What’s the rush?
Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm based third-person melee combat game that rewards you by landing your hits on the beat. From a list of flowing combos comes a catchy beat, skilled moves, and rocking visual effects. This is a masterpiece of a game and its stylistic characters banter in hilarious ways, its world comes together to feel alive, and its art style just never stops hitting those notes. If you want to know about the hype, let’s get into it.
Music make you lose control
This is what keeps the game together in a rhythm-based fighter, it’s the peanut butter that glues the bread into a sandwich. The music is phenomenal, I just need you to listen to it.This is what I’m talkin’ about. What’s missing from this though is the kicking beat that you make with your moves as you play. The game rewards you as you hit your combos by adding to the soundtrack, and it all works so so so well.
Never stop fighting, rockstar
Combat is the actual bread that makes our sandwich and this is what you spend most of the game doing. Each time you get locked in an arena, it’s intense and thrilling as you dodge enemy attacks, time your parries, and plan out elaborate combos to maximize your score.
I can’t emphasize this enough though: you can be bad at this and still have an incredible amount of fun. I’ve always stayed away from games like DMC that require you learn combos but the list here is roughly 20 moves long at most and you learn them intuitively as you experiment.
Enemies have legs or wheels or fire or…
One of the highlights of this game is the enemy design. Each enemy is distinct and it’s rare to see a game have this many types without feeling repetitive or copied. We’re talking shields, robo-bikes, owls, fire using boxer robots, samurai, fire owls?!, and many many more. Each feeling unique and requiring a different approach and more importantly, blending fantastically. The enemy variety in each arena gets really creative by the end and you really never stop adapting.
Art so good, it gave me nostalgia
That’s serious by the way, I got nostalgia for this game thinking about how amazing the art is. It feels like it’s from a past era and yet I also can’t think of anything like it. It’s so stylized but also never gets in the way of the gameplay. It will constantly add to your experience and honestly it’s just perfect, I need the merch.
Video game stories are bad, this isn’t
What you’ll notice about this story is that it’s both very simple and very effective. A good mark of storytelling is sometimes how complex a story can be while still having you follow along, this isn’t that. Instead it’s so good that the story is very simple and yet keeps you entertained and gives context and detail to everything you’re doing.
The way they seem to have achieved this is by adding a lot of depth to their characters and giving them real personality. So even though the story is very simple in essence, you enjoy seeing what characters are going to say even in highly predictable moments. You know something is a trap, but the reactions to it are what you’re there for, not the plot point. It’s great.
And the masterpiece award goes to…
I truly believe this game is a masterclass in game design in so many ways. Everything it attempts works really well and the only complaints I can even come up with is that I could’ve used just a couple more combos and the readability in combat suffers due to some of the effects and camera. Other than that this game is perfect in my eyes.
It’s rare that I mark a game down as masterpiece but you absolutely should try this game. If you don’t, you’re missing out on something amazing that doesn’t come around very often. It’s also rare that I ever plan on replaying a game in the future, but I can already imagine rediscovering this game 5 years from now and picking it up for another playthrough.
Addressing the coffin in the room
Last things last, Tango Gameworks was shut down by Microsoft in May. This game is the last thing they produced and it really is a pity. They went out on one of the best games I’ve ever played and I was baffled to hear about their closure Please go play this game in honor of the loss of the studio, maybe then you can be as angry as I am at Microsoft if you aren’t already.
That’s it for me though, I feel like I’ve really experienced something here and if you haven’t played this game, I want you to give it a shot. It’s charming, it’s fun, it’s thrilling, and a good listen always.
If you played this, drop me a comment and share your thoughts. I’d love to hear what your experience is with rhythm games in general too. What else is good in the genre?
Until next time.
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I simply don’t understand how you can shut down a studio right after they make an amazing game like this. I hope whatever number it changed in whatever spreadsheet was worth it.
It blew my fucking mind. They put out Ghostwire too, right? Two great new IPs for XBOX and theoretically more to come but nah, they didn‘t make CoD 420 so good riddance. Closing a performing, innovative studio. Mindboggling. I just wish and hope they all just go straight founding a new studio and stay as independent as possible.
oh fuck I didn’t know about Ghostwire, game blew my mind with how good it looked and how fast it ran. Gameplay was fun too, i should play it again.
Awesome game, despite being very well received I still think it’s not as popular as it should be. I also can’t get over the fact that Microsoft closed the studio that made it. What a shame!
The first half of the game is fun, but the second half is where it really hits its stride. The more difficult enemies and last few boss fights are amazing. Agh, what I’d do for a sequel…
Truly an incredible game. One of the rare games where I am actually rocking my head to the beat the entire time. It was one of those games where I knew that playing it will give me a straight up good time
My only complaint of the game I have is pacing. I found the routes between fights to be boring, and the weird 2D sections never really provided much else.
I can’t say I share those feelings. While I think the 2D sections are just okay, they’re very short. I also think as far as pacing and traveling between fights, they did about all they could without distracting from the point of the game in my eyes.
Like yes you can make better platforming or exploration, but that’s not what the overall level is there for. It’s there for scale, setting, NPC conversations, etc. Add too much and you distract from the next fight, add too little and you might as well have a boss rush type game. Fine balance here and this is honestly the best I’ve ever seen a game like this pull off filler time.
That’s a whole conversation about filler in games but I think it’s harder than people realize to get this right.
This game is a masterpiece. It’s a shame Tango got shutdown because some people in suits felt the metrics on their dashboard wasn’t good enough.
If I’m buying it now, will the money, go to Crosoft, or the devs of the original shutdowned studio ?
I’m discovering Metal hellsinger for now, but this game I really want to play it too (legally if possible, if not, not a shame).
From what I’ve read, the money goes to Microsoft. I got my copy via humble bundle subscription (a really good deal btw) so I got lucky. If it were me, I’d be looking for other ways to play it probably
Thanks for confirming 😇😅
I really wanted to like this game but I couldn’t get into the rhythm aspect. Shame as I enjoyed DDR and guitar hero back in the day. I couldn’t find the beat, I made it about 30 minutes in and dropped it. The music and art were also not my cup of tea. Seems like many other people really enjoyed it, but it didn’t click for me.
That’s totally fair and I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything here if you bounce off of the combat. Still, it’s worth a shot even if you don’t typically like rhythm games. I wasn’t super thrilled about the combat initially but it grew on me pretty quickly once I found that beat.
It might just take a couple tries for it to click with me, I’ll revisit it again someday. Great review, btw.
If you didn’t try it the first time, you can enable a beat display. It’s toggled with a button on the controller (share button on the DS5 when on PC) and it will display a very explicit indicator along the bottom of the screen.
That means a lot, thanks!
I fucking love this game.
Fuck them for closing the studio. Never gonna spend another dime on Bethesda published games or M$ shit.
