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| You should buy Hi-Fi Rush by Rafiki 02/18/2024, 9:10pm PST | ||||
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| Before, I had only played like 3-4 hours, now I restarted and played all the way through on Hard and have done a bunch of post-game stuff. It is a good game that is worth full price.
I haven't played DMC but I compared it to DMC because I know that's the template it's from. I have played Bayonetta, though, which follows the same template, and what I didn't much like about Bayonetta is how button-mashy it felt. Spam attacks to chain the longest combos that will also kill enemies within a certain time limit to get the highest score. There are 8 billion combos, and they're all more flashy than useful. Hi-Fi Rush follows the same basic template, but scoring is also based on how well you time your attacks to the beat. You can spam attacks all you want, but if you're playing for S-rank you'll never ever get it without nailing your timing. To me, this makes a huge difference in making the game feel like there's some actual skill to it rather than just memorizing and spamming button combos. Pretty much everything in combat is linked to the timing of the beat of the music. Enemy attacks always land on the beat, you can parry or dodge attacks which means you have to time them to the beat, and if your timing is tight enough it opens up special counter attacks which can do big damage, break shields, or air juggle. If you complete combos, it opens up a "beat attack" which is a special finisher that you have time perfectly and doing so rewards energy to fill up the meter that powers your special attacks. It's fun. I had fun. I like this more than Bayonetta. If I had to criticize the combat, there's still a reliance on like 30 combos without it feeling like there's a need for them. To get S-rank from score component of your grade, you mostly need to incorporate air juggling and manage your special attacks. You can really just memorize half a dozen combos and ignore the rest. I guess the defense would be "variety," but what's the point of putting them in the game if you can S-rank your way through while ignoring 80% of the possible attacks? I'd be motivated to branch out and experiment with more combo options if there was a reason to. There's a lot of QTEs in the game, both throughout levels and as part of boss fights, but these too are all about timing buttons to the beat, so you end up playing Elite Beat Agents instead of some bullshit QTE where you have a millisecond to react or you have to hammer a button until your thumb falls off. Since Elite Beat Agents is a good game, I liked these too, but I think they could have done a little more with them. In between fights there's some platforming and light exploration where you can find power-ups to expand your health or vacuum up currency to buy new items and abilities. This is the weakest part of the game. Levels are just one big long corridor with an occasional hidden room with a special item. Here again timing slightly improves the levels, because you can dash to the beat which allows you to chain dashes three times if you time it right. Jumps also can be timed, but there's no bonus just a little flair. Levels are filled with lots and lots of crates to smash open :( Not even stylish PUNK RAWK crates, just boring wooden ones. The art direction gets a D-rank here. Animation is fantastic. Voice acting is also excellent. The writing generally has the sensibilities and positivity of a Saturday morning cartoon, but occasionally there's some legitimately funny lines and exchanges. The robot using a marker to draw expressions on its face is actually an inspired sight gag. I'm surprised it's never been done before. Unless it has. Then they ripped it off, but it was still funny. There's some licensed tracks that are used both as background music in levels and remixed for boss fights, and they chose some, as the kids say, bangers. 1,000,000, Perfect Drug, Invaders Must Die, Lonely Boy, and a few others from bands I didn't recognize. The non-licensed tracks are mostly generic sounding rock, I think there's only one I really liked :(. What's BULLSHIT, though, is that in your hideout, aka the game hub, there's a jukebox where you can unlock tracks to play as background music. None of the licensed songs from anyone are available to listen to. I guess there's separate royalties that would have to be paid out to play them outside the levels? What? I give Hi-Fi rush my highest rating: pretty good |
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