Easily going to top a bunch of 'best surprise' lists come the end of the year, both for its launch and the fact it's a Tango Gameworks game.

The first few hours are a blast, with a fusion of PS2/Dreamcast era cel-shaded visuals and a soundtrack that would also fit around that time. However, around the middle section, it treads treading into ‘cult of the lamb’ territory, where you feel it won't stick the landing. There are a couple of chapters where HFR runs out of ideas and escalates the difficulty by throwing more enemies at you. Unfortunately, the more enemies on the screen, the quicker the game falls into the trappings of a standard hack n slash-style brawler; when this happens, the enemy design simply isn't interesting or varied enough to compensate for this.

But oh man this game nails the landing, and the last few chapters ties everything together, gets you actually to care about these characters and used some inspired needle drops (I say inspired, it just went through the most played songs on my iPhone from 2011) to end Hi-Fi Rush on an undeniable high.

Hey now, you’re a rock star.