Rift of the NecroDancer Review (Switch eShop)

Canadian developer Brace Yourself Games first hit the spotlight with Crypt of the NecroDancer, a rhythm-based roguelike, all the way back in 2015. Dungeon crawling to a relentless beat became the new dance craze sweeping the nation, and it was warmly welcomed into the Switch indie canon with the 2019 Zelda tie-in Cadence of Hyrule.

This time, Brace Yourself has teamed up with Tic Toc Games for a fun spin-off that trades dungeon crawling for guitar shredding. It’s still rhythm-based and still builds to mind-bending, chaotic action, but it’s also still surprisingly puzzley, like Guitar Hero had a baby with Ikaruga. And there’s zombies. It’s not often that a game makes you feel like you’re solving a puzzle, dodging traffic, and playing a gig all at once, but Rift of the NecroDancer likes to keep you busy.

Story-wise, our star Cadence is back. As the game opens, she suddenly finds a guitar in her hands where there had previously been a shovel, a rift in reality gapes open and off she pops out of her own timeline and into a modern world. There, further rifts are tearing open and monsters streaming through. She meets other characters from Crypt of the NecroDancer and works with them to stymie the monster flow by jamming on her guitar. It doesn’t sound like the kind of story they’ll make into a film, but you never know.

Anyway, it’s all about the action. Each battle unfolds across three vertical lanes. Enemies bop down to the beat, left, right, and centre, and you’ve got to knock them back before they chomp you in the face. Simple enough, right?

Well, no. Apart from the rhythm they dance to – some on the beat, some syncopated – each enemy type has its own attack behaviour. Green slimes, for example, require single hits, while blues need two. In effect, what looks like one note on the 'score' is actually two, to be hit on consecutive beats.

And that’s just the start: other enemy types move lanes as they descend, requiring you to match their position as they reach you; some dodge to the side after being hit; some run away when hit, then come back for more.

The effect, then, is that the actual musical score is obscured behind a wall of clues that need to be deciphered as you play. Unlike other music games, Rift isn’t just presenting difficult or satisfying things to play; it’s making a game of it. We’d even say this makes the concept of a standard music game feel kind of dry, in the sense that they just tell you what to play, and the game is for you to play it. Here, the game is to work out what to play in real time – and then execute on it as well.

It leads to the kind of in-the-zone play where you’re not sure how your brain is making sense of what’s on the screen, but it seems that it must be because somehow you’re chaining Perfects.

This does mean that, difficulty-wise, things get pretty tough pretty quickly. The kind of freewheeling, 'How am I even doing this?' feeling really only came with Medium difficulty for us – harder than that became a step too far on later stages, and Easy was almost like a different game in terms of its simplicity. We were relieved the easy setting was there, though, to get through some tough moments, but it significantly reduces the need to compute multiple enemy types at once, which is where the galaxy brain stuff starts to happen. The game kindly lets you switch difficulties on the fly, which was a godsend in those moments when our brain was saying yes but our thumbs were saying no, or vice versa.

In between the battles, which are the main attraction, Rift features a grab-bag of rhythm minigames. You might be building burgers to a techno beat, marching onstage in a humiliating costume, or just performing quite aggressive yoga. These are quick-fire, Rhythm Heaven-style distractions, and while they’re not all winners, they do a good enough job of keeping the campaign varied.

Further spicing things up are the boss fights. These throw in a mixture of ideas, including callbacks to the shrinking circles of Elite Beat Agents and attack-dodging tests of reflexes reminiscent of Punch-Out!! They’re clever, and make the most of the charismatic character designs while still getting your brain to basically perform interpretive dance while you sit and watch.

A rhythm game lives or dies by its soundtrack and, undead enemies notwithstanding, Rift definitely lives. The music spans rock, synth pop, funk, and more, each track tied into the characters and story beats. Unlike a music game where your actions play the tune, here you’re overlaying the accidental grunts, squelches and clangs of combat, which can trample the vibe a little. Maybe it would have been nice if the sound effects were more stylised to become part of the music.

The levels are well designed to let the music partly decipher what’s onscreen. Parsing all the information charging down the screen at you can be helped along by the prominent rhythms of the track letting on how many button presses you’re likely to need. That said, while music drives the energy, you’re still very much dependent on working with the visual cues of enemy animations, wind-ups, and movement tells, a bit like playing poker in a disco.

Outside the main story mode, which lasts around five hours, you can select any track, toggling a Remix Mode for extra variety. Add in daily challenges and the ability to replay boss battles and minigames from the campaign and there’s a lot here to chew on, especially if you like chasing high scores.

Performance on Switch is solid and inputs are snappy. A special shoutout goes to the audio and video latency calibration, which effectively teaches the game what “Perfect” means to you, providing a basis for evaluating your inputs while you play. This means the game always plays in a way that feels natural and fair.