Guitar Hero was my jam as a teenager.
I bought a real drum kit after playing Guitar Hero World Tour. I even briefly held a world record for the top score on Katy Perry’s Waking Up in Vegas thanks to a perfect expert run and the AEST time zone which saw the game launch in Australia before most places in the world.
Rhythm games are my jam. I loved Bit.Trip Runner and every music-infused level of Rayman Legends.
And yet, I’ve never touched a Rhythm Heaven game.
The series — known as Rhythm Paradise here in Australia — has only ever appeared on Nintendo handhelds. Now, after an 11 year hiatus, the franchise’s first new entry in a decade is coming to the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
Rhythm Paradise Groove is not my favourite.
Off Beat
I made an effort to earn a medal in all 80 of its single-player stages and, while I had fun with many of them (and even laughed out loud at one), I struggled to find a real challenge in any of its short, shallow levels.
Most of these mini-games are restricted to one or two buttons. I didn’t mind that initially off the back of 20+ hours spamming lasers in Nintendo’s excellent Star Fox remake (I could play left-handed and give my RSI a break) but it also never got more complicated than that as the settings for the mini-games got more and more ridiculous.
Bouncing fruit of a body-builder’s biceps, slicing through ghosts as a lone samurai and sprinting past a gap in the fence to avoid the gaze of an angry, sneezing moon are all incredible excuses to push a button to the sound of a beat. The one which made me laugh out loud cycled through stock images of construction workers as my troupe of cartoonish high-fiving stick-figures teleported from one bizarre location to the next clapping in time (trust me, it’s funnier than it sounds).
Unfortunately, for every killer game there’s a boring one right behind it.
Repeatedly crushing cans with a hammer, popping balls as they fall off a conveyor belt and sorting between good and poisoned pudding as a robot on a production line are not fun fantasies to live out – and they return for a second serve!
Rhythm Paradise Groove does feature 80 single-player minigames but only 30 of those are unique. Another 30 are just tougher versions of the same levels and 20 are ‘remixes’ that combine elements of multiple stages into one.
Monotonous Music
My biggest gripe is the music itself. None of the tunes in Rhythm Paradise Groove are recognisable songs.
I know that’s not what the game is meant to be. I know it’s about responding to visual and audio cues which may be difficult to blend with songs we all hear on Spotify. But the songs we get instead just aren’t ear worms. Because each game is limited to one or two inputs, you’ll also hear the same sound effects over and over and over and over. My wife actually leaned over to say “that is so annoying” as the same “hop, step, jump” cue was rapidly repeated every time my pixelated runner needed to leap over a hurdle.
I was playing without headphones because over Bluetooth the game is basically unplayable. The lag was that bad. There is a setting that helps you calibrate the beat to the lag on your TV but, as far as I can tell, there is no way to compensate for wireless headphones.
Overall, the presentation is very basic. Most of the minigames look about as good as the flash games I used to play on my computer as a kid and you navigate between them via a pretty bland menu system. The game even tells you when you boot it up “there might not be an epic story, but there are a lot of quirky games that I hope will make you smile.”
Is It Worth Your Money?
Rhythm Paradise Groove definitely made me smile at times.
It has more minigames to play than any in franchise history (including 30 multiplayer games which were simple enough for me to attempt solo with two Joy-Con), a short but cute magic casting campaign called Beatspell and a full drum kit to play with each tom and symbol tied to a button on the controller.
If you’ve been waiting more than a decade for a new Rhythm Heaven game, Rhythm Paradise Groove launches on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 on July 2, 2026.
Quest Daily scores Rhythm Paradise Groove:
5/10
Nintendo provided the author early access to Rhythm Paradise Groove for this review.
