Hi-Fi Rush Review: The Video Game Version of Soup

what's up, and welcome to the single player experience. As always, I'm your host, Sebastian Malden, and often the best surprises in life come outta nowhere. You could be given a surprise gift. Maybe you get extra pieces of chicken in your two piece and a biscuit combo, or maybe someone threw your surprise party. You might have found some money on the ground. Life is full of surprises in the gaming industry. We don't often get the pleasant surprise that is video games being shadow dropped, at least not. One of the most recent examples of this though is Tangle Works. Newest Game HiFi Rush. As soon as I saw the trailer, I just knew, I knew my ass had to chicken out. After playing it to completion, I knew that I had to do an episode about it. It's a game that blew me away and became an early contender for Game of the Year 2023. So what is this game and who is this game for? I'm gonna answer that question and more right after the intro. DJ start the intro. so you probably don't know this about me, but if you do, you really need to quit stalking me, is that one of my favorite types of food on this entire planet is soups. Why? Because it's delicious for one, but also because it takes simple foods and combines them to make something that's better than the sum of its parts. I found that completely fascinating and the game high fire rush is a lot like that. It takes the grading system of Devil Mayra, the musical timing of Guitar Hero and some of the combat elements from Devil Mayra in Kingdom Heart and combines them with this into the Spider verse Jet Set Radio like art style. And thankfully, that mixture absolutely works. So let's talk about this game. Let's dive into it. Why am I recommending High-Fi Rush? It's simple. This game absolutely slaps, and let me tell you why. Starting with the narrative in this game, you play a chai, a goofy and charismatic guy who becomes a victim of a robotic surgery gone wrong due to an incident. Chai gets his musical player infused into his chest. Imagine iron. But instead of keeping Shrapnel Ray from his heart, chai is granted the ability to turn the world around him to move to the rhythm of the song bling in his chest. It's an interesting concept that I've never seen before. At least I can't remember anything quite like this in this game. Chai and a dope crew of characters journey to expose and take down an evil corporation known as Vandelay Technologies. The side characters that I was just telling you about are an absolute gem, and each one of them is filled with their own personality and flavor. It's a real common occurrence that you see characters with just the stereotypical sidekick tropes, and this game feels different in that regard. While the narrative isn't going to revolutionize video games, it's a fun story. It gets in, does what it needs to do, while providing some good laughs along the way and kind of gets out. It's a smaller, more contained story that feels like it respects the gamer's. So let's talk about the combat. Another aspect of High Five Rush that really stands out is the gameplay and the combat. The Game has a similar hack and slash combat to games like Kingdom Hearts and Devil May Cry, but with the added element of doing combats to the rhythm of the beat. If you played games like Guitar Hero, then you understand the mechanic of pressing the needed button at the exact right time to stay on beat. In High-Fi rush, if you do combos to the beat, then you're awarded by doing extra damage to your. A great element of this game is that if you're rhythm challenged, then you can still play this as a hacker slash adventure game. By going this route, you won't do as much damage and you'll get a worse combat score, which is very similar to Devil may rise combat grading system, by the way. But you can still complete this game and have tons of fun in the process. The combos themselves are nice and varied. You have combos that you do on the ground in the air by pairing and by grabbing your opponents. Another component that adds some that special spice to the combat is the character assist game mechanic. The crew that you meet along the way can come in and for a very limited time attack the enemies around you. It adds another layer of combos that you can do and quickly dispatches your foe for a better overall combat. Now let's talk about the art style and the presentation. That's one of the things that really stood out to me about this game is this art style. It has a very similar vibe and aesthetic to games like Sunset Overdrive, and Jetset Radio, while also being its own unique, original thing. Everything in this game is full of style and flir. The animations in the gameplay and the cut scenes look like something you'd see in a very high budget animated. The colors in this game really pop and highlight the environment and the different moves that you need to do to beat certain enemies. One of the biggest compliments about this game is how unique the game looks visually. It's not often that you play a game that is this stylized with this type of art style. And throughout the year, I'm probably going to be thinking about which game kind of had the best looking art style. And I know this game is gonna keep popping up in my head throughout 2023. So no game is perfect and I wanna point out a flaw of this game, but I also wanna say like, oddly enough, this is a pro for me, but it's also like a flaw. So bear with me here. With the games genre and theme being very music centric, it's vital that the game had a killer soundtrack. Thankfully, for the most part, the team at Tango Game work. The soundtrack here has a nice selection of tracks featuring music from bands such as Nine Inch Nails, the Black Keys, and Wolfgang Gartner. Most of these songs work well in accent and the beat that the world is vibing to. I do wish, and this is where that flaws that I was alluding to earlier kind of come in, that there was more variety to the music or at least more songs from other notable bands. There are tons of alternative bands that could have provided dope songs to battle bosses to. So I kind of feel like the soundtrack, while it was good, was also a little lacking if that makes. I wanna also talk about High five Rush's upgrades and skill trees. And High Five Rush. You don't have a skill tree per se, but you earn money throughout the levels and you can use that money to unlock additional combos. Powerups and Team Bank combo moves all of the combos that you buy. Feel like they add a nice layer to gameplay. The game also has a ton of collectibles that you find in the world. And while not all of them blew me away, but a lot of 'em felt like they were worth chasing though in the world, you can also find really cool items such as like items that would add permanent additional health, cool decor to decorate your home base and even dialogue logs that help flesh out the world and. I told you about one flaw earlier, and I guess that was more of a nitpick. But I also want to list out another flaw that I found with the game, and it's that the game kind of suffers a bit of a lull in the middle of its narrative. High-Five Rush starts off with this breakneck pace in the beginning of the game. Then it suffers from that slight lull in the middle, and then it kind of resumes its swift pace in the final third of its narrative. It's not the biggest deal in the world, and you might say I'm being a little nitpicky, but I thought it was worth pointing. Another flaw in this game is that it's not gonna be for everyone. If you're probably a person who's rhythmically challenged, then you might not like this game. I'm gonna be honest, it has a lot of musical QuickTime events that will happen very frequently in this game, and that will probably frustrate you. Overall, though, I gave you a lot of things that I liked about it. I gave you some things that I didn't like, but let's get to the answer of the question here. Should you play high five? I think the answer is yes. While this game does have its flaws, like it's pacing and its mandatory QuickTime events, it shines in all other aspects of the game. The combat is fun in addicting. The characters are enjoyable and memorable, and the narrative is very entertaining. Like I said earlier, high-Fi rush is like your favorite soup. It mixes in a lot of ingredients, in this case, gameplay elements and combines them to make something greater than the sum of its parts. The Hacken slash Combat of Devil May Karate, the style of Jet Set Radio and sunset overdrive, and some of the aspects musically of Guitar Hero and thankfully, it mixes all these aspects really well together and makes it an ease game for me to recommend. Before I go though, I just want to say that there has been the narrative for a really long time about the lack of Xbox First party games over and over again. People kept saying and asking, is this the year that Xbox finally gets its groove back in that regard? And I gotta say, after playing this game, high-Fi rush, that if Xbox can continue to release games like this, then thankfully that narrative is finally on borrowed time. Another flaw of this game is that it's not going to appeal to those who are looking for a challenging experience. While it does have some areas, particularly when it comes to platforming, that will take you a few attempts. There is nothing here that will give you a real c. The last venture flaw of this game is that there isn't a map or a mini map available to help you navigate around the island. I get wanting exploration to be the primary focus, but it is immensely easy to get lost in this game. It's not the end of the world, but be prepared to get turned around on more than a couple of occasions. So overall, should you play Little Gator Game? If you're a fan of Cozy Games, then the answer is a definitive yes. This is a chill, indie game that has taken some of the elements from Legend of Zel to Breath of the Wild like it's gameplay, and use them to create a game that will likely stick with you. This game is touching, thought-provoking, and simply fun. While it won't be for everyone, the little Gator game is a short and sweet experience that's very easy to recommend. In this show, we practice the 10 games backlog rule. In this practice, you log down 10 games, those games are gonna be your video game backlog. To be as productive as you possibly can be, we recommend that you only play three games at one time. One single player narrative game, one game that's gonna be your chill and relaxed game. And another game that's going to be your palate cleanser game, which is a game that you play when you're not in the mood for your other narrative. When you complete or get tired of one game, it leaves the backlog list. Then you decide which new game is added to the list, and which game on the list advances to your active three games. So where should High Five Rush fit in your video game back? This is a game that I think should be either your main focus or your pallet cleanser game. I think it fit perfectly in either one of those spots. It's a beautiful, straightforward, action adventure game that is a very concise story that you can mow through, especially if this is your primary focus. If this is your pallet cleanser game, this could be that game that you kind of play where you kind of give yourself a break on the elm rings and God of award rack rocks of the world. It's a perfect game for that as well. I'd say that this game fits perfectly in either slot. So that is the game recommendation of the week that you should consider adding to your backlog. If you want me or my community of gamers to give you feedback on your backlog list, then join us in the single Player Experience Discord server. Once you're in, feel free to share your video game backlog list our talk about good single player game experiences that you've had lately. The link to join the free single player experience Discord server is in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode, and I hope to catch you in the next one. Peace.