Parent's Guide: Rhythm Paradise Megamix - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

What is Rhythm Paradise Megamix?

Rhythm Paradise Megamix is a collection of musical mini games, where players have to press buttons in time with the beat in a variety of madcap games. Whether you're playing badminton while flying a plane, translating for an alien or plucking hairs from a smiling onion, the concept never really changes - all you need to do is press the button at the right time, in the right rhythm.

How do you play Rhythm Paradise Megamix?

Simple to play but challenging to master, Rhythm Paradise Megamix is a game that really puts your sense of rhythm to the test. Depending on the game in question, you'll need to press buttons in time to launch fruit into basketball hoops, hold down the A button and release at the right moment to sing, or repeat back the rhythm at which spaceships appear to shoot them down. With simple controls, it's much less about visual clues, and the real skill comes in listening to what's going on and timing your actions accordingly, in a simon-says kind of style.

The story mode, which charts pink afroed dog Tibby's return to Heaven World, is split into two distinct halves. The first sees you helping out six different characters with their problems by completing four mini-games for each, earning coins based on how well you did, before carrying on to the next area. For every other character you help, you'll have to take on a Gatekeeper Challenge, which requires you to complete a less musical and more timing-based mini-game on your choice of difficulty (like catching a coin after three seconds have passed, without any sort of timer) - but the catch here is that easier difficulties require more of your collected coins to attempt than the harder ones. Whether you decide to play it safe on the more expensive easy, or decide the cheaper but more challenging harder difficulty is more economical because you can have more attempts is entirely up to you.

Once you've reached the first tower, you'll then find yourself tackling harder versions of the rhythm games you've already cleared, as well as tackling a final 'remix' at the end. Remixes mash up all the previous mini-games into a single song, so you'll find yourself chopping and changing between air badminton, karate punching and fruit-catching within beats of each other, and as each has slightly different rules and controls, it can be a bit of a challenge at first.

How easy is Rhythm Paradise Megamix to pick up and play?

With simple controls, generally limited to a button or two, the real challenge with Rhythm Paradise Megamix is one of timing, as you'll need to be fairly precise with your button presses if you want to succeed. However, the game does have a few tricks up it's sleeve to make things a little easier if you're struggling.

First off, whenever you come across a new rhythm game for the first time, a short tutorial will talk you through the ins and outs and go over the controls - first talking you through it, then getting you to try it out a few times yourself. If you struggle in the initial tutorial, a beat indicator on the Touch Screen will pop up, showing you the exact points at which you need to press your buttons.

The Touch Screen is also pretty handy in the main game too, as the position of the firework-y explosion as you press the buttons will let you know at a glance how accurate your timing is. If it's central and rainbow, you're hitting it perfectly, but yellow and to either the left or right indicates you're going to early or late respectively. Great for fine-tuning your timing mid-game, it comes in especially handy when you're trying to tackle a challenge that requires you to land a certain number of perfect hits. If the game senses you failing a particular rhythm game too much, it will also give you the option to skip over it and come back later, so even if you're struggling, you shouldn't be stuck for too long.

While it may not be immediately obvious for what's essentially a musical mini-game collection, for the youngest of players, reading can still be an issue. The story mode is conveyed entirely through text, with nothing in the way of voice-overs, and while none of it is really essential viewing, you'll miss out on a lot of the crazy characters and silliness if you skip over it not reading. But more crucially, if you can't read, you'll miss out on the instructions for each of the rhythm games - and while some are fairly self-explanatory, many are not. As the controls and rules for the games are all different, there's no easy way of knowing what to do outside of reading the instructions, unfortunately.

Sample Sentences:

• "Charge up the car just enough to reach the goal. Press and hold A to charge. Release just as the timer hits zero to get the right amount of power."
• "Wait - I sense an especially formidable foe approaching! I will use my sword to block, then slice the enemy away! Press and hold B to block, then release it to counterattack."
• "YOU INSULT ME WITH YOUR IMPUDENCE, O CONTAINED ONE!"

As with much of Nintendo's offerings, Rhythm Paradise Megamix is squeaky clean in terms of mature content - there's no bad language, no bloody violence and no sex scenes whatsoever. With nothing in the way of true violence, you'll be whacking an alien in a spaceship into orbit with a baseball bat, hacking shadowy balls with a sword as a samurai, or firing arrows at ghosts as they pass by a hedge. It's all incredibly slapstick and silly.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo 3DS