Radiohammer Review

I don’t always know how I feel about rhythm games. Guitar Hero and Rock Band are fun until you hit that moment where either your fingers can’t keep up with the pace or you realise that you just spent 4 hours straight strumming a plastic guitar and need to reassess  how you spend your spare time. Well Radiohammer refines the rhythm game formant and leaves you with just tapping/playing along to the same beat as the music and gosh does it feel good. Oh, and by doing so you get to hit perverts and aliens with comedy hammers.

There are 4 characters in Radiohammer and each one has it’s own set of 3 episodes with 5 chapters within. Waiting at the end of each character’s third episode is a distinct boss battle that ties up what your character has been hitting for the past hour or so. As well as having different levels, each character also has its own soundtrack that gradually get unlocked as you complete levels. The more you play the more songs you will unlock in the freeplay mode so that you can play your favourite track as often as you like. The songs are all great instrumental tracks as well and whacking your creature of the week in time to them is very satisfying.

I should a minute to be a big negative about Radiohammer by telling you about how it looks. The character models and foreground look great. They are a sort of cool cartoony/anime models that are lots of fun to watch. However, the backgrounds look rubbish. Keep an eye out for the ferris wheel that is all blurry and has about 2 frames as it looks comically bad. I can understand that these are perhaps not the most important aspects of a rhythm game, but it makes the world seem disjointed and is laughably noticeable.

Back to the positives. Humour. Radiohammer is funny in a quirky, weird way. It doesn’t really have any laugh out loud moments, but the entire game is amusing enough that playing it made me smile. Seeing the different ‘enemies’ appear, listening to what your manager has to say (each character has its own manager that ‘helps’ you throughout their episodes) and just the idea of hitting things in time to music is fun idea. Receiving a present mid-song can either boost your health or your super gauge, but grab a ‘bad’ present and your super will dip back to zero. There are 4 different scores you can get for each enemy that you hit: Perfect, Great, Good and Bad. Getting perfects helps to boost your super gauge and once it hits maximum your character will go into overdrive and every hit you make becomes a Perfect letting you really churn out those points.

On the subject of level scores it would have in Radiohammer’s favour to include a scoreboard so that you can compare your score to your friends and others around the world. As it stands though there are 3 stars to obtain on each level for completing certain objectives like grab all the presents or get an 80 hit combo. These are nice, but I would still like a leaderboard, please.

If after all of that you still want more, then Radiohammer has achievements. By matching specific requirements you can unlock them. They don’t do anything (much like all achievements), but you can unlock them. And if you really like the tracks then swing over to the Jukebox and play them without needing to hit things at the same time. Radiohammer is a great rhythm game on a platform full of them, but its humour, hammers and honest to goodness excellent price make it a must buy.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Nintendo 3DS code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.