As someone who played an instrument from elementary school on through college, I’ve always had a pretty strong love for music and rhythm games. For at least a little while it felt like the gaming world was in the same spot, with the tremendous success of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but once those ships had sailed it feels like the genre went right to the back burner once again. While there has been a smattering of them on the Switch, which thankfully have been reasonably diverse, I’m always someone who’d love to see more. Synth Riders actually has a bit of a surprising origin, having come over from the VR space where it was made to compete with the well-known and well-loved Beat Saber. Thankfully, its transition to the Switch has been a pretty successful one as it provides its own sort of flavor, style, and a nice variety of tracks that music lovers should appreciate.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Beat Saber, it’s a VR rhythm game that will have you slashing in time with each hand to cut through color-coded blocks, requiring a fair amount of dexterity and speed to keep up with as you move up through various levels of difficulty. Since Synth Riders is geared towards that same general style, while you won’t be playing in a first-person perspective, you will be controlling your character’s arms to go up, down, to the left, or to the right in order to match up with colored spheres to match the beat. You’ll have the choice of using the two joysticks or the mix of the face buttons and the D-Pad to do this, with each of them having their own strengths and weaknesses. While the D-Pad and buttons did feel more crisp in execution, I also sometimes ran into issues in quick sections where the D-Pad was simply less reliable for getting the right directions to register, so I instead tended to stick with the slightly more sluggish joysticks instead.

One of the absolute tests for how much you may enjoy one of these games is the strength of its soundtracks, and while this may not have the deepest cuts it definitely knows how to have fun. With music ranging from various 80s hits, to contemporary pop, to tracks from Monstercat and some others, it would be hard to say there’s no fun to be had here, and while some titles don’t always have very rhythm-game friendly tunes included, these all tend to have a strong beat with your moves mapped out pretty sensibly. In terms of some stumbles, I do consider it to be a mistake not to automatically require calibration when starting out, and while the two tutorials do a decent job of getting you up to speed, a few moves you only learn in the advanced tutorial are used on Easy difficulty even in early tracks, so that feels like a needless oversight. Outside of wishing that perhaps the default camera was at a slightly higher angle, making it easier to see what’s coming up and avoiding confusion on some things like held notes, for the most part everything runs well and makes the game highly playable. While it may take a few runs to get the hang of it all, this is a pretty fun time.