![]() Metal: Hellsinger, for instance, attempts to turn Doom into a rhythmic shooter, but its restrictive beat-matching system leaves little room to experiment with the music. Many games have tried this in recent years to varying degrees of success. ![]() The twist, though, is that players do more damage if their attacks line up with the beat of the background music. On paper, it’s your standard hack-and-slash where players build up massive combos (see: Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, etc). Hi-Fi Rush excels in a lot of areas, but its musical combat is its standout accomplishment. When you’re making a AAA video game that’s going to be positioned as a major console exclusive for a company like Microsoft, that’s perhaps the most punk thing you could do. Rather than chasing bankable trends, Hi-Fi Rush prioritizes invention above all. That’s slipped away from the big budget scene in the last decade as I’ve felt the biggest releases homogenized around the same general ideas. I’m transported to playing Capcom’s Viewtiful Joe as a kid, still impressed by how games could offer such a diverse range of play styles and visuals that I’d never experienced before. Even its art style rebels against modern instincts, opting for vibrant colors and an illustrative style rather than chasing “next-gen” realism.ĭuring my playthrough, I frequently flashed back to the golden days of the Nintendo GameCube - a console that was loaded with the kind of eclectic games that you’ll only find in the indie scene these days. It’s an entirely unique fusion of rhythm and hack-and-slash action, turning Devil May Cry into a music game. It’s not a run-of-the-mill AAA game featuring an expansive open world and obsessive hooks meant to keep consumers logging in (one could argue that Tango’s own Ghostwire: Tokyo fell victim to some of those trappings). Hi-Fi Rush itself feels like a rejection of the capitalistic restrictions that major studios like Tango Gameworks often face. That theme isn’t just reflected in its story. It’s a message that feels especially relevant to the year it’s releasing in, as the gaming industry inches closer to mass unionization. One of my favorite text logs is a poem written by a maintenance robot forced to ceaselessly clean company floors that never get dirty. The dystopia is filled with corporate propaganda posters and lore logs that paint a picture of the world’s exploited working class via loaded gags. Biting satire is baked into its colorful world, as it makes some heavy themes more digestible for a range of age groups. Though its story can be a bit “anti-capitalism 101” at times - and loaded with the same quippy humor that plagues games like Forspoken - much of its narrative decisions work in the context of its light aesthetic. ![]() That kicks off an alt-rock-fueled journey to take down the company’s top brass with the help of some allies and a metallic guitar blade. Set in a metropolis run by an oppressive megacorporation, the story focuses on a worker named Chai who’s deemed defective after having a music player fused to his chest. Narratively, Hi-Fi Rush is a cyberpunk game wrapped up in cartoon aesthetics. It’s the rare major studio game that breaks free from the monotony of a stagnating medium to deliver something that truly, earnestly rocks. It has all the style of an anime, the long-lost creative energy of a GameCube game, and the bright-eyed exuberance of a 2000s teen at their first indie rock show. Hi-Fi Rush rockets to the top of the rhythm-action genre thanks to a stellar combat system that goes far beyond simple beat-matching. Steady beats serve as an invisible force that powers its vibrant cyberpunk world, but I can hardly ever feel that restriction in a musical quest that plays like a creative improv session. Rather, everything about it is built around that music, like a band naturally locking in after a drummer’s opening count-in. Tango Gameworks’ rhythm-action game, which surprise-launched on PC and Xbox last week, doesn’t just throw players a good playlist and ask them to keep time over it. While some music games could stand to learn a thing from that video, Hi-Fi Rush is a model student. Then, she switches over to the rhythm, replicating the actual pattern of notes that weave around that tempo. In one clip I stopped to watch, the teacher starts by pointing out a song’s beat, steadily tapping out its tempo like a metronome. For a few weeks, all of them seemingly latched onto the same trend as they put out quick videos highlighting the difference between beat and rhythm, two specific terms that get mistakenly interchanged with one another. ![]() Last year, the app’s unknowable algorithm briefly decided that it should only serve me reels from music teachers (a passive-aggressive move, if you ask this self-taught guitarist).
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