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dkirschner's Hi-Fi Rush (PC)

[July 8, 2023 02:05:21 PM]

I suppose I should write some entries for all the games I’ve been playing. I’ve just been trying to burn through Game Pass games while I can, before I have “crunch time” at work, then vacation, then the new semester. Last weekend, I house/dog-sat for Sasha’s mom and dedicated the days completely to sitting in air conditioning and playing games. Hi-Fi Rush is the first one I played. I think I had a smile plastered on my face the whole time through. It’s pure joy, fun, funny, action-packed. This is a rhythm action game. Imagine if you had to play Bayonetta or Devil May Cry to the beat. That’s Hi-Fi Rush. This is different than other rhythm games I’ve played because everything—every thing—moves to the beat. It’s not just that you have to attack to the beat, but enemies move and attack to the beat and everything in the environment pulses with the beat. Actually, I suppose in this way it’s like Crypt of the Necrodancer. And, since I recently completed Metal: Hellsinger, I couldn’t help compare it to that, though they are very different games. One thing they have in common is that both encourage you to keep a combo meter up (though Hi-Fi Rush doesn’t penalize you for not doing so).

It's one of those “easy to learn, difficult to master” things. The difficulty curve isn’t too high on normal, and I figured out about halfway through the game that you can button mash, and later on in the game that as long as you’re rotating your party’s attacks in your combos, you’ll pretty much kick the shit out of everything and get high scores. But you have tons of attacks, special attacks, party member attacks, dodge, parry, and everything both on the ground and in the air. There are dozens of button combinations to memorize, from the simple X X X X combo to something like X [rest] X Y [hold X] Y [now they’re airborne] X X [hold Y] Y [chain enemy] Y Y Y X [switch characters for the finisher]. Okay, I made the last one up, but you can pull off combos like that.

I don’t think I would have cared all that much about Hi-Fi Rush if the story, setting, characters, and art weren’t so great. The music was really one of my least favorite parts. I found the songs to be pretty boring rock music (compared to the much more exciting metal in Metal: Hellsinger!) that got lost in the background of everything going on on the screen anyway. But that art! Man, the attention to detail in the setting, the character animations, it’s great. Everything is colorful and vibrant. The setting is alive. One of my favorite things about the game were the other robot characters—the vacuuming robots that run around frantically when you attack, the stoner guy mechanics, the robots made to move boxes who are perpetually worried about losing their jobs, the jabs back and forth between the newer model worker robots and the older ones. They’ve all got funny one-liners, and they always say something if you try to attack them (e.g., the box-carrying robots plead for you to stop so they don’t lose their jobs). The main characters were great, the bosses were great. It was just so charming, and I was always eager to see what the next little NPC was talking about, who the next boss was (and how insane they were!).

Some of the boss fights were pretty creative, and didn’t always involve traditional fighting, though like I said, I did eventually realize that as long as you’re including your party in your combos, you can pretty much stand right next to them and button mash your way to victory. I felt cheap. This helped me beat the last two.

Definitely recommended.