The most visually joyful game ever made about how terrible is a society run by coffee addicts.
Hi-Fi Rush is a gem of a spectacle fighter hack-n-slash, it is entirely devoted to the idea of feeling the beat, following the rhythm and grooving while styling over your enemies, with a Devil-May-Cry-laundry-list of options at the player’s disposal. On some stages, the whole shtick may become way too cluttered for its own good and it’s hard to react precisely to each visual and audio stimuli, but generally the game will rarely put too much enemies in one room for this to be the case. And even then the loads of content in each scenario is just proof of the intense love that was put into this world; there are no sections, rooms or fights that appear lazily done or put there just to pad the game. The pacing is frenetic when it needs to be and leaves a lot of room for the player to breathe between each setpiece, with an art style and soundtrack that are the epitome of fun!
Thematically, the game is about the escapades of Chai and the merry gang of social disruptors trying to improve the lives of the general population by wrecking the corporation responsible for drowning the world in consumerism. It is a beautiful coincidence that, just a few months after Cyberpunk Edgerunners tried the colourful approach to cyberpunk just to beat the dead horse of the status quo again and generally doing nothing with its genre, a simple video game made with loads of passion is capable of presenting, with light-heartedness but enough care, the issue (overtly rich delusional egomaniacs), the solution (beating them a lot with a stick) and the lesson (actually achieving something of value in life requires effort, not nepotism, and being led by the latter freaking sucks).
Moreso, Hi-Fi Rush is also a majorly significant title for the year it released in 2023, and what it signifies for the market of video games. As Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw eloquently put at the time the game came out, “the way it was dropped on us felt for me like an act of surrender. “OK, fine,” Bethesda seemed to be saying. “We officially give up trying to convince you that what you want is overpriced mediocre crap that’s a thousand hours long. Here’s a game that’s ten hours long but it’s thirty bucks and really fucking good.” And what do you know, it did gangbusters.”
Hi-Fi Rush is a gem of a spectacle fighter hack-n-slash, it is entirely devoted to the idea of feeling the beat, following the rhythm and grooving while styling over your enemies, with a Devil-May-Cry-laundry-list of options at the player’s disposal. On some stages, the whole shtick may become way too cluttered for its own good and it’s hard to react precisely to each visual and audio stimuli, but generally the game will rarely put too much enemies in one room for this to be the case. And even then the loads of content in each scenario is just proof of the intense love that was put into this world; there are no sections, rooms or fights that appear lazily done or put there just to pad the game. The pacing is frenetic when it needs to be and leaves a lot of room for the player to breathe between each setpiece, with an art style and soundtrack that are the epitome of fun!
Thematically, the game is about the escapades of Chai and the merry gang of social disruptors trying to improve the lives of the general population by wrecking the corporation responsible for drowning the world in consumerism. It is a beautiful coincidence that, just a few months after Cyberpunk Edgerunners tried the colourful approach to cyberpunk just to beat the dead horse of the status quo again and generally doing nothing with its genre, a simple video game made with loads of passion is capable of presenting, with light-heartedness but enough care, the issue (overtly rich delusional egomaniacs), the solution (beating them a lot with a stick) and the lesson (actually achieving something of value in life requires effort, not nepotism, and being led by the latter freaking sucks).
Moreso, Hi-Fi Rush is also a majorly significant title for the year it released in 2023, and what it signifies for the market of video games. As Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw eloquently put at the time the game came out, “the way it was dropped on us felt for me like an act of surrender. “OK, fine,” Bethesda seemed to be saying. “We officially give up trying to convince you that what you want is overpriced mediocre crap that’s a thousand hours long. Here’s a game that’s ten hours long but it’s thirty bucks and really fucking good.” And what do you know, it did gangbusters.”