Hi-Fi Rush – Review
During the Xbox and Bethesda Developer Direct display, the game Hi-Fi Rush was unexpectedly announced and released. The game combines three-dimensional beat ’em up gameplay with stunning visuals and a unique focus on rhythm and timing. Actually, music and tempo permeate every aspect of gameplay, making Hi-Fi Rush a timing-based action game that is both familiar and wholly original. While there are some tricky platforming segments and the obligatory minigames can be annoying if you don’t time them just so, Hi-Fi Rush is still a lot of fun and deserving of our Editors’ Choice nod. This $29.99 action game is playable on Windows, Xbox One X/S (as a separate purchase or as part of Xbox Game Pass), and Xbox One X/S. (via Epic Game Store or Steam).
You take control of Chai, a brash and idealistic young man who signs up for Project Armstrong in the hopes of getting a prosthetic arm and pursuing his ambition of becoming a rock star. As a result of a chain of unfortunate events, Chai now has a robotic arm driven by a music player grafted onto his chest. The Vandelay company, which provided the robotic improvement, views this peculiarity as a flaw and is therefore determined to eradicate it along with Chai’s peculiar existence in order to conceal its own dirty little secrets. In his quest to bring down the large tech firm and its villainous board of directors, Chai forms an alliance with a group of rebels.
Just know that Hi-Fi Rush isn’t a game that takes itself too seriously, so you don’t have to worry about the finer points. The main story is just a vehicle for the robot-destroying action created by Tango Gameworks. In the end, it all comes down to gameplay, and Hi-Fi Rush has some of the best action gameplay you’ll find in a video game. The combat may not have the depth of Ninja Gaiden’s combo system or the variety of attacks featured in Devil May Cry, but it more than makes up for it with a clever, rhythm-focused basis that greatly enhances the action and makes it extremely addicting. The game’s mechanisms push for system mastery without ever feeling too challenging. To put it another way, it’s the kind of challenge that makes you feel like coming back for more.
Hi-Fi Rush is an action-oriented game with some minor puzzles and platforming thrown in for good measure. The game’s fast transitions between stages keep things feeling new and exciting. You have to make your way across a chasm painted in techno colours, fight if you so choose, find some secrets, and then return to the main road to do it all over again. When you’re not actively playing, you can rest in the hub lounge and play with 808 or buy new moves (an adorable, pudgy robot cat).
As Chai fights the robot sentries Vandelay deploys to stop him, his musical soul informs his strategy. In the heat of combat, he conjures a guitar from discarded materials, and with each strike, he deals, the guitar strums in harmony with the score. Because of the rhythmic nature of Hi-Fi Rush, you’ll want to time your melee attacks to the beat of the music. The game is, thankfully, not too strict. Even if you miss the beat, Chai’s attacks will still land, but a well-timed assault will deal significantly more damage and have a more significant knockback. In Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, your score is determined in part by how well you manage your timing during battle. For instance, your rank is exactly proportional to the amount of flawless notes you hit throughout a fight. This makes it easy enough for newbies to enjoy themselves without hindering the experience for high-score chasers.
Light attacks can be executed in a single beat, making them quite effective. Performing a heavy assault, which is significantly more powerful, takes two beats. Special combinations can be executed by alternating light and heavy attacks, and additional moves and combos can be purchased from the central shop (for example, a spin attack or an iaido-style quick-draw attack). Although the combo trees aren’t too complex, you can easily and effectively wipe off adversaries by chaining together hits in any order you see suitable. But, the unlockable moves provide a tonne of possibilities for creating combos.
You can increase your attacking potential by using a variety of supplementary skills. You can quickly avoid harm by dodging, and parrying deflects attacks without giving up position (and both can be timed to the beat for extra style). To lengthen your combo or use their specific attack properties (such as shield shattering or barrier overloading), you can call upon characters you meet. Nero-like grapple allows you to close the distance between you and your foes, making for a more devastating assault. You have a wide variety of options available to you, which opens up many possible combinations.
Hi-Fi Rush intersperses the fighting with periods of puzzle-solving and platforming. Due to Chai’s high yet short jumps, it is simple to make mistakes during the platforming sections. Minigames focused on rhythm are occasionally thrown at you as well. Some of the game’s tougher foes and bosses, for instance, can drive you into a parry-centric minigame in which you’ll need to time your counterattacks to the enemy’s attack rhythm. Minigames like these are great when you get the time just right, but they can be really annoying if you keep failing at them.
The music and animations in Hi-Fi Rush truly pulse to the rhythm of the game. Lights flash or spin to the beat, platforms sway to the music, and equalisation images flicker over the walls. Even when Chai is doing nothing, his animations show him moving his fingers and toes to the beat. The sound design is excellent. The Black Keys, Nine Inch Nails, and The Prodigy are just a few of the bands whose songs were licenced for use in Hi-Fi Rush’s original soundtrack. The music is fantastic, and it’s a genius bit of game design to be able to use it to guide your movements and give you an edge. While other games like BPM, Metal Hellsinger, and Soundfall have made musical elements integral to the experience, the dynamic twist that Hi-Fi Rush introduces is uncommon in the beat ’em up genre.
The game’s visuals are extremely impressive. The imagery is spot-on for a comic book setting, and the world teems with life. The sharp 4K visuals help a lot, as do the outstanding cel-shaded models, which have just the right amount of detail to make everything seem beautiful and distinct without making the game look cluttered or overdesigned. The game’s visual style is a mashup of elements from Jet Set Radio and Viewtiful Joe, including speedlines, comic-spread intros, screen-tone shading, and onomatopoeia, but it still manages to appear fresh and original. The only legitimate critique is a pragmatic one. Every once in a while, bright background items (such scrolling screens or neon barricades) get stuck in front of the camera, blocking your view until you either move the camera or yourself out of the way.
By launching a high-quality game without much fanfare, Bethesda and Tango Gameworks (maybe cleverly) avoided the prerelease controversy that plagues so many video games. Hi-Fi Rush is a great addition to the Xbox’s renowned Game Pass and comes with a high recommendation from me. It’s a freemium action game that’s worth every penny. The $29.99 price tag is rather inexpensive for a game of this calibre if you don’t have Game Pass. Although Hi-Fi Rush doesn’t fundamentally alter the action-adventure genre, it manages to breathe new life into it.
