Rhythm Thief And The Paris Caper review

Publisher: Sega Developer: In-house Format: iOS Release: Out now

An amiable tale of a roguish art thief and his canine companion, set in a romanticised, blue-skied Paris, Rhythm Thief And The Emperor’s Treasure won the hearts of a small audience on 3DS. Now Sega is hoping to improve the pulling power of this narrative-led rhythm-action game on its iOS debut by pouring the unlikely mix into a very different mould. While the first game attempted to leverage the success of the Professor Layton games, replacing brainteasers with beat-matching, this abridged remake sees the publisher adopt a structure undoubtedly inspired by GungHo’s phenomenally successful Puzzle & Dragons.

The process has left Rhythm Thief’s musical core mostly intact. As before, you’ll tap or swipe as circles reach the edge of circular markers, or jab coloured buttons in time with the beat. Some stages take their cues from the likes of Samba De Amigo and Space Channel 5, while others see you competing in call-and-response dance-offs, flipping crêpes and cooking steaks in a Parisian restaurant, or posing behind statues to hide from wandering torch beams during a midnight sprint through the Louvre. These sequences are as breezily engaging as ever, while the scoring system is more generous than before – some would argue to a fault – by allowing for a couple of mistakes even in an S-rank run.

Accomplices make these sections even easier. You’ll recruit them on completion of each musical interlude, or from the lightweight mini-games – some rhythmic, some random – that pad out each caper. You can take up to three characters with you for each mission, including one from a randomly selected online player, with each increasing the length of your health bar, which depletes with every missed cue. Their individual and collective skills, meanwhile, may cancel out misses, give you a coin bonus, or even reduce your damage on certain days of the week. They can be upgraded by blending them with trinkets you’ve successfully pilfered, in a similar fashion to Puzzle & Dragon’s monster fusions, though the downside to this social component makes itself known all too frequently: Rhythm Thief requires a stable online connection, as you’re constantly reminded by a message warning of corrupted save data if your signal isn’t strong enough.

The switch to iOS has seen Rhythm Thief lose some of its challenge and some unwelcome accoutrements latched on.

As with GungHo’s game, it expects you to grind, and the structure quickly begins to dull the appeal of its simplistic systems. Each rhythm game must be completed multiple times: you’ll play through it once on Normal difficulty, while the next mission might see you repeat the process with an increased damage modifier. Remixes follow, and then the Formidable challenges appear: the song remains the same, but the cues are faster, the rhythms more irregular. The increased difficulty is welcome, though the repetition does the game no favours at all: where the original was agile, skipping briskly from one caper to the next, this is positively leaden-footed.

All but shorn of their narrative context, the missions can feel rather inconsequential, disconnected from the truncated plot and lacking the variety and invention of some of the 3DS game’s later missions. Then, just as the story reaches its climactic stages, it hides the final chapters behind a paywall, asking you to spend 10 ‘R’ coins – at a cost of £5.49 – to unlock them. You’re encouraged to return for daily bonuses, or to attempt flawless runs of completed stages, but your patience with this charismatic stranger will surely have worn thin by then. Rather than admiring the chutzpah and sleight of hand of a nimble thief, you’ll likely end your time in Paris feeling like you’ve just been mugged.

The post Rhythm Thief And The Paris Caper review appeared first on Edge Online.

Source http://ift.tt/L4g8Nw