Rhythm Master review: keeping the beat with Chinese pop

Although they’re a little out of fashion these days, I have to admit that rhythm games have a special place in my heart. Perhaps it’s because I have a lot of happy memories of playing Rock Band with friends (and beers); perhaps it’s because as a former drummer and rapper I was always better at rhythm than melody anyway. But when I noticed that Tencent’s Rhythm Master (节奏大师) was topping App Annie’s charts for China, I thought it’d be fun to take a look at the game. I was right.

Gameplay: rhythm and not much else

It’s worth noting right off the bat that the notes you play in Rhythm Master aren’t always arranged according to their melody. Two notes of exactly the same pitch may appear in different lanes, and if you’re thinking “the next note is higher, so it will appear in the far right lane” you’re going to spend a lot of your time with the game surprised and disappointed. Personally, it didn’t bother me much, but as I mentioned earlier, I was never much of a melody guy. If you are, this may drive you nuts.

Additionally, missing a note doesn’t mean you won’t hear it played the way it would in some games. The sound that plays isn’t affected at all by what you’re doing, but if you miss a note you will be notified via a “Miss!” popup and the screen shaking slightly.

Other than that, the game is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. As has become standard for the genre, notes fall down the screen in lanes and you tap on the bottom of each lane along with the rhythm as each note gets there. There are also notes you have to hold and even pitch shift, just to keep things interesting. At the end of the song, you’re scored based on how accurate your timing was and how many (if any) of the notes you missed. It’s all pretty boilerplate, but it’s fun and it works well. Tencent hasn’t messed with the formula at all here, but that’s because the formula works.

For a free game from Tencent, Rhythm Master offers a surprising amount of stuff without begging you for money. By my count there are more than 100 songs you can download and play for free. Each song has three difficulty levels, four speed settings, and three lane settings (you can choose to play with four, five, or six lanes of notes, though the latter is a bit difficult on small screens). You have to beat songs on the lower difficulty levels before you can play the higher difficulty ones, but there seems to be a good variety here. The easiest songs played with four lanes and the slowest speed setting should be doable for almost anyone. And on the hardest setting with six lanes and the fastest speed setting, the game will be damn hard even for rhythm game veterans.

One minor problem you may have is that depending on where your phone’s speakers are, holding a phone to play could make it difficult to hear the music. Using an iPhone 5, I found that especially when reaching for certain notes, my hands blocked the speakers and I stopped being able to hear the music. It’s a little annoying, but it will only affect some phones, and it can be easily solved by using headphones.

Graphics and sound: lots to choose from

There’s not much to say about the graphics in Rhythm Master. There isn’t much to look at, but what’s there is nice enough. You can see an image representing the song you’re playing in the background of each song, but that’s about all you get in the way of decoration.

In terms of sound, the game offers a variety of songs but almost all of them are pop songs and most of them are Mando-pop hits from the past few years. There are a few Western hits in there, like Flo-rida’s autotune nightmare “Club Can’t Handle Me”, but for the most part whether or not you enjoy this game is going to depend on whether or not you like Mando-pop. If you do, this will be fun (and you can buy more songs from the shop for about $1 apiece). If you don’t like Mando-pop, it will be torture.