Rhythm Sprout from SURT and tinyBuild is a colorful rhythm game with a wacky story. Learn more in our Rhythm Sprout review!

 

Rhythm Sprout is a handcrafted rhythm action with original music and a wacky story mode.

– Step to the rhythm / Fight to the beat
– Remix levels with modifiers
– Follow a quirky self-aware story in between

Rhythm Sprout from SURT and tinyBuild is a colorful rhythm game with a wacky story. As someone who played a lot of Dance Dance Revolution in the arcades way back in the early 2000s, I’ve always been a fan of rhythm games. I definitely took DDR for a spin on PlayStation as well! We now have games like Rhythm Sprout, which goes for a colorful, cartoony, more accessible rhythm game.

As Rhythm Sprout begins, you’ll be in King Brock’s throne room, and he’ll explain how the Vegetable Kingdom is being invaded by the Army of Sugary Sweets. You’re the chosen one, an onion named Sprout, and you’ll be tasked with single-handedly saving the Kingdom by fighting against the Army of Sugary Sweets and their leader.

The game will ask you to calibrate your input lag right away. I do encourage you to pay attention to this process and that you invest the required minute to calibrate as needed so that you can have the best experience. If you don’t do this and dive right in, you won’t be getting any grade better than OK at best. I suffered from this when I started to play since I was getting lots of misses. After taking a moment to recalibrate, I went from missing notes and getting OKs to nailing Perfect after Perfect.

 

The gameplay will see Sprout moving through various beautiful handcrafted levels, and you’ll have to press the correct key along with the background music in order to help Sprout. The controls are easy since you have to hit the Red bars with one of the buttons (X, Circle, Triangle, or Square), the Yellow bars by pressing up, down, left, or right on the D-Pad, and the Blue bars – which are dodge notes – with either the L1 or R1 buttons. Each level can be played at its Normal difficulty, or you can activate Beginner Mode, which considerably lowers the challenge.

You’ll not be alone on this journey because you’ll often encounter enemies from the Army of Sugary Sweets. Enemies will try to stop you, and you’ll have to attack them using the same control scheme as detailed above. During battles, the music also changes to a specific battle tune where dodge notes will be crucial for avoiding incoming attacks. If you are running low on hit points, you can press the L2 or R2 buttons to activate a special rush ability, during which all notes will change into long bars for a bit, so you can press any button to collect them while also healing your wounds.

 

Speaking of the difficulty, I thought it was accessible at first, but the challenge does ramp up after the first handful of levels. Once you’ve completed a level, you can also play the level again with one of the available modifiers, which adds a ton of replay value: Turbo makes the level play 25% faster or so, Mirror swaps the game horizontally, and Randomizer which changes the order of the buttons to press. Once the main levels are completed, a Prequel story unlocks with 5 levels, and you also get an extra 5 bonus levels on top of that.

On the presentation side, I liked how each level was unique and was made with love. The story is also well-written and made me smile more than once. The animations are great, and the game is fluid, running at 60 frames per second. The soundtrack is also great, with most of the tracks being very catchy and fun to listen to, which is a must for rhythm games.

 

Rhythm Sprout is a colorful and fun rhythm game experience on PlayStation. One of the most important aspects of this type of game is the soundtrack, not to mention its controls. For both cases, Rhythm Sprout does a great job of giving us exactly what we need. The story is also fun and will make you smile more than once. You’re looking at around 4-5 hours to play through everything that the game has to offer, with some extra time needed to get the extra trophies you might be missing to get another Platinum trophy to your collection.

Disclaimer
This Rhythm Sprout review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by tinyBuild.