Rift of the NecroDancer review

Rhythm games come in all shapes and sizes, but where my personal journey started with the genre was Guitar Hero. As a youngster with paper round money burning a hole in his pocket, that plastic guitar was simply impossible to resist. I spent years trying to become a rock god across various entries in this franchise, and so did thousands and thousands of other fans. Rift of the NecroDancer brings me back to those wonderful lazy days of strumming, with a rhythm game that initially seems straightforward and then before you know it beats the snot out of you.

Despite being a game focused heavily on timing button presses to the beat to get a high score, there’s actually a story mode in Rift of the NecroDancer. When dragged into another dimension by a portal (or rift, I suppose) our hero Cadence can only survive by taking down the monsters within with the power of music. There are loads of other characters who find themselves trapped in this world too, be they friendly faces from Cadence’s past or long since defeated foes, and only by working together will you all escape to the real world. Playing through the story mode is a nice way to get to grips with the game by playing the songs in an ideal order, and although not the most sweeping emotional narrative, the story scenes are charming enough that they never feel intrusive.

The actual gameplay of Rift of the NecroDancer will feel immediately familiar to even passing rhythm game fans. There’s a line at the bottom of the screen, and “notes” that come from the top of the screen that you need to hit when they reach that line. This is all done in time to banging tunes of course, which helps you reach that wonderful trance state where only rhythm exists.

Where Rift of the NecroDancer differs from those well known rhythm games of the past is the notes, which are actually little fantasy enemies. Each enemy type has its own rules to hit it correctly, from simple green slimes that just require a button press, to skeletons that once hit will lose their head on run backwards away from the line until stopped by another note. It’s a wild twist that completely changes how you play the game, requiring you to think ahead just as much as feel the rhythm.

As you progress the enemy types only get more wild too, like bats that change lanes when hit, or giant skulls that spawn skeletons when hit based on the direction they’re facing. I won’t pretend it doesn’t take a bit of practice (and a few fairly lengthy tutorials) to get to grips with all these different foes, but once you do it adds a layer to a usually more basic rhythm game setup I really appreciated.

You’ll spend the vast majority of your time in Rift of the NecroDancer taking on new and more fast paced songs, and if you’re anything like me you’ll die a few times on the tougher ones. In each song you start with ten HP, and missing a note will cause you to lose one of those precious hit points. There are some food “notes” you can hit on the lanes to heal you which can mitigate your damage, and you can also use a power meter you build up to enter a mode which doubles your multiplier and causes you to take no damage (which is particularly handy when you approach a tricky section of a song). Using every survival tool at your disposal is key when facing the traps and tricks this game likes to throw at you, especially if you stubbornly refuse to drop below medium difficulty like me.

Outside of the standard stages, Rift of the NecroDancer also likes to throw minigames and bosses at you throughout the story. The minigames are a lot of fun, and are reminiscent of the silly little rhythmic tasks thrown at you in the Rhythm Heaven games. Boss fights however are a little less impressive, swapping the regular note line and enemies with circular notes that are harder to track. Thankfully there are only a handful of these to play, as they are way worse than everything else the game has to offer.

It’s worth mentioning the sheer amount of content Rift of the NecroDancer contains, because it’s pretty damn impressive. There are a ton of songs to play and unlock in the game, all of which have four difficulty levels to try and survive. It will take many many hours to master this offering, and even then thanks to Steam Workshop support there are custom songs to download too. Even pre-release I was able to download a Billy Hatcher tune, and an Undertale song, and I can only imagine that the selection will grow exponentially in the next few months.

Without fantastic music a rhythm game would be miserable to play no matter how well made it was, and fortunately that isn’t the case here. With a long list of artists but headlined by Danny Baranowsky (composer of Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac and Crypt of the NecroDancer) the tracks are as varied as they are enjoyable to play along to. Soundtracks simply don’t get better than this.

I had a splendid time with this superb rhythm game, but it does have a few issues. The most prominent of these is just how hard it is to master, with certain elements like offbeat enemies really posing a problem to me. The controls (if you’re using a controller) don’t particularly help with this either, and it does feel designed for keyboard inputs mainly. You can use either the top three directions of the D-pad or the top three face buttons to hit notes, but because pressing them together to hit multiple notes is a bit fiddly you’ll end up sort of using both sides in tandem. It took my brain a while to really gel with this way of playing, and although I can’t think of a more elegant solution outside of grabbing a Guitar Hero controller, it did still detract from the early hours of the game.

Rift of the NecroDancer is a game that will absorb rhythm game fans for a long time, with clever gameplay and, more importantly, a sensational soundtrack. It’ll take some effort to get to grips with all the enemies the game throws your way, but once you do you’ll be in rhythm heaven and will never want to leave.