Few games actually get the appeal of cartoons - that springy expressive fun that captures the imagination and brings you in for a great time. Doing this is incredibly difficult in games, so many aspects need to work together for the effect to pull off but Hi-Fi Rush makes it look easy.

The way the world pulses to the music, how npcs are used to inject comedy and character throughout the levels, the simple but entertaining story, and the satisfying combat that gradually gets more intense - if you give it time Hi-Fi Rush will draw you in.

By the end of the game the rhythm combat has developed into something incredible as you're constantly bouncing between attacking, parrying, calling in your teammates, and using awesome super attacks.

How this game uses music looks cool on paper, but playing it and actually feeling beat of the music, your north star for when to strike and parry is incredible - what an achievement of combat design. Tango Game works makes it look easy as natural an idea as could be.

From an aesthetic standpoint, I really think this is one of my favorite looking games - the art direction is extremely coherent - everything has the prefect level of detail for legibility and style - the work to design this world and cast, and then animate, art direct and voice it all is impeccable.

A sign of good direction on a project is intentionality. Everything in this game has a clear purpose. John Johanas directed The Evil Within 2, one of my favorite games and he's back flexing a totally different set of aesthetics and tones, and I can't wait to see what he and this team does next.

I'm hoping this review will be of some help to anyone new to this game, or just curious. I'm refusing to put a star rating on this, as i don't think this is one of those games where it's useful.

I wanted to start by talking about the combat, it's one of the things that gets brought up immediately whenever you see this reviewed. I saw many people talking about how bad the combat was in this whenever i looked this up, and most likely, like me, when you read them you assumed this was your standard; "old survival horror games control bad wah wah wah".

When i started playing this, the combat, on first glance, is your standard survival horror stuff, it features silent hill style melee stuff, you hold a trigger and press a button, and your protag swipes left to right.

"Wow, really, this is what people were griping over?" i foolishly said, but all illusions are shattered upon reaching the first boss.

This game, hands down, has some of the worst hitboxes/collision detection i've ever encountered. You often can be hit by enemies facing away from you in this, and to make things worse, your character falls over from 90% of attacks, giving them time to hit you again.

Hearing this, you're probably thinking i hated this game. And i admit, when i encountered moments like this, i really had to fight the urge to give up.

However, i am one of the few people out there who actually owns a physical copy of this, call it weird, or sunk-cost-fallacy but i felt that actually being able to play through this on a physical copy, on the actual PS2 hardware, is a pretty rare thing that not everyone gets to experience. So i played on, and beat it.

This is all immensely helped by the fact that i have a big love for survival horror from this era, and how incredibly unique and interesting the style and story telling in this is, how hard the aesthetic and story telling beats hit. I really don't want to spoil it, and i encourage emulating (save states would really help), or watching a playthrough.

The soundtrack is the most distinctive thing i've ever heard, i've never seen a horror game do this style since, and it's honestly fantastic.

I could go on and on, but my main thrust is this:

This game is a real diamond in the rough. There's something extremely cool and groundbreaking in this, but you really have to persevere through some irritating gameplay to get to it. I don't feel comfortable rating this as some 5/10, or something, as it really doesn't do it justice. Numbers don't really communicate just how high the highs are, and how low the lows are in this.

Anyway, i hope this gets ported some day, with the hitboxes fixed.

Was I supposed to laugh ?

❤ :
- Colorful environments with a few good designs.

💔 :
- The characters and jokes are just unfunny.
- The weapon is non stop talking with a whiny stuttering tiring voice. Made me irritated tbh.
- The gameplay is… not that entertaining.
- The graphics and facial animations are not it for me.
- Terribly boring.
- Constent 4th wall breaking.

pretty solid gameplay but it's really dumb that a game that's so insistent that you should "play your way" punishes you for using like half of your options. you get a worse ending for using a pretty huge chunk of the abilities you have and that is quite dumb. to be clear, i don't mind the idea of alternate endings, but if you're gonna literally label one of them as the "correct" one and if you're gonna market your game as one that gives you a lot of choices i'm gonna be annoyed.
With that said there is a lot to like here. The level design is actually quite good. The areas all have a really tangible sense of being real places and the game does a good job of providing a lot of ways to accomplish your goals. The really key thing here is that it does this by letting you do things that make logical sense given the areas you're in rather than just giving you multiple rigid routes with little room for creative play.
It's a shame that stealth loses a lot of its tension by how powerful your combat powers are but it hardly ruins the game
It's worth playing if it interests you but do yourself a favor and ignore the part where the game tells you killing bad and just play in the way you enjoy instead.
Or, y'know, play deus ex, because a lot of stuff this game does well is stuff deus ex did first.