As the battle royale genre continues to expand, we see a need for more fresh ideas to join the fray. My experience with the genre is somewhat limited, although my history with rhythm games stretches back several console generations, and this taps into my love for those with some added competition.

Headbangers: Rhythm Royale is, at its heart, a silly rhythm game. In season 1 there are 23 different mini games to play through, each with a different chance to build up your reflexes, rhythm, and memory skills. Most of these games are a lot of fun, although some will require strategy (it took several tries before I successfully survived The Ring), and others grow tiresome after just a couple times through. The battle royale nature comes in with it lasting 4 rounds, starting with 30 pigeons, then 20, 10, and 5. Come in first place on round 4 and you are crowned the Master Headbanger.

The game characters come in the form of goofy pigeons. Their endearing nature reminds me of the pigeons from Finding Nemo. You can dress up the birds and give them different taunts as you unlock or buy them. And of course there are crossovers, as the first costume item I spent my bread crumbs on was a Worms head. In addition to gaining experience and bread crumbs by playing the game, there are costumes to unlock by doing certain challenges (e.g. complete a round without messing up).

The game takes advantage of cross platform play, which is great for those with friends on different platforms. It also means a bigger pool to play with. And even if the player count fizzles, the game will provide bots (robot pigeons) to fill the gaps. This is exclusively how I played in a prerelease environment, as no one was ever available. The good news is that it was still enjoyable. The bad part of this was the time it took to actually start playing – it’d usually fail to connect to a server a couple times first, which would take a few minutes. Then once it did connect, it’d take a few minutes to populate the room with bots, at which point it finally selects the first game. It was usually ten minutes from booting the game to playing. Time between games is generally not long enough to run and go pee, but it depends on the mini game.

Probably the hardest thing to wrap my head around, which is obvious for this type of game, is the inability to pause. It’s an online experience, of course pausing isn’t available. However, this led to several matches being forfeited because I needed to tend to my kids, or my wife needed help with something. I also recommend against playing in a setting with much distraction, as the game requires a lot of focus – while you don’t necessarily need to see the screen for every game, you do need to hear, as the game is focused on rhythm. Similar to Rhythm Heaven, I actually found myself doing better on some sequences when I took the visual aspect out of the picture. Of course, this wasn’t always beneficial, as there are power-ups you or others can get that will distort sound. These can also increase experience, crumbs, show the answer, invert controls, and more. Much like the mini game selection, you never know what you’ll get, and chances are you’ll get the same thing twice before the one you’ve never gotten.

Fans of rhythm games can rejoice in knowing there’s not only a competent game being added to the genre, but one that adds competition to keep players coming back. Headbangers isn’t going to topple Fortnite as the biggest battle royale, but it’s not trying to – this speaks to a completely different audience with a thirst to get that rhythm right.

8 out of 10

Headbangers: Rhythm Royale was developed by Glee-Cheese Studio and published by Team17. It launched on NS, PC, PS4, PS5, and XSX. The game was provided to us for review on PS5. If you’d like to see more of Headbangers: Rhythm Royale, check out the official site.

 

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