Rift of the NecroDancer, a new music game from the creators of the music roguelike Crypt of the NecroDancer, solves the problem of exploring a big library of tracks with a simple idea: a story mode.
In Rift, you have to press buttons in time with notes that appear on lanes in front of you, similar to games like Guitar Hero. You only have three lanes to worry about, but the tracks get complex because the ânotesâ are actually enemies with different movement patterns. A green slime just takes one hit to defeat, for example, but a gold bat takes three beats to eliminate, and with each hit, it hops to another lane.
If you want, you can immediately jump into the gameâs library, which features more than 30 tracks. (Though youâll need to accrue âdiamondsâ to unlock some of them.) The songs are killer â I happily tapped my foot to just about every one I played. But because the songs are originals, there arenât familiar licensed tunes to jump into like with Guitar Hero, so it can be daunting to know where to start.
Thatâs why I played Riftâs story mode. The plot doesnât really matter â you play as Cadence, the main character from Crypt, as you try and solve the my …