Hi-Fi Rush Review | Adrenaline-pumping Hack-and-Slash Rhythm Action

Hi-Fi Rush is a refreshing action rhythm game that released out of nowhere on January 25th, 2023. See what Hi-Fi Rush’s gameplay has to offer, if it’s worth buying, and Game8's rating.

Hi-Fi Rush Game Review

Hi-Fi Rush Trailer

Hi-Fi Rush Game Score

Hi-Fi Rush Review: A Blend of Hack-and Slash and Rhythm Genres

Hi-Fi Rush is a creative take on the hack-and-slash formula, blending it with rhythm game action. This is anchored with a superb cast of characters, a light-hearted story, and graphics shot out of the mid-2000s American Anime boom. It's a must-play for fans of both hack-and-slash and rhythm games, as well as anime fans.

Hi-Fi Rush Full Game Review

Pros of Hi-Fi Rush

Things Hi-Fi Rush Got Right
Foot-Tappingly Great Hack-and-Slash Action Soundtrack Gives a… Hi-Fi Rush Vibrant Saturday Morning Cartoon Art Style Logical and Brain-teasing Level Design Great Characters in a Tried and Tested Plot

Foot-Tappingly Great Hack-and-Slash Gameplay

Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm game disguised as a hack-and-slash game, where your success in combat relies on your skill to keep up with the beat. Though you won't get punished for attacking out of the beat, you'll find that executing combos well, timing your ally attacks, and dodging/parrying enemy strikes will get you through battles faster with a higher score.

There are very few games like Hi-Fi Rush in the market, which attempted to meld both action and rhythm for gameplay. It was probably a gamble for Tango, but it seems to have paid off.

The combat is thrilling, keeps you focused, and forces you to memorize combos instead of mashing buttons. To beat an enemy, you deal a mix of light and heavy attacks, dodge or jump when necessary, and parry when you can't do either of those things. Once you have allies, you can call on them to help you stun enemies, break their barriers, or smash off their Z-Shielding.

So you'll be going around the battlefield using specific allies to weaken special enemies, before beating them down with your combos and special attacks. It may sound like a lot is going on all at once, but the control scheme during battle is easy to understand and get a hang of.

Meanwhile, if you feel that you're getting too good at Hi-Fi Rush, new enemies are introduced every two stages or so, which means you'll have to use new tactics to deal with them. Bosses also require the creative use of your allies to dispatch them quickly and easily.

In between and even during missions, you can access a shop where you can buy more special attacks, abilities, and chips (passive skills) to upgrade Chai with. There's also a training room you can use to get a hang of your combos. Depending on how you do during battle, you can get scores ranging from the lowest at the D rank to the highest at the S rank.

All in all, Hi-Fi Rush's gameplay is a fresh take on the hack-and-slash formula that carries itself well from start to finish.

Soundtrack Gives A... Hi-Fi Rush

Being a rhythm game, Hi-Fi Rush's soundtrack HAS to be both full of great hits and pleasing to listen to during gameplay. Luckily for us, Tango has done a good job in both creating original music for the game and a good number of licensed tracks as well.

Most of the game's original soundtrack was created by Tango Gameworks' sound designer Masatoshi Yanagi, along with former Konami music maker Shuichi Kobori and ex-Capcom composer Reo Uratani. Yanagi was responsible for composing the music for Tango titles The Evil Within 2 and GhostWire: Tokyo, and Uratani made music for the Monster Hunter Series. Meanwhile, the licensed tracks on display are a mix of rock and EDM pieces made by bands like Nine Inch Nails, Number Girl, The Prodigy, and Zwan.

All of the songs work surprisingly well within the context of the game and match the gameplay almost perfectly. Rock tunes interspersed with claps and number counts by an unseen audience during the heat of battle, and easy listening when you're chilling in the hideout between missions. It's a soundtrack designed to make you bop your head (and sync your attacks, hopefully) to the beat.

Now, about the voice acting. The English dub is great, with veteran anime dubber Robbie Daymond rightfully cast as the lazy but loveable loser. Other talents include Erica Lindbeck, Gabe Kunda, and Ezio Auditore... I mean, Roger Craig Smith. All of them give convincing performances that made me feel like I was watching a hip new Saturday morning cartoon.

But if English voices aren't your thing, don't fret; there's an option for Japanese voices as well as French, Italian, German, Polish, and so on.

Vibrant Saturday Morning Cartoon Art Style

Now that I've mentioned Saturday morning cartoons, Hi-Fi Rush's art direction reminds me a lot of the western attempts at anime back in the early to late 2000s like Avatar, Teen Titans, and RWBY. It's a mix of bright, colorful 2D anime cutscenes that blend very well with cell-shaded 3D graphics.

Every character is well designed, from Chai evoking his slacker-rocker persona with a yellow jacket and lightning t-shirt, to Kale Vandelay showing his not-so-nice tendencies with his all-black business attire. Now, I wouldn't say their designs are iconic, but they are definitely eye-catching and memorable.

Now let's go to the level design. Every level is a certain department within Vandelay Technologies, and they're all designed appropriately. Production is full of conveyor belts building robots en masse, while Research and Development is full of computer labs and researcher robots (though situated underground and surrounded by lava).

Spectacle is the name of the game here, with almost all levels presenting Chai with a panoramic view that's busy with buildings, blimps, billboards, and other small details. You can tell that the developers went to town with designing this game, just by looking at the variations of the Vandelay propaganda posters festooned across levels.

As for enemy designs, though they all seem to be based on the same kind of robot blueprint, they all have enough variety to set each other apart. There are your basic robot mobs armed with swords or Megaman-like blasters, enemies that are a cross of a centaur and a motorcycle, and even kabuto-clad samurai robots with menacing katanas and even more menacing Japanese. All of the enemies and robots you'll encounter in Vandelay Tech are quirky and even cute in their own way.

And who could forget 808 the cat? Yes, who's my little cute robot kitty cat? You are, 808! It's like Tango got all their great animal designers in one room and made them design the cutest cat design known to man. Bets are off on whether they actually succeeded, but this feline companion is cute to me and that's what counts.

Logical and Brain-teasing Level Design

Now that we've talked a bit about the levels, let's discuss the level design. Hi-Fi Rush has a lot of platforming in it and, luckily for us, every level is designed in a way that we quickly know where to go. That's because the levels are more or less linear, with the deviating paths only leading to secrets scattered around the level.

This helps the player keep track of where to go to end the stage, but also be able to keep on the lookout for any goodies like Life Gauge shards, graffiti, and Vlog entries.

But don't think that every stage is linear! Because some stages like those set in the Security Area take on a Metroidvania approach where you get to choose which part of the level you want to go from a central hub area, which expands both what you visit and where you should be looking for collectibles at.

It may be nostalgia that's talking, but the level design feels very similar to PlayStation 2 platformers like Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank. You know it's linear, but they jampacked it with so many details and secrets that the levels still come alive.

Great Characters in a Tried and Tested Plot

Let me begin by saying Hi-Fi Rush's plot is by no means original. It's basically a post-Cyberpunk story of a ragtag band of rebels who are out to take on an evil corporation, just like Final Fantasy VII or Syndicate. But luckily for us, Hi-Fi Rush's plot has been given a big dose of goofy puns, even goofier characters, and anime references up the wazoo, with hints of zaniness from games like Sunshine Overdrive.

What makes the world of Hi-Fi Rush come alive are its characters. You've got Chai, the loveable slacker-loser who never thinks his plan through and loves to improvise. Behind him is his sidekick robot cat 808 and the mysterious hacker Peppermint, while in front of him are the six bosses of Vandelay Technologies.

Watching these characters interact with one another gives away witty dialogue, and self-aware and self-deprecating jabs, all coated with a thin sliver of cringe. But it's the good kind of cringe. The kind you'll be sneaking to the fridge to eat in the middle of the night when nobody can see you. It's a guilty pleasure almost, if not for the fact that Hi-Fi Rush really is good.

I spent 10 hours with all these weirdoes, and the heroes were all people I wanted to hang out with, while the villains were just so dang hammy that I couldn't get enough of them. It's a love letter to the 2000s anime craze in the west, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Cons of Hi-Fi Rush

Things That Hi-Fi Rush Can Improve
Controls Make Platforming Awkward Sometimes Unskippable Dialogue Before Major Fights Can Only Retry for Flawless Scores Once You Beat the Game

Controls Make Platforming Awkward Sometimes

Now, for all the good things I've said about Hi-Fi Rush's gameplay, there is one thing that irks me and that is the platforming. Rather, how the controls can sometimes be incompatible with the platforming sections.

For example, double-jumping in the air won't drive Chai forward too much. So you'll have to use dodging to get where you need to go. Unfortunately, the dodge animation can overshoot where you want to land, causing Chai to fall to his untimely (but momentary) demise. This can be rather frustrating, especially if you're collecting secrets on top of pipes hanging above a deep, dark abyss.

Unskippable Dialogue Before Major Fights

Hi-Fi Rush can be tough, especially if you haven't gotten a hang of the combo mechanics. Now, that's okay; losing happens in video games, even to the best players. But it becomes frustrating when you die to a boss and have to sit through their cutscenes and speeches again. Like, can I just go and have the boss beat me to a pulp already? I don't want to wait another 20 seconds before that happens.

It's rather weird considering that you can skip dialogue between characters when you're talking to them during gameplay. Why can't we skip the cutscenes?

Can Only Retry for Flawless Scores Once You Beat the Game

Here's another thing that will get the goat of any perfectionist players out there. Hi-Fi Rush's levels can only be replayed once you've beaten the game once. That means you'll have to live with the fact that you got a D rank from that last match, tarnishing your overall score for the entire level, until the end of the game.

For a game that emphasizes scores so much, you'd think that Tango would already give us a level select option even in the middle of our first playthrough. I suppose it's to keep in character with how Chai does well, but not too well, in his role as the resistance's main fighter. But that's just me.

Hi-Fi Rush Story Plot

Chai wants to be a rockstar, but he has a bad arm. Luckily for him, Vandelay Technologies has the Project Armstrong program, where he gets a new and shiny robotic arm. Unfortunately for him, his music player got fused to his chest during the process, rendering him a defect in Vandelay's eyes -- a company that has zero tolerance for defects...

While on the run from Vandelay's security robots, he runs into a cat named 808 -- and it talks! Rather, its owner is talking through it. And this same owner informs Chai that a sinister plan is brewing behind Vandelay's doors, a plan only known as SPECTRA. Now it's up to Chai to find out more about SPECTRA and to put a stop to whatever Vandelay Tech is planning to do with it.

Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm game disguised as a hack-and-slash adventure. You control Chai as he rampages through Vandelay Technologies, wrecking robots with a Flying V electric guitar made out of scrap metal. Everything from Chai's guitar swings to the movement of your robot enemies is tuned to the beat of the music playing in his chest. This means timing your attacks to the beat lets Chai give a serious beatdown with a bevy of combos, special attacks, and even support powers from allies you'll gather during his adventure.

To finish the game, you'll have to memorize combos, learn when to time your attacks, and use your allies properly. On top of this, a lot of sections in Hi-Fi Rush involve old-fashioned platforming, so you'll have to run, jump, and dodge to get yourself closer and closer to the truth behind SPECTRA.

Who Should Play Hi-Fi Rush?

Recommended for Fans of Hack-and-Slash Games

People who've played hack-and-slash games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, and No More Heroes will find themselves in good hands with this game. You've got your combos, you've got your attack timings, you've got dodges and parries, and at the end of each battle you're given a rating for how well you've done. If you like a creative spin on hack-and-slash action, Hi-Fi Rush is the game for you.

Recommended for Fans of Rhythm Games

Maybe you're a big Osu! player? Or maybe you loved Guitar Hero? How about Elite Beat Agents? Combat is not the only thing attuned to the beat in Hi-Fi Rush; it's absolutely everything from the platforms that pop out and disappear within five beats, to the volcano that spews lava in tune with the beat. So you'll definitely be at home with your beat-counting self in this game.

Not only that, but many minigames in Hi-Fi Rush will have you use your fast-for-Osu reflexes to get past obstacles and progress. If you want a rhythm game that has a great soundtrack and action, try Hi-Fi Rush.

Is Hi-Fi Rush Worth It?

Hi-Fi Rush is Worth Your Money

Now, for a $30 game, you can finish Hi-Fi Rush in between 8 to 11 hours. That alone already justifies the price, if I'm being honest.

But Tango has thrown in a lot of secrets that you can dig for in a second replay like post-game content, the Rhythm Tower, and a new difficulty mode. That's on top of incentives like unlockable costumes for Chai and his crew, as well as any collectibles scattered across levels that you may have missed.

Good thing then that once you finish the game, you can simply select which levels to play from Chai's couch. Though I will have to knock Hi-Fi Rush for not disabling tutorial prompts and letting us skip cutscenes, especially while replaying the first levels.

If the opportunities for completion don't convince you, then maybe this will: if you're a perfectionist who's had to suffer playing through the story the first time with less-than-stellar scores, then why not redeem yourself by replaying them post-game?

Hi-Fi Rush already offers a lot in terms of gameplay-to-cost, and the completion rewards are just the cherry on top of this delicious cake.

Hi-Fi Rush Product Information

Title	HI-FI RUSH
Release Date	January 25, 2022
Developer	Tango Gameworks
Supported Platforms	Xbox Series X/S & PC
Genre	Hack-and-Slash, Rhythm Game
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	Teen
Official Website	N/A

Michael Mendoza Ab..

Reviews video games by day, tries to write novels by night. He's a sucker for open-world games (Bethesda Fallout titles, Mount and Blade Bannerlord, Grand Theft Auto), CRPGs (Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium), and First-Person Shooters (Call of Duty, Battlefield, and immersive sims like Bioshock..