Thank you JMJ Interactive for sending us this game to review!

Rhythm and puzzle matching games have been around for a while. Akihabara - Feel the Rhythm combines the genres into a match 4 game that requires you to move around the blocks to the beat of the music for a combination bonus.  Like most rhythm games, you’re given a rating of perfect, good, or bad depending on your timing when shuffling around the various colored or patterned blocks.

When you start the campaign mode you’ll get a text-based tutorial of the basic gameplay.  Like Tetris, blocks will fall down in rows of four.  A bar will slide across them and if you press a button on or off beat, the selected block will be swapped out with the one that’s in the preview box on the upper left hand side of the screen.  When four similar blocks are touching they will vanish and clear room for more.  If the blocks build up too high, it’s game over.  Continuing is an option, but you’ll take a score penalty that increments with each continue used.  

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not good at this game.  So the continue option is the only way I was able to advance through most of the campaign.  The soundtrack is great and worth purchasing if you like electronic dance music.  You can play songs individually after they have been unlocked in the campaign mode.  

Some Steam features like trading cards and achievements are implemented, but sadly there is no cloud save functionality.  The progress I made on my desktop did not transfer over to my laptop computer.  The leaderboards are nice, but my name won’t be on there anytime soon.

The visuals are nice, but are rather low resolution and there are no options to increase the screen resolution at all.  Another weird quirk is that this game would crash whenever I exited from it using my desktop.  My laptop didn’t experience that issue though.  

Akihabara - Feel the Rhythm has full controller support and I was able to play it using my Xbox One controller and my Steel Series Stratus XL.  The XYAB buttons work in the game but the button to make selections in the game menu is the start button.  The D-pad works as expected, but the joysticks are not usable.  

There are no moral issues worth mentioning and this game is suitable for rhythm game lovers of all ages.  While this is an interesting combination of puzzle and rhythm game genres, I am not sure if it’s a good fit for me.  I’m good at those genres individually, but when combined I’m horrible at it.  Despite being bad at this title, I still enjoyed playing it.  The price is a reasonable $6.99 and worth keeping an eye on if it goes on sale.