Review: RIFT OF THE NECRODANCER is Fun Despite the Lack of a Guitar Controller

Earlier this week, Brace Yourself Games launched their latest rhythm game: Rift of the NecroDancer. The game follows familiar characters from Crypt of the NecroDancer and executes Guitar Hero-esque gameplay mechanics to help you slay monsters and advance the story (or not).

The game is available now on Steam with a release for the Nintendo Switch currently set to TBD. The team was kind enough to provide me with a review copy of the game, but all thoughts below are my own.

Dragged into a strange new world, our franchise hero Cadence must engage in musical combat with monsters pouring through the Rift! Each monster has unique behaviors—like bats that shift lanes when attacked—and tougher foes take multiple hits to dispatch. Learn the pattern of each new fretful fiend to keep the music flowing!

Right out the gate, I was excited to play Rift of the NecroDancer. Like many others my age, Guitar Hero and Rock Band were huge for me and my friends back in the day, so any excuse to attempt getting into similar games is always going to get me excited.

The core gameplay mirrors those games with objects coming down a track and you have to hit the corresponding key in time. You’ll score points based on how close you are to the beat and of course for getting longer streaks.

There’s even a mechanic similar to Star Power which not only increases your multiplier, but makes you invincible for a short time. If your health depletes from monsters not getting smitten in time, you fail and must try again. It honestly is pretty straightforward at first.

However, we then get to one of the geniuses of Rift of the NecroDancer. There are several different monsters and each one is unique in how you have to defeat it. For example, a Green Slime or Skeleton simply requires you to hit the key in time.

However, a Blue Slime will go back one space after getting hit and so you have to hit it a second time on beat. Meanwhile, a Shielded Skeleton requires two hits in the same beat (think going from a quarter note to an eighth note).

There are so many different approaches that the team took for monsters that it really keeps you on your toes. Also, some monsters are set to be on the off-beat which really helps the flow feel right when playing although it does make it a little more challenging at times.

Songs aren’t harder just because they get faster or because there are more monsters; they’re harder because of which monsters you have to slay. It is worth noting, this also makes it a little harder to be a party game just because anyone who plays the game does need to be familiar with how the monsters behave.

The game features more than 30 original songs, each with chart maps across four difficulties ranging from Easy to Impossible. The songs overall are good and I personally really liked “Matriarch” and “King’s Ruse.” I thought it was one of the most fun ones to play.

However, the team also launched Rift of the NecroDancer with Steam Workshop support and the same dev tool used to chart songs. This means that you can create your own tracks and charts and share them with others.
I haven’t taken time to play around with this aspect of the game, but I’m sure some people are going to create amazing (and sometimes terrifying) things.

In Rift of the NecroDancer, there are three main game modes for you to enjoy. There’s Story Mode, Play, and Daily Challenges. Story Mode has you take on the role of Cadence as you end up in a different world and have to figure out what’s going on and get back to the Crypt.

You’ll run across familiar faces like Dove, Heph, and even the Necrodancer. It’s a fun and cute story, but the implementation felt a little off. Often, I would finish a story segment or Rift and then feel like I missed a little something in between.

Think back to when you used to watch live TV and run to the bathroom in the commercial break but you didn’t quite make it back in time. That’s the best description I have for it. I will also say that the story wasn’t super engaging for me who has only played a little bit of Crypt of the Necrodancer.

I haven’t played enough of it to know who any of the characters are other than Cadence and so that didn’t help. That said, neither of these points mean the story is bad, it’s just not great.

However, Story Mode has a couple other tricks up its sleeve. For starters, some stages are minigames. These are still rhythm-based, but instead of having a chart and fighting monsters, it’s doing things like helping a character meditate so you have to time your breathing and remove distractions.

The other is the inclusion of Boss Battles. Once again, still rhythm based, but no chart. Instead the arrows spawn around the screen and when you time it right, Cadence dodges the enemy’s attacks and then if you time the attacks right you’ll deal damage.

I do feel like these went on way longer than they should and sometimes I found it really hard to keep track of the arrows and timing personally. It was also odd that the second-to-last boss was a lot harder than the ultimate one.

For reference, I mostly completed Story Mode on Medium although sometimes I accidentally ended up on Easy and didn’t notice until too late. You can switch difficulty before any song just by pressing left or right.

I did find the jump up to Hard to be a very big jump and so maybe someday I can get up to that level. If you’re struggling with a song and refuse to drop the difficulty, it will eventually give you the option to continue the story without having to complete that song. I refused to do that personally, but it’s nice to know that it’s there.

Play is the arcade experience. You go there to play whatever song you want from the game on whatever difficulty you want. It’s pretty simple. If you want to play custom songs, that is a separate area but it allows for easy access to the editor if you want to make your own tracks or the Steam Workshop to see what others have put out.

The Daily Challenge is a different song each day to see if you can top leaderboards. That’s about it.

There are some Extras though. These include Boss Battles, a Bestiary, Minigames, and Challenges. Challenges tend to be smaller sections of songs but with various conditions.

For example, there’s one where only Perfect hits count; everything else is a Miss. Others have all enemies become “?”s which means you don’t know what they are until you hit them.

Overall, I really like Rift of the NecroDancer. It’s a lot of fun, albeit very challenging. The story delivery felt lackluster to me, but it wasn’t bad and the use of Boss Battles and minigames was mostly positive. The ability for people to create their own tracks and share them via Steam Workshop is also really cool.

My number one request would be a plastic guitar peripheral that could work with the game! That would just be top notch.

GeekTyrant Review Score 9/10