Writers have a problem where they become hostage to one particular genre or series of works. They only expect Harry Potter from JK Rowling, and a continuation of the Metro series from Glukhovsky, and they simply don’t pay attention to their other creations, even though they turn out to be quite worthy. That’s not what happened with Tango Gameworks, but it’s a pretty good example. The studio has been creating Survival Horror throughout its existence, and its head Shinji Mikami was one of the pioneers and popularizers of this genre with his Resident Evil. But after leaving Capcom and settling under the wing of Bethesda, he did not abandon his work and gave us two parts of The Evil Within. Yes, even Ghostwire Tokyo was relatively in the spirit of the studio. Hi-Fi Rush is completely different from their previous projects, but is nevertheless a great game that gives the opportunity to let out your inner rock star.
How I like the practice when you know nothing about the game, when you have not seen a single frame of it, and then it is announced and immediately released to the public. How pleasant it was to watch the exclamations of people who did not once again come with bile, but with enviable solidarity shared positive impressions of an unexpected and pleasant gaming experience.
I only got around to it now, or rather, I played it, but with periodic drops for other projects. But gathering my strength, I finished this musical nonsense. True, after a break, it was quite painful to master the features of combat again, but fortunately there is training in order to regain lost skills and restore muscle memory. True, there were some difficulties with this game in terms of combos. While playing Devil May Cry, I was able to dance around the buttons quite deftly, and I knew exactly what to press to use this or that technique. Here I only remembered a couple, and the rest turned out by pure chance, but for some reason it’s always on topic.
The main character in his texture resembles a star lord, the same rock-obsessed boy, not particularly smart and constantly cracking jokes. Despite the fact that the type of stupid teenager is fed up and is starting to get a little annoying, here he looks very, very appropriate thanks to the right humor. In any case, for me what happened on the screen was funny, but everyone has different tastes.
In addition to the obvious emphasis on humor in the dialogues of the protagonists, which you don’t get tired of following until the very end of the game, the lion’s share of the most seasoned and topical jokes, at which you sometimes openly laugh, and not just break into a grin, are taken by robots. These minor characters, even more like extras, mainly perform economic and technical functions in factories, but they find themselves in such ridiculous situations and each of them is ready to tell you about his problem, which he tells with such pain in his heart, and you look at him and just laugh.
Sometimes they give out such topical topics, which is both sad and funny, considering how stubborn the Japanese are in terms of work.
Plus, there are messages www.bronze-casino.co.uk/ from the corporate chat, which for once I read in an action game. They don’t take up much of your time because they don’t take up several A4 pages, like in Remedy games, so they don’t ruin the dynamics, and their content complements these mini stories of unfortunate bots.
The main characters also don’t lag behind and constantly exchange barbs, and watching them make plans is a special pleasure. Everything is very coolly stylized, accompanied by a bunch of comments and, as usual, does not go according to plan and is carried out on pure luck and improvisation with a mine, as if everything was planned. And everyone’s characters are very bright and memorable and there is no such thing that they fade from memory, despite the fact that I dropped the game for quite a long time. Each of them is unique and has its own characteristics, which will unfold very organically as the story progresses.
But let’s not hide the elephant in the room and move on to the gameplay, which, although not unique, feels quite fresh. As a result of an accident, the protagonist named Chai has an audio player integrated into his chest, as a result of which he begins to feel everything in the world in rhythm, thereby demanding the same from you. And with this, as I read, many people had problems, although the system is quite gentle. Not having an ear for music, I achieved 80% or higher hits on the beat, which you can see at the end of the battle or story segment.
In general, there is no need to focus on this; rather, focus on the music. At least when I tried to get into the beat of the composition, it turned out to be some kind of mess, when the gashes during the strikes did not fit in with what I heard. I did all my actions rather according to visual markers, which the developers apparently understood and added the ability to turn on a local version of the metronome, which you need to adapt to in order to hit, but I didn’t use it, since what was happening on the screen was quite enough to telegraph your actions.
Given that you only have two punches, fast and hard, you need to remember two simple truths. The weak can beat every beat, the strong every other. At first it will seem somewhat inconvenient, but over time you get used to attacking under the count, and your fingers get used to pressing the buttons with a certain timing, and that’s where things start to go wrong. Now you can combine attacks with each other and alternate the frequency of pressing buttons, respectively, without going beyond the specified rules.
When you do everything clearly, the efficiency increases significantly and the next combo can be completed with a powerful attack, into which you can wedge in the skills of your partners. Characters not only appear in cutscenes, but also take part directly in battle, at the press of a button. Basically, they are needed for a specific situation, but they can simply have a useful effect on the battle, and with some bosses I used them almost constantly.
And so what, but bossfights are just some kind of extravaganza of staging, audio and visual splendor, which looks like a real show in which you are taking part. It looks simply amazing, but it also tests in practice everything you learned along the way. In terms of training and honing skills, everything here is done very competently. You get new abilities like a block, a cat’s hook, and throughout the level you are given opponents against whom you use new gadgets, and at the end there is catharsis and you need to use literally everything.
Boss battles are just some kind of unreal show that can be separately recorded in a clip format.
Despite some rough edges, which more likely relate to my, so to speak, “inability,” the battles turned out to be very cool. In large battles with a lot of different robots, sometimes you just get lost and can’t concentrate either on the bits or on a specific goal, and the abilities of your partners sometimes go completely wrong where you wanted. Plus, a large crowd does not allow you to complete almost any combo performed on the ground and you have to either hit in small series and simple blows, or use attacks that allow you to fight without touching the ground. And in such situations, attempts to adapt to the music fade into the background.
Unfortunately, this also happens with platforming. At first, when you run under pressure and it moves to the rhythm, you think that there will be many such situations in which you need to calculate the timings of the music. But over time, everything slides into typical bouncing. Sometimes you are given tasks that add variety to this process, but they have nothing to do with the main idea of the game. At some moments while riding the monorail and in a couple of other places you need to dodge the rhythm, but mostly just run and jump through very beautiful and bright locations.
This is what first of all alerted fans of Tango Gameworks, that is, the visual style. After the gloomy and harsh previous projects, we got some kind of cartoon. And someone will say that the Japanese made an anime, which has just a huge number of references, but for some reason the graphics here didn’t remind me of Japanese animation at all.
I don’t know how to describe this feeling, but when I see cell-shading with a skew specifically for anime, I involuntarily have a feeling of some kind of rejection, since I can’t stand modern 3-D works. And in Hi-Fi Rush everything looks somehow harmonious and does not cause visual dissonance. Plus, the animations emphasize all this splendor with their smoothness despite the fact that the entire environment is twitching to the beat.
And I don’t know how to put it, but I missed what the game focused on. At first you think you have to adapt. You listen to the music, look at the visual markers and try to get into the rhythm. But over time, and this comes quite quickly, you forget about all this and play like a standard action slasher, except for the moments when you need to repel attacks by repeating the enemy’s tact.
In the cutscenes, all this is expressed much more clearly and the videos resemble natural clips, but the gameplay somehow fell short. Perhaps you just get used to everything and over time you don’t notice, but deep down you still try to adjust, but the sensations are something like this. Nevertheless, the game turned out to be simply awesome and, despite its presence in the gamepass, deserves a separate purchase. Such projects that come out completely ready without lags should definitely be encouraged.