HIFI RUSH OPENCRITIC PLUS

That said, going at the combat in your own way doesn’t mean missing out on the music.

But Hi-Fi Rush is all about letting players go at their own pace, doing things their own way when it comes to combat and its an approach that works perfectly, especially with combat that’s so excellently smooth as butter and fast-paced that rhythm or not, you’ll be able to effortlessly glide around and swipe at enemies it a brilliantly chaotic cacophony.

HIFI RUSH OPENCRITIC PLUS

It does help as you’ll gain more gears in each battle spend on new attacks, special attacks, items to boost your health, energy and more, plus it helps you defend against enraged enemies as you parry their special attacks.

You’ll notice that I said “preferably” striking back there, because you aren’t actually required to be in perfect tune. The easiest way to describe the core gameplay would possibly be a combination between Devil May Cry and say, Metal: Hellsinger, where you attack groups of enemies with both light and heavy blows, preferably striking in tune with the beat of the music, all while you dodge and parry numerous attacks along the way. This sounds like a lot, and yet all of it is somehow seamlessly executed. But Hi-Fi Rush almost feels like a love letter to video games in general in one way or another, be it brawlers and spectacle fighters with intricate special attacks and huge combos, platforming sections both 3D and 2D, more straight-up rhythm games used for certain parries and counterattacks, collect-a-thons with a lot of extra stuff to discover, a more modern emphasis on narrative, and indeed, even some moments poking fun at video game tropes themselves (like Vandelay having literally patented a set of arrows designed to point the way forward, or even a cameo by some of the developers’ other stars). It’d be easy to just simply say that Hi-Fi Rush is a love letter to an older generation of video games in the same way as a title like Evil West, both being 3D action games with linear stage progression that wouldn’t feel out of home on something like a souped-up Dreamcast. Hi-Fi Rush feels exactly like its creator wanted to make a massive tribute to everything they loved about video games, gathered all of that up, mixed it together and ground it into a powder. Yet to me, one game that oddly kept coming to mind was Saints Row IV, if only because I remember Zero Punctuation describing it as “a big, bouncy, anarchic, irreverent roast of itself and of video games in general,” which not only sounds right here as well, but leads to another term I saw multiple folks using to describe Hi-Fi Rush: “gamelike.” Such a term may sound redundant or even confusing, and yet here fits perfectly.

Now, Hi-Fi Rush is best described as a rhythm-action game, and other folks have described the game with comparisons to Jet Set Radio, Sunset Overdrive, Viewtiful Joeand others, be it on visual style, use of music or combat.

From there, they’ll team up with a motley crew of new friends in order to strike back at Vandelay and uncover the secret behind their mysterious project SPECTRA. But fortunately, the music player, combined with the magnetic wand his new arm has, allows Chai to summon debris to create a giant attack guitar and sync up all of their attacks and movement with the music playing in order to help them fight back. Unfortunately, a freak accident gets his music player embedded in his chest, turning him into what Vandelay considers a defect and making them a wanted man. Hi-Fi Rush is the story of Chai, a young man with dreams of being a rock star who signs up for Project Armstrong at the renowned Vandelay Technologies, looking to get a robotic replacement for their crippled arm.

So we need to put that part aside for a moment and judge the game on its own merits, and once that’s accomplished, we can truly see that the game is. But while a sudden major release like this is a delight, this has also led to a huge chunk of Hi-Fi Rush’s buzz coming mainly from praise over the shadow drop itself, and coming across like a good chunk of the praise so far come’s from its method of release, how it didn’t suffer from months of marketing, empty promises and whatnot. Last week saw the surprise release of Hi-Fi Rush, which shocked everyone due to the fact that its existence wasn’t even hinted at until a couple of hours before in dropped into digital storefronts, as well as the fact that it was coming from the Shinji Mikami-led Tango Gameworks, making it a high-profile surprise release.

Hifi rush opencritic