Hi-Fi RUSH

The games good, but some people may not enjoy it. I bought it over a year ago tried it a bit and left it there. with nothing else to play i decided to give it a try. It's a good and fun game. Buy it at a discount.

This is such a mixed bag, On one hand, this is one of the most unique rhythm games you'll possibly ever come across. You basically have to like both rhythm AND 3d beat'em ups to get the full enjoyment out of it. (though either should be enough to be worth trying/playing though once, at least during a sale) The characters are pretty 2 dimensional/archtypical, and even by the time I beat the game, the best I could say is that I found them tolerable, but that might just be my personal biases. That said, the story itself does an amazing job lambasting major corporation developer business models, and their opinions towards their customers, which plague the entertainment industry(and even some other fields) as a whole. It almost feels like this whole game was just an excuse to vent about all the various failings of upper/middle management that the writers/developers have had to personally deal with. Considering how Microsoft acted despite all the awards Hifi Rush garnered, perhaps upper management took it personally. The gameplay basically lives and dies on whether you can vibe to it properly. There are a ton of options to ensure that even players who fall short can still work with a handicap, but you still run into the question of how many of those accessibility features can you lean on before you can no longer even be considered to be playing the game. There are some aspects that feel a little clunky and obnoxious. It's difficult to tell which friend you're summoning in the middle of battle, and outside of battle, the minigame to activate their power is sometimes slow or unintuitive. The boss battles have a rough difficulty ramp, and various quicktime events can just feel like an arbitrary stallout. Going for high scores can be grindy as heck, and there's a whole "now that you've beaten the game, you can access the areas that were arbitrarily sealed off before by going through the entire game all over again" dragging out gameplay via recycled elements that I could forgive easier if it didn't feel like so much blatant padding. There are also several core upgrade features that don't really tell you they are a thing you need to purchase, so if you aren't reading every single thing carefully and actively searching through the options, you can wind up completely missing those aspects. Alternatively, you might be going on a wild goose chase trying to figure out how to unlock alternative costumes, only to finally find out those are only DLC, or unlocked only after beating the game. Frankly, it feels buried under collectables and arbitrary achievements hoops to grind for. I beat the game, enjoyed it, but I don't have the slightest desire to continue playing further. If you fell in love with the characters and just want an excuse to play more, that's probably a good thing, but to me all of the extra stuff feels like meaningless padding so they can advertise "50+ hours of gameplay!" There are better games to go for, and at cheaper prices, if you're looking to waste time. Despite all that, it feels like the game was made with genuine heart, dedication, and vision. The music tracks are all solid, the boss fights all feel unique, the hits lining up with the beats always feel so satisfying at the finishers, the writing is entertaining and even genuinely heartfelt in places despite me not being invested in any of the characters. The scenes leading up to the final boss fight all feel like genuine culmination moments. If you're just looking at this game because you heard it got critical acclaim, don't bother, but as I said at the start, if you like both rhythm games, and/or 3d beatemups, then this will scratch both of those itches at once.