Rhythm Heaven Fever Review

If you look at the Wii games coming out this year, there really isn’t much to choose from. Aside from Xenoblade Chronicles finally coming to North America, the only games to be remotely excited about are Rhythm Heaven Fever and Mario Party 9. Both of these games are essentially mini-game compilations, which have flooded store shelves since day one on the Wii. With Rhythm Heaven Fever, it adds an interesting rhythmic twist that helps to keep the game fresh throughout, but a few odd design choices keep it from reaching its true potential.

For anyone who hasn’t played the DS version of the game, Rhythm Heaven Fever, puts you into various tasks, such as hitting a baseball or playing golf. In order to interact with the game, you must simply hit buttons in accordance with the rhythm of the music playing in the background. If you’re worried that you’ll have to memorize a ton of different button moves, fear not, you will only use the A and B buttons on your Wiimote. It may seem a little odd to have a Wii mini-game compilation that doesn’t use any motion controls, but it helps to keep the game very accessible for people of every age and the mini-games themselves keep the gameplay fresh.

In those mini-games, they will each start out with a tutorial that walks you through what you’ll be doing in each stage. I found that throughout Rhythm Heaven Fever’s 50+ mini-games, you pretty much have to watch the tutorial because each game has a different rhythm and different scenarios, meaning that you can’t simply jump into a game. That almost mandatory tutorial does slow the pace down quite a bit, but each mini-game does generally have a few layers so it saves a lot of frustration down the line.

With so many games to choose from, you might think Rhythm Heaven Fever could get boring or repetitive, but it does a very good job of keeping those mini-games from becoming stale. Even though you essentially do the same thing throughout the game (tapping in rhythm), you’ll find yourself keeping basketballs away from two chipmunks on a date, playing a tambourine with a monkey, killing demons with a sword, and catching fish. My personal favourite would easily be the one where you play as a dog flying a plane and next to you is a cat flying a plane. For no reason, you decide to start playing badminton and the fun never ends. Not only is it a very frantic experience trying to time your button presses just right, the voice of the cat is hilarious. There are definitely a lot of stand out games in Rhythm Heaven Fever, mixed with a few really bad and frustrating ones, but the good definitely outweighs the bad. Behind that crazy, wacky exterior though, is a seedy underbelly of poor design choices.

Despite the nice mix in the different games you can play, there are some glaring problems with Rhythm Heaven Fever. For starters, even though there are a ton of mini-games, you have to unlock each one, one at a time, obviously a conscious effort to extend the life of the game. This means that if you get stuck on a game, or a Remix that combines the previous 4 mini-games, you are forced to become good enough to beat it. There’s no way to skip past it, meaning that you could replay the same game upwards of twenty times.

Now, this wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating if the game told you exactly where you messed up, but it doesn’t. Instead of showing you a percent at the end of each game showing how well you did, it just says ‘Try Again’, ‘Ok’, or ‘Superb’. You wouldn’t believe how many times I thought I passed, only to find that I failed, with no explanation as to why or how close I came to passing. Oddly though, the game’s 2 player mode shows exactly how well each player did, but the 2 player mode just reveals more disappointment. 

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Instead of including the full roster of games in 2 player mode, you are limited to about 8 and you only unlock those after progressing far enough into the single player campaign. Not only that, but in a game where you just hit two buttons, why isn’t there a 4 player mode included? Being able to get 3 of your friends together, tapping along to the same song would have been great, but it is a huge missed opportunity. There may be endless versions of the few 2 player mini-games, but you will get bored with the games after a short period of time.

Now, despite the problems with Rhythm Heaven Fever, it is definitely worth picking for fans of the DS version, or for anyone looking for an interesting change of pace. It may be lacking in a few areas, but the $30 price tag definitely makes this purchase easier to recommend.

Rhythm Heaven Fever was reviewed with a copy provided by Nintendo. You can purchase Rhythm Heaven Fever for $29.99 starting on February 13th.