Rhythm Heaven Groove (Switch)

While I've been a fan of rhythm games for a while now, I have never had the opportunity to play a Rhythm Heaven game. With the announcement of Rhythm Heaven Groove I finally got the opportunity to try the series for the first time. As the title suggests, the game is purely rhythmic with some visual flourishes, so it's not going to be for everyone. If - like me - you enjoy this style of game, then you are in for a heavenly time! The game is presented through more than 80 different "songs" with have little relation to each other, outside of some recurring characters. Each song has you timing beats at different cadences, often with some distracting visual or audio noise to complicate things. If you are able to keep the beat and clear a stage, you are rewarded with a rating and a new song - make too many mistakes and you will have to try again. If you do an exceptional job with few misses, you are rewarded with a medal for that song. As you collect more medals, you unlock a piece of side content called Beatspell, which plays as an interesting take on a rhythm-roguelike. In short, you cast spells such as fireball and cure using different rhythmic patterns in order to defeat monsters. Despite being bonus content, Beatspell was a lot of fun and feels like it could easily be expanded into a standalone game - the final boss in particular was very challenging and showed the possible depth. The core game is excellent as well, and it hits a particularly strong stride in the second half of the stage catalogue - entitled the "flipside". The games range in difficulty but there is really only one or two stages that had me groaning (looking at you Spirit Slicer 2). Otherwise, I had a great time traversing the stages, and retrying particularly fun songs in an effort to unlock their medals. As an added challenge and incentive to keep players coming back, certain medaled songs will occasionally become available for the opportunity to get a Perfect rating. To do this, you need to complete the song with no mistakes, while only being allowed three attempts - if you fail, then you lose your chance to perfect that song until it next appears. While this may be irritating to some players, I appreciated it as it made the Perfect opportunities all the more intense. Ultimately, Rhythm Heaven Groove is a fantastic rhythm game, and one that I would recommend to anyone with a Nintendo Switch. Even if you don't like rhythm games, I would encourage you to give this one a try to see if it can change your mind.

Play it for the:

Jovial characters and stages
Abundant challenges and ample replayability
Groovy soundtrack, particularly the remixes

Reviewed on 2026-7-12

The background can get distracting, but it's always in good fun.