Rift of the NecroDancer, a new music game from the creators of the music roguelike Crypt of the NecroDancer, solves the problem of exploring a big library of tracks with a simple idea: a story mode.
In Rift, you have to press buttons in time with notes that appear on lanes in front of you, similar to games like Guitar Hero. You only have three lanes to worry about, but the tracks get complex because the “notes” are actually enemies with different movement patterns. A green slime just takes one hit to defeat, for example, but a gold bat takes three beats to eliminate, and with each hit, it hops to another lane.
If you want, you can immediately jump into the game’s library, which features more than 30 tracks. (Though you’ll need to accrue “diamonds” to unlock some of them.) The songs are killer — I happily tapped my foot to just about every one I played. But because the songs are originals, there aren’t familiar licensed tunes to jump into like with Guitar Hero, so it can be daunting to know where to start.
That’s why I played Rift’s story mode. The plot doesn’t really matter — you play as Cadence, the main character from Crypt, as you try and solve the mystery of the rifts that spawn the monsters in the songs — but it provides a logical way to work through the music, especially as the songs ramp up in difficulty. It’s kind of like an album: Rift’s songs have clearly been put in a certain order with intention, and playing through that order through the story mode is a great way to experience them, at least at first. There are fun Rhythm Heaven-like minigames, epic boss battles, and charming cartoon art to accompany the story beats, too. (If you’ve played Crypt, you’ll recognize some familiar faces.)
Even on medium difficulty, Rift can get tough. In some of the later tracks, the tempo is fast, and the monsters fly down the lanes at a rapid rate and in tricky combinations. Fortunately, the game has a great practice mode that lets you repeat specific portions of songs at a significantly reduced speed so that you can get your timing down. You can also ease down to a lower difficulty whenever you want. And one time, I failed a song enough times that the game told me I could move on without finishing it. While I appreciated the gesture, it made me more determined to beat it. Which I did!
It took me about five hours to play through Rift’s story. When I was done, I was surprised to find myself immediately jumping into the game’s full tracklist to play some songs again. If I hadn’t played through the story mode, I might not have discovered some of the game’s best music.
Rift of the NecroDancer launches today on PC.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
