![]() This is a new-generation only game, available on Xbox Series X/S and PC, but it justifies that not with lashings of superfluous detail but just with a sense of raw, crisp style - and in running silky smooth. Beautiful animation, popping colors, and cutscenes that honestly gave me a brief pause for thought of ‘is this real-time, or pre-recorded’? There’s style here. What also elevates the experience is how it looks. It’s a genius bit of design that elevates what is basically a fun and pretty accessible action brawler into something else entirely. I think Hi-Fi Rush is good enough to get there on its own - but the music lets it take your soul in record time. You don’t need the music to line up in this way - but god, it helps. I can slip into a similar trance playing Crazy Taxi, or Ikaruga. The best character action games and intense arcadey video games always have this sort of quality, to be fair. ![]() And because everything is tied to the music, there’s a toe-tapping poison that slowly seeps into your very pores.īy the time you reach the game’s first proper boss encounter, which takes place to a licensed Nine Inch Nails track, you’ll feel yourself slowly slipping into a goblin mode stance most familiar to drummers and DJs – I can speak from experience on the former – into a slight slouch, Gollum hunched, but shoulders rocking and popping as the rhythm takes you. You’re slapping people about with a guitar that’s made of scrap metal. The entire world pulsates with the BPM of whatever music is currently playing, and although you can just button mash your way through things, the way to deal more damage and handle enemies efficiently is to do so with timing, allowing your hits and combos to directly line up to the pulsing music. In real terms, Hi-Fi Rush is an interesting sort of mix between a character action game like a Devil May Cry (another Mikami-produced joint) and a rhythm game. When I talk about this era, I’m talking about stuff like Crazy Taxi, and Jet Set Radio, and Viewtiful Joe – the latter of which was actually produced by Mikami. But this game, on which Mikami is the producer behind director John Johanas of The Evil Within 2 fame, demonstrates that he – and Tango – can do so much more.Ĭolorful, slick, and with a gorgeous aesthetic and bright-eyed attitude, Hi-Fi Rush recalls a lot of my favorite games of that era, where the spirit of approachable and accessible arcade games merged with the first console hardware that was truly on par or more powerful than what was available in arcades. The studio was founded by Shinji Mikami, the man most often credited as the most influential person in the creation of the Resident Evil series – and thus far, the studio’s works have matched up to that. And I mean that in the best possible way.Ī new off-beat action game from Tango Gameworks, the Bethesda studio that up until this point has been all about survival horror. The point is, the latest first-party addition to Xbox Game Pass feels like it’s time traveled from circa 1998-2003. ![]() Or a GameCube classic, to be fair – it feels like it’d be most at home on either of those. Trends come and go, and loop back around, and here we are – it’s the year of our lord 2023, and a time portal has just opened above our heads and dropped a Dreamcast classic into our laps. Time is ever-flowing, but it’s also undoubtedly a flat circle. ![]()
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