Built by students and released for free, Rhythm Journey is a 4 lane music game using a variety of student produced Japanese electronic music. Whilst the soundtrack is varied, fun and largely well written and produced, the students first go at creating a rhythm game is clearly a learning experience. It feels unfair to totally shoot this game down but some parts of this game are barely or non-functional.
The first thing you’ll notice with Rhythm Journey is the fact there are zero options to speak of. No audio/visual synchronisation. No volume controls. There isn’t an options menu at all. You choose your song and dive straight into the game. Those options, or lack of them, soon become an issue when you immediately realise that the games view has a very narrow but steep perspective. Notes fly down the four lanes quite quickly but they aren’t quite in time with the music. Thankfully the success timing for hitting a note is rather generous but a loud sound triggers and in anything remotely difficult, the entire song becomes a loud crashing noise that drowns out the music. Those notes feel more chaotic than they are because of the viewpoint too and the difficulty rises sharply meaning you’ll be hitting 2, 3 or 4 buttons constantly at times. The charts are a bit all over the place – sometimes feeling rhythmic, often feeling like a gymnastics routine for your fingers but without any grace. It’s odd.
You can’t fail a song mid play which is a good design decision given everything that you have to cope with. From the audio/visual misalignment that hurts your brain to the chonky graphics that don’t quite line up – things are rough but its functional. The same cannot be said for the scoring.
As you play a song you score points per note hit and combo you build. This in turn moves you up a visual ranking system to S rank if you do well. The problem is that when the song finishes, you are moved to a placeholder scoring screen. Your score doesn’t carry over – its placeholder numbers for your score, combo and top score. Nothing saves so you can’t go against your high score – its placeholder text! How this has been allowed to be released with this omission is frankly astounding and whilst I appreciate the game is free and built by students, it needs to function first before it goes out to the public.
My experience of Rhythm Journey was extremely poor. Whilst it isn’t the worst in game moment-to-moment rhythm game I’ve ever played, it is certainly in the bottom fifth. Add in the fact the scoring system is broken and I don’t know how I could possibly recommend this to anyone. I do wish all the students the very best of luck in their future game development though. I’m sure it was a valuable learning experience that they can take with them into the future. I hope the composers get to submit their work to other rhythm games in the future too – its the sole bright spark in the project.
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