Rhythm Stones Reviews

Before the actual review, I'm pretty sure there's a mistake in the "Monster index" in the menu. It says the purple monster represents more than 2 tiles, but in level 5 "Game On!", the purple monster appears on rhythms of 5/3 of a tile, which is less than 2 tiles. I think they made a mistake and meant the purple monster represents more than 1 tile instead. Also, is the Speed Record not working for anyone else? It doesn't seem to record anything unless I beat a level at 2.0x or 3.0x speed. [h1]The actual review[/h1] Let me preface this by saying that I had fun playing Rhythm Stones. I have all 55 green stars and 220 yellow stars, so I've clearly spent a lot of time playing this game. I think the sync and latency are just as good as ADOFAI's, and the timing is lenient which makes it easy to get perfects as long as you got a grasp of the level's rhythm. The game plays very well in my opinion. However, the biggest problem with the game, and the reason I don't recommend it, is the sight-readability. It's hard to read the distances between tiles, and the complicated offbeat rhythms just don't get properly conveyed most of the time. I get that one tile represents half a beat and all other tile distances are proportional to that, but when you're actually playing it, it's hard to tell how far apart one tile is to another tile. That's especially a problem during sections that heavily alternate between sixteenth-notes and eighth notes. Having to read tile distances wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the unintuitive visual design. For the first couple levels and in the Monster index at the title screen, they went with a crooked stone shape that makes it even harder to tell tile distances. Fortunately, the stones become much more square-shaped later on. The perspective sucks too. Rhythm Stones has a much lower camera angle than Rhythm Journey, which makes the tile distances more vague. The zoomed-out perspective setting is not zoomed out nearly far enough to make up for that problem either. You can remedy the problem of having to read tile distances by setting the monster frequency to "very high." That's what I did for the majority of my time collecting stars. But that's clearly not the way most people play it, nor should it be the only way to avoid the poor visual design choices that ruin its sight-readability. There should at least be a way to zoom out the camera further, or an option for a top-down view instead. Overall, it's pretty fun for someone like me who's into rhythm games with challenging rhythms, but because of the unintuitive sight-reading, I can't recommend it for most players, especially those who don't have a good sense of rhythm.

One of the hardest rhythm games I've ever played, but the tracks are absolute fire. 🔥The number of stars you need to buy new characters is waaaaaaaay too high though, which can be discouraging. If you get frustrated easily and are quick to give up, don't bother buying, but if you're looking for a challenge and are musically inclined, I highly recommend. This game is hard but fun. If I had to give it a score, I'd day it's a 6/10. It's not for everyone. Tip: use both hands early so you're ready for harder tracks.

+fun game mechanics and game feel +some good visuals +some good music -game is generally lacking in character -the random generation of some aspects of the level design causes all of the levels to sort of blend together and makes the game more boring -unmemorable song titles don't help -difficulty curve is absolute nonsense, level 1 was one of the hardest levels in the game, and took me longer to beat than level 50 Procedural generation is definitely like, "the hot new thing", but in such a "player agency is restricted" genre as rhythm games, the autogen removes the only thing that can have expression in the stages... It's not like there's enemies with interesting behavior or cool movement options line in crypt of the necrodancer or dead cells :( it makes the actual game component kind of Nothing. This game so badly wants some level designers.