When Hi-Fi Rush released last year it received almost universal acclaim, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s a very easy game to rally behind. Expressive cel shaded graphics ripped right from a 2000s cartoon coupled with a creative spin on the action game formula combined to steal the hearts of the general public when it was shadowdropped. Its metanarrative paralleled the story of the game itself; with this underdog title competing with several hundred million dollar AAA realistic looking blockbuster titles for players’ attention. It’s no wonder why so many voices championed Tango Gameworks and sung Hi-Fi’s praises to anyone who would listen. There’s also the angle of it being one of the only genuine hits coming from Xbox’s neck of the woods that is the console game market. That aspect, much like most of the discussion surrounding Hi-Fi Rush, has aged like milk with recent news, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway, Hi-Fi Rush was ported to Playstation, so I picked it up a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about. And I was indeed charmed by it, however I wasn’t completely put under its spell.

A rhythm based action game is something I can safely say I had never played or even seen before Hi-Fi Rush. But in my time playing games I’ve frequently found myself tapping buttons along to the beat of the background music. So to capture that phenomena, and solidify it into an actual game mechanic is a spirited idea, if nothing else. A lot, and I mean a lot of care was put into making this work as well as it possibly could. And for the most part, it does work. My sense of rhythm isn’t amazing or anything, but I do find it fun to try and sus out times signatures in songs and tap along to their beat. Hi-Fi’s grading scale for staying on the beat felt pretty lenient as well, I frequently received A rankings for being right about ~65% of the time. In fact most of my scores for the game were above par, I only died a small handful of times throughout my entire playthrough. As far as character action games go, this one was pretty easy. Despite it being easy overall though, I found its more high intensity action sections to be the hardest to gel with. Without a lock-on, Chai simply chooses his target based on proximity, which can lead to some annoying instances of fighting with the game to hit your intended target. Usually you can simply treat these combat encounters like jazz and go with the flow; attacking whichever enemy the game chooses for you. However there are several cases where you’ll want to prioritize certain enemies over others. Most annoyingly would have to be the biker enemies. Which almost prey on this aspect of the design by putting up shields for other enemies and attempting to get as far away from the player as they can. There is a grappling hook item which lets you instantly latch to foes, but it didn’t do much to curtail my annoyance. I don’t think this would be that big of an issue if every enemy could be defeated from the jump with Chai’s light or heavy attacks, but there are certain classifications of enemies that heavily encourage the player to call in one of Chai’s three buddies to use a certain attack to break a color coded shield, which then will allow the player to pelt the enemy with their standard suite of moves. These moves recharge on a cooldown, too, which I didn’t find to flow with the game’s combat at all. I would spend many fights dodging around attacks while I waited for my cooldowns to recharge so I could commence my fighting proper. The enemies that require Macaron’s assistance annoyed me the most, as their shields always required two separate attacks from him to fully break the shields, meaning I always had to wait some amount of time when fighting them. This isn’t including the times when Macaron would whiff his attack or target the wrong enemy, by the way. The least invasive of these cooldowns is probably your third party member’s, and that might just be due to them having the fastest recharge rate. It may be the least invasive cooldown, but it’s counterbalanced by the fact the the enemies they’re meant to counter were some of my least favorite to fight in the entire game; spewing fire that brings any and all combo strings to a complete standstill until the player shakes the control stick enough. I hate mechanics like this and it didn’t help that it only takes one small ember touching Chai’s belt loop to cause complete and total immolation. Keep in mind, all of these mechanics need to be juggled with the constant push to stay on rhythm, which for me entirely flew out the window once things became too chaotic.

I’m willing to chalk a lot of these issues to personal issues, as I’m not exactly the foremost expert on character action games or anything like that. I’m more well versed in the field of RPGs and platformers, which, to my surprise, were also a part of this game’s identity. RPGs less so than platformers, although I can’t think of a time in recent memory where I laughed harder than during this game’s very overt reference to a particular RPG (hint: I reviewed it on this account!) But what leaves a much bigger mark on this game is its platforming elements, an entire side of the game I didn’t even know existed thanks to almost all the talk online I had seen of this game coming from its rhythm game action. Character action games aren’t just a walk from one cuboid white room to the next, with enemies sprinkled in for good measure (that does happen in this game but it’s fine in context), but I frequently thought back to games like Bayonetta, which kept this downtime traversal to a minimum. There were even moves you could unlock in that game that allowed you to traverse these downtime sections faster. Because they weren’t the focus. These sections should exist as a means of reprieve between high intensity action, but Hi-Fi’s downtime sections drag missions out to an absurd length that I found myself really struggling to enjoy. Chai’s movement on the ground is fairly slow, with no meaningful way to speed it up, there’s a dash but it’s not much help. And his jumps cover great vertical heights, but almost no horizontal distance. I believe this is where the air dash is supposed to save the day, but I found that its fixed dash distance would more often than not overshoot my target, which was frustrating.

The story of Hi-Fi Rush is nothing you haven’t seen before; Slacker underdog wants to prove himself against impossible odds. Put that under the blanket of a heavily anti-corporate theme for good measure and you’re golden. It hits all the right beats, and while I initially didn’t find the game’s many attempts at humor to be successful (groaning over puns is just as bad as making puns), I think the story managed to win me over in the end. The presentation of Hi-Fi Rush is incredible, it bears repeating. It’s this game’s silver bullet: even if I didn’t totally gel with the gameplay or characters at times, I always marveled at its graphics. It's a game with a lot of heart, and most of its shortcomings I can forgive as first attempts at a brand new style of game. A hypothetical Hi-Fi Rush 2 would have most likely been a total improvement across the board. But the chances of that happening now feel slim at best.

The news about Tango Gameworks’ demise occurred when I was about halfway through Hi-Fi Rush. I was already intending on drafting a review for the game, but obviously the wind had changed course by the time I sat down and started typing my thoughts. It was hard to not see the self-absorbed, egotistical, imbecilic corporate villains of the game in a new light hot off the heels of a Microsoft shutdown. I don’t pretend to understand the economics of a multibillion dollar business, but I don’t think I need to be a bean counter to say that Hi-Fi Rush was dealt a bad hand, and the treatment of Tango Gameworks was a cruel blunder by Microsoft. Hi-Fi Rush was the first unequivocal win Microsoft could claim as its own in this console generation (even though they had nothing to do with its development). So to reward that accolade, alongside the shower of other industry rewards Tango received for this game, with a complete shuttering of the studio, is a complete and total travesty. I’m sure you’re not hearing anything new from me here, but I just wanted to get this off my chest. With their gross, frivolous spending and callous treatment of people’s livelihoods, whatever hardships await the executives at Xbox Games Studios they wholly deserve. They should count themselves lucky it won’t happen to the tune of The Perfect Drug.