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Hi-Fi Rush — A Review Session

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It’s been a hot minute since I’ve done one of these “It’s New to Me, Dangit!” reviews, and it’s not without reason. Since completing my multi-month journey through the various Pokemon generations, I was looking for something new and strikingly different from playing seven straight RPG’s.

After dabbling in a game here or there, I settled on trying Hi-Fi Rush, a game released on Microsoft platforms the same day it was announced. What I found was a game that was seemingly made just for me.

Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm-based action platformer. The best way I can describe it is if someone took Viewtiful Joe, Rock Band, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and Super Mario Odyssey, ran them all through a meat grinder, and charbroiled the resulting beef on a well-seasoned cast iron skillet.

Yes, I’m saying Hi-Fi Rush is a hamburger. And good lord is it tasty. Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash.

The visuals for Hi-Fi Rush are gorgeous. Everything’s in 4K, and while the transitions from in-game engine to animated cutscenes are obvious, the rich color palettes and black-line art more than make up for it.

There had better be an entire spinoff game about Detective SEB-AAA. His voice actor reminds me so much of Garrus from Mass Effect.

What really sells this game is that everything is based around the rhythm. Whether you’re playing licensed tracks from The Black Keys or streamer-friendly alternative The Glass Pyramids, everything about this game lives through the beat. The environment pulsates. Lights flash, platforms move, and enemies attack all to the beat. And the boss battles take on a life of their own with unique platforming challenges and mechanics based off of everything you’ve learned up to that point.

[embed]The first boss wears a wrestling championship belt. See? I always find a way to include wrestling, or wrestling finds a way to me. Wrestling is a microcosm of our culture.

Chai himself moves and attacks to the beat, but here’s where Hi-Fi Rush differs from a game like Crypt of the Necrodancer: Chai’s movements, attacks, and platforming mechanics are not dependent on the beat like they are in Crypt. Sure, you can jump and swing your guitar around and beat up enemies off-beat, but the game rewards you for being on beat.

As you progress through each level of the game, you’ll be rewarded for your skills, which translates to money you can use to buy upgrades like new attacks, or permanent stat upgrades, so you can get even bigger rewards. Time is a flat rhythmic circle in Hi-Fi Rush.

It’s not enough to just have the level end with your score. No, you need style.

And for the less musically-inclined, there’s a feature you can toggle to let you know when the beat hits, so that you can time your button presses to the beat. And that’s not the only bonus regarding accessibility — Hi-Fi Rush goes above and beyond with color blindness filters, audio descriptive narration, text size, subtitles. Tango Gameworks really wanted to make sure that anyone interested in this game could have a fair shot at trying it out, and they deserve a lot of kudos for that. Gaming is always better when more folks can play and enjoy games!

The story is simple — in some fictional futuristic land where robots and cybernetics are the norm, a young man named Chai gives up his busted human arm to receive a new robot arm. However, his MP3 player manages to sneak past security, and through circumstance, is integrated with his body in the process of getting said robot arm.

Deemed a defect at the factory island where he received the upgrade (and here, “defect” basically means “kill this affront to Robot God at once”), Chai takes on an entire corporation called Vandelay Technologies, including all their security robots and the entire C-Level management.

No doubt someone has screencapped this boss with a “Me and the Squad entering the club” caption

Chai joins the one-woman resistance team in Cinnamon, a clever hacker and markswoman who has a robot cat named 808 (aka Bob, who performs an unexpected Twin Peaks reference mid-game). Other characters join the party as the game progresses, and all serve as assists to Chai in battle. Cinnamon can fire at targets, and another character can break shields. Another character sends enemies flying into the air. Each of these characters have a small cooldown associated with summoning them, but you can summon them infinitely and at any time, even all at once.

Naturally, this means you can summon your assists in a way that there’s always someone helping you. Or you treat it as a “four-on-one” assault on an enemy. And yes, the game also rewards you for summoning them on beat, which can result in awesome combination finishing/signature maneuvers. Folks who seek to become experts could create a fight scene that would look like pure chaos to the average gamer, but it’s all just careful, rhythmic timing.

[embed]My thumbs are crying just watching this.

Looking back on the characters in the game, my favorite is Korsica, the Info-Sec Manager of Vandelay Technologies. She’s unabashedly fierce, has a phenomenal boss battle with Chai, and has an absolutely delightful Scottish accent that would make Craig Ferguson blush.

My only criticism of this game is that she did not refer to her Gran even once. NOT EVEN ONCE!

I beat the game in roughly 12 hours’ time, which will feel much longer given how involved you can become when chasing higher scores and beautifully-synchronized violence.

Whether you have a PC or an Xbox, I think it would be foolish to avoid at least giving this game a shot. It’s easily one of my favorite games of recent memory, and a welcome Xbox original property as well. If Microsoft ever dared to make a Smash Bros. clone, Chai would make for one hell of a fun fighter.

I don’t do “x out of 10” stuff for these, but I gotta say I’m glad I played this, and I think you should play it too. Onward to the next game!