Rhythm Heaven Groove Crushes It After 10-Year Wait

"Groove's collection is great. I don't think there is a single game among its more than 100 single and multiplayer games that I actively dislike." That's Game Informer in its 8.25/10 review of Rhythm Heaven Groove, and it might be the most telling line in the entire review cycle. Not because it's the highest praise the game received, but because even the more measured critics can't find much to complain about.

Rhythm Heaven Groove launched today on Nintendo Switch, and the reviews paint a picture of a series that hasn't lost a step despite being gone for roughly a decade. The game currently holds an 82 on Metacritic based on 53 critic reviews. CGMagazine went all the way to a 10/10, while Pocket Tactics landed at 9/10, calling it "exactly what I was hoping for as a long-time fan" and highlighting the $39.99 price point as a genuine value. IGN matched that 9/10, praising the minigame variety while noting the RPG-inspired Beatspell mode didn't quite land. On the lower end, GFinity gave it a 7/10, warning that the timing windows are "brutal" despite the cute cartoon aesthetic.

I love that spread. An 82 Metascore with scores ranging from 7 to 10 tells me this isn't a safe, watered-down comeback designed to offend nobody. It's a game with real teeth that some critics bounced off of precisely because it demands actual rhythm skills. That's exactly what a Rhythm Heaven game should be.

Ten Years of Silence

The last entry in this series, Rhythm Heaven Megamix, hit the 3DS in 2015 in Japan and 2016 in the West. For the entire Switch generation, fans had nothing. No port, no remaster, no announcement. Nintendo Life's reviewer Gavin Lane put it well in his 8/10 review, calling Groove "the perfect mic-drop for Switch 1" and admitting he'd been worried the series would skip the console entirely. As the final first-party Switch 1 game announced at the time of writing, Groove carries a strange weight: it's both a long-overdue return and a farewell to the original Switch's library.

Nintendo is clearly treating this as an event, too. Seven tracks from Groove have already been added to Nintendo Music as a "special release," and new Rhythm Heaven Groove icons are available on Nintendo Switch Online for both Switch and Switch 2 through July 29. The soundtrack addition is a nice touch for Switch Online subscribers, though only seven tracks from a game built entirely around its music feels like a tease rather than a celebration.

With over 100 minigames across solo and multiplayer, plus side content like Beatspell and the Rhythm Toybox, Groove sounds packed. Multiple reviewers flagged that handheld mode offers slightly better input timing than docked play, so if you're chasing perfects, keep that in mind. The game also limits your attempts at perfect scores on any given song to three tries before making you wait for another opportunity, a design choice that's either brilliantly tension-building or maddening depending on your patience.

At $39.99, Groove is priced below the typical $50-60 first-party Nintendo release, and several critics specifically called that out as a positive. In an era where publishers routinely charge full price for six-hour campaigns, a rhythm game stuffed with over 80 new solo minigames at that price point is refreshing. Nintendo took ten years to make another Rhythm Heaven, and based on these reviews, the series came back sharper than most people expected. Eurogamer's 4/5 review described it as a game about perception, about "learning how to really grasp what it's actually about," and TechRadar's 4/5 praised it as a continuation of everything that made its predecessors work.