Creating a unique rhythm game is the main focus that makes one title stand out over another. Well, that and the actual songs in the playlist. For SURT and tinyBuild that meant creating a kid-friendly story with a beginner-friendly play style in Rhythm Sprout: Sick Beats and Bad Sweets. While the whole game doesn’t maintain a beginner-friendly challenge rating, the gradual increase in skill for each level invites players that are new to the genre to grow a gradual yet slightly rapid rate.

Story

Oh no! The Sweets are sending their people to invade the Vegetable Kingdom! In order to fight back, the king sends out his ultimate warrior - you, the chosen onion. With your sword skill and rhythmic ability, it is time for you to step up and take on a journey that can save the kingdom. Head out to the sweet kingdom to take on the evil Sugar Daddy and be sure to take out any sweets you come across along the way.

Gameplay

This game offers a few things in the form of their gameplay. While the whole game comes down to three keys being pressed in their proper sequence as it appears on the screen, those who are just getting used to these types of games can put it on Beginner mode. This will make it so all Left and Right arrows will be one block that can be hit with either arrow, making accuracy more focused on timing.

The third button in the list is Down which acts as a Dodge. Most of the time, you won’t see this used outside of fight encounters as there is nothing to dodge with no enemies. However, when you do encounter an enemy, the music will have a natural shift and the rhythm will change up slightly for the encounter. The fight lasts until you hit enough notes to take them out or until you miss enough dodges that you are defeated.

Each block uses a different color to indicate which arrow to hit. As I mentioned before, the Beginner mode blends two of them. So while Yellow and Purple mean either Left or Right, the Beginner mode shows a Yellow and Purple block. Dodge blocks are always blue.

Once you beat a level, you can go through it again with modifiers to change up the challenge. These modifiers include a randomizer and a speed increase, which those two alone are enough to fully change up a song’s difficulty. Once you beat enough of the game, you will unlock a side mission campaign and a few extra levels. Both the side mission and the extra levels are harder than the campaign, so once you get your skills up you can take these sections on to prove your talents.

To specify further, the extra levels are unlocked by obtaining a certain amount of stars. You get stars at the completion of each level based on your score and combo count. You don’t even have to do amazing on every song to unlock all of the extra songs though, so there isn’t too much stress when it comes to unlocking these levels.

Audio and Visual

This game holds a very cartoonish style throughout the game. Given you play as an onion warrior taking on evil sweets, I would say the art style is very fitting. Even the environments for each level are cartoonish but they do a good job showing an actual journey being made as the adventure takes you through a variety of different locations.

When it comes to the audio, they kept it really simple with sound effects and had the voice work for characters simply come through as garbled language. Since the story is silly and not really important, this was a fine choice as it puts focus on the music itself. The music in this game felt like it had a good variety to it, even if it wasn’t always great. Regardless, it is impressive that the shift in songs when it changes from the adventure to a combat encounter and vice versa manages to be incredibly smooth.

Replayability

Other than the beginner mode, there isn’t much of a difficulty slider on the game. So, while you are improving your skills, then there is still plenty of replayability, especially with the extra modes that can alter the songs. However, there aren’t a lot of songs (50 in total) and the only ones that are challenging enough that I found fun enough to play more than once were only a handful. If you’re a rhythm game master, then this game likely won’t offer much replayability to you.

What It Could Have Done Better

For a visual aspect, when there was a dodge key placed in a song outside of a combat encounter, it would have been nice for there to be a reason for the dodge. It felt silly to see my character dodge in the middle of his journey when there was no threat. Something as simple as an environment trap, such as an arrow shooting out of a wall, would make for a good visual inclination as to why dodge keys are in the middle of songs.

With a story as kid-friendly as this one, I was surprised to see that there weren’t actual difficulty options in the game. Sure, beginner mode lets players focus on the rhythm itself, but that still would be too hard for some players. Rhythm games should always offer a large variety of difficulty options with the top difficulty feeling impossible to even the most skilled players.

Verdict

Rhythm Sprout is a cute introduction to the rhythm genre! Despite the fact that the game can get a little difficult pretty quickly for someone who is just getting started with this genre, it is definitely a neat game to introduce someone to the rhythm genre. There are only three keys, most of the time they only utilize two of them, and the beginner mode brings it down to any one key of choice. Getting used to following the music can be something that comes in steps and this game offers those steps in a way that feels a bit like ‘sink or swim’ with a practice mode option.

Rhythm Sprout: Sick Beats and Bad Sweets will launch on February 1st for PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.