series.

Timing is everything in the latest title, released Thursday on the Nintendo Switch. Gamers will have to listen closely to the beats and have a perfectly precise internal metronome as they attempt a gauntlet of 80 single-player games and 30 multiplayer challenges.

The series began with Japan’s “Rhythm Tengoku” in 2006 on the GameBoy Advance, which introduced gamers to the musical minigames that were simple yet difficult to master. The franchise came to the rest of the world with “Rhythm Heaven” on the Nintendo DS a couple years later. The games had a lot in common, including a developer, with the popular “WarioWare” games, which starred Mario’s nemesis in his own series of funny, rhythm-based micro-games. Then, “Rhythm Heaven Fever” added motion controls the Wii in 2011 and returned to handhelds with the “Megamix” compilation in 2015.

Now 11 years later, “Rhythm Heaven Groove” can take full control of the Switch’s high-fidelity motion controls. Players will be hopping, throwing, rolling, shooting and more in a broad test of their reflexes. In a hands-on demo, some of the games involved opening and closing your adorable character’s umbrella in line with three others; tossing a frisbee to a dog on the beach running at various speeds; and chopping vegetables in quick succession to make a finely-sliced salad. All of the games were easy to pick up, but nearly impossible to get a perfect score. Plus, all of the songs put you in a nearly hypnotic trance that forces you to count in your head or tap your foot along to the beats. By the end of your playtime, you’ll likely be counting in four-beat or even seven-beat rhythms for the rest of the day.

You’ll also be able to recruit three more friends for nerve-frying challenges that put you on teams or head-to-head. One game sits four people around a table with one slice of cake in the middle, but only the player with the most precise timing will enjoy the tasty treat. A timer counts down, and whoever can press their controller as close to zero seconds as possible wins. It was a quick but deceptively hard game that rewards those with the best sense of timing. But if that was tough, another ninja-inspired minigame broke the four of us. We had to defend a caravan from archers, who shot their arrows at different intervals. Each of us had to watch our opponent closely and time our sword slices at the exact right time to protect our cargo. We had a shared pool of lives, so if one person couldn’t nail their timing, we all lost. This was the only game that none of us could finish, and it left me itching to keep trying for hours.

“Rhythm Heaven Groove’s” other mode is a brand-new fantasy adventure called “Beatspell.” It’s a departure from the usual quirky minigames and puts you in control of a mage using different rhythm-based attacks to defeat monsters. Your character starts out with a two-beat fire attack, but you’ll soon level up and unlock a three-beat healing spell to throw into the mix. As you advance and fight more dangerous monsters, you’ll need to master the timing of your spells to dispatch them. For a game with an already dizzying amount of variety, “Beatspell” is fun addition with a surprising amount of depth.

Like its predecessors, “Rhythm Heaven Groove” is perfect for both casual gamers in search of a fun party game, or masochists who want to put their rhythm skills to the ultimate test. Along with “Beatspell” and the multiplayer games, there are more than enough options — and catchy songs — for hours of entertainment.