Review: Hi-Fi Rush

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• Review: Hi-Fi Rush

Game Details

Hi-Fi Rush At A Glance

Developed by Tango Gameworks (developer of Ghostwire: Tokyo) and published by Bethesda, Hi-Fi Rush is a fresh game from a AAA publisher in an otherwise bland and same-y market. Though, it’s not without its faults. The game started off fun and enjoyable, but as I got further in the story the gameplay loop became less fun and more irritating. The game is centered around music and so everything from your movements to the enemies attack cycle follows a standard 4/4 timing at a moderate BPM.

Story

You can follow the story from our Let’s Play YouTube videos either from our Let’s Play Videos page or YouTube.

Welcome to Vandelay

Hi-Fi Rush follows the (mis)adventures of Chai as he heads to a marketing event by mega corporation Vandelay. It becomes apparent in the first few seconds that Chai is a huge music fan as the opening cinematic has him obliviously dancing around at the reception while they impatiently wait for him to acknowledge he is next in queue. Vandelay, a producer of robotics and cybernetic parts, unveils a new product that a select “lucky” few get to receive. Chai heads on to get ready to receive his upgrades while up above the top management at the event, having gone back into the facility, drop the niceties and the CEO, Kale, goes on a rant about the quality of the applicants. In the process, he throws away Chai’s music player which ironically lands on Chai’s chest right before the augmentation process begins.

The Defect Problem

After an undisclosed period of time, Chai is thrust out of his bed and proceeds to leave the facility. Upon leaving, he’s stopped by security who want to run a quality inspection on the augmentation process. Due to the presence of his music player now a part of his heart, he’s flagged as defective and security attempts to apprehend him to be reduced to scrap. Through a series of received punches, Chai eventually figures out that his magnetic waste grabber is a weapon. This weapon also happens to to attract scrap metal in such a way that it resembles a Flying V™ style guitar. And so you go through the game smacking your robotic enemies with a scrap metal guitar.

The characters themselves were rather forgettable with the exception of the psychology robot CNMN (Cinnamon) and the head of R&D, Zanzo. Chai is a hipster teen who’s life aspiration is to be become a rockstar. Peppermint is some technologically gifted woman with the unusual-looking hair style of shoulder-length hair with one side of the head buzzed. Macaron is some absurdly strong guy who’s also a shy pacifist. I only found CNMN to be entertaining because of his snappy humor and that their facial expressions were marker drawings on their face. Zanzo was entertaining because he was overly animated and made a lot of anime postures, but then they pair this with the dialogue that he’s mentally immature due to wanton spending and time crunches.

Gameplay

The core gameplay loop is is your typical 3D platformer with the addition of predefined combat arenas that block your way. For added difficulty, if you find keeping the tempo to be a little challenging, the entire world moves to the beat of the background track. So moving platforms and traps all react according to the beat. I found this to be refreshing at first, but later it became irritating. This was especially so at an area where some laser beams in an air duct activated faster than Chai could move. I ended up just “yolo-ing” it through the lasers and taking the damage.

Boss Fight Soundtracks

Being a musical/beat game it is worth mentioning the soundtracks for the boss fights were very good thematically. I didn’t love every song, but the one I loved the most was the second-to-last boss fight against the Finance director, Roquefort. The track was an adaptation of a classical song and was appropriately called “The Fizzith”. You can check it out in my episode 8 Let’s Play video.

Flow Breaks and Irritating Design Choices

Earlier when I said that the game reacting to the beat of the music to be refreshing but turned irritating, I meant it. Early on in the game they introduce you to the Parry mechanic. At first, I was like “Ok and can parry if I can get the timing down”. Well I had no choice but to get it down because the same level you learn to parry you are forced to master the timing or else you literally cannot progress any further in the story. Why is this? There are some laser defense drones that the only way to kill them is to parry every attack they shoot at you which, by the way, follows it’s only beat within the music’s tempo. It was at this point that the game immediately became less fun because every time you encounter these drones your progress is hindered until you complete the “quick-time event minigame”.

Another design choice I found irritating and somewhat flow breaking was the addition of what I’m going to call “beat events”. These are used in various places throughout the story, but they always appear at inconvenient times. These events were like the parry QTEs and if you didn’t press the right button at the right time you had to restart the whole cycle. I don’t know who thought this was a good idea, but it broke the flow of the game in my opinion and drug out certain combat sequences. Especially if you had a hard time keeping the beat and rhythm.

Final Thoughts

Hi-Fi Rush has some interesting gameplay ideas, but the overall execution left me feeling frustrated. The story itself wasn’t bad, but I as I got further into the story I wanted to play it less. This was due to forced game mechanics closely coupled to the beat tempo. The combat itself isn’t too hard, but the mechanics they force you to use make it hard. I found myself wanting to play it like a hack and slash and largely ignored the beat except to parry or dodge.

I can neither recommend nor not recommend this game, but you can pick it for free on game pass so it’s worth a try if you are curious.