Rift of the NecroDancer

rift of the necrodancer is a fun rhythm game that has a lot of charm, and i would recommend it. HOWEVER. i have a lot of gripes with it as well, so i'm just gonna list things off as they come to my head pros: - has community maps (and an active community) - don't need previous game to enjoy story - art is amazing - has music custom made for the story that doesn't feel like it's custom made for the story (this one is kind of hard to explain, but you can really tell this is the case in games like adofai) - story is fun, characters are likeable - difficulty customization is good, you can skip songs if you want - has rhythm heaven mini games that are very well done - hatsune miku!!!!!!!!!!! - can remain f2p after initial purchase, not like musedash or djmax where you have like 3 hours of songs before you have to buy songpacks - the art is Good. enough i'd say it a 2nd time, maybe even a 3rd time. did you know the art is good? cons: - you cannot ghost tap. i have lost an insane amount of combos to this. to be quite frank, i think the game is far too lenient on its judgments, getting the lowest accuracy rating (which i think is "ok") won't break your combo, but god forbid you have twitchy fingers because you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥ if you double click! changing this to punish bad accuracy and allow ghost tapping would make the game feel a lot better to play rather than fudging my way through it - the calibration sucks ASS. especially because the calibration test literally doesn't correlate to the actual gameplay and is just a reference to the previous installment. all times i've tried using it, my video calibration is pretty accurate to other game's calibration, the audio calibration however is always off by ~150 ms somehow, rendering it useless. - this game is so much different than other rhythm games, that if you have thousands of hours in other rhythm games, it makes this one Very Very difficult. this can be seen as a pro, but in my case, it is a con. there are so many note mechanics and some are super hard to read and deviate my mind from like, what i'm used to...? (changing lanes every beat, notes going in reverse while others don't, etc.) i understand that it's kind of the entire gimmick but i'm still allowed to complain about it lol. the game is very unique, so this bulletpoint is more ambiguous than negative - the downscroll moves beat by beat instead of a consistent down stream movement, this causes the notes to approach the judgement line in slightly weird way that may make your timing feel weird. this also prevents you from being able to set your scroll speed independently, but this is not unique to this game so that's just kind of a personal gripe i have. allowing you to set it to the song bpm or have a universal scroll speed like osumania would be awesome sauce tl;dr, game is good. it's weird but in a very charming way and it is easy to love. entertainment value will probably be lessened if you play a lot of other rhythm games, or maybe i'm just having an insane skill issue

Spent 2 years on the demo tracks, now I finally bought it and I am enjoying every second of it <3 will probably purchase the DLCs in the future, but for now I have enough content with the vanilla version and the mods I'm coming across, hope they don't crash :D