I’ll tell you what wasn’t on anyone’s radar: a colorful, cartoonish Shinji Mikami-produced rhythm action game set to a soundtrack of Nine Inch Nails, Number Girl and The Black Keys with obscenely high production and animation values and some really funny gags. And yet, that’s exactly what Hi-Fi RUSH is. Eminently playable and replayable, free on Xbox Game Pass, and creatively pretty audacious all things considered, Hi-Fi RUSH is a really, really good video game. It had the strange fortune to come out the same week as Square Enix and Luminous Productions’s spiritual successor to Final Fantasy XV, Forspoken, and that has led to some odd discourse around the game’s formulaic narrative and cheesy dialogue.
And like, what you see is what you get: Hi-Fi RUSH is about an egotistical goofball loser whose overconfident ignorance is only balanced by the obscene and frankly slapstick amount of luck he has. The dialogue is of course cheesy, and naturally the writing is formulaic. What’s more important here is how good of a time you can have while playing it, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a lot. This is the School of Rock of video games, a high end B-movie that hits all the emotional and psychological sweet spots necessary to have no-strings-attached fun.
To that end, I need to make a correction to my initial impressions of the game. I said on Twitter that I thought the game was “joyously, unabashedly mid. A true 6.5/10 and absolutely fucking proud of it. It will win zero awards and be nobody’s game of the year by the time December rolls around, but/and we should all be thanking it for its service.” After finishing Hi-Fi RUSH, and if I did scores around here, I would absolutely put it higher than a 6.5 out of 10. This game is definitely pushing the needle well past 7.5; there’s still some nonsense to deal with, like the kind of poor third-person timed platforming sections peppered throughout each level, but you can really tell that this game was put together with the utmost care otherwise.
Like, Hi-Fi RUSH is a game that wants you to be carried along by the rhythm through its story, not get stuck frustrated at every turn by a particularly difficult trap or puzzle or enemy arena. The game checkpoints constantly and lets you modify settings on the fly, to the point where I was able to change the difficulty from normal to easy in the middle of a boss fight and lose no progress. There’s still very much a sense of challenge at play, as you have to keep track of the rhythm of the background music, listen/watch for cues that hint at upcoming enemy attacks, and be mindful of area-of-effect hazards, but it’s kind of nice to play a game that you can tell wants to be played.
That being said, I stand by most of the rest of what I said. I think this game falls squarely into the “mid-tier” category of games, somewhere between the hardcore ultrapolish of most AAA blockbusters and the crunchy DIY skung of most indie games. It’s a game that would have been very much at home on the PS3 or Xbox 360, for example, and which critics and players would have looked back fondly on. As it stands now, I still think it’s going to end up being overshadowed by games that produce more discourse, have bigger marketing budgets, are more photo-realistic, tell more “grounded” stories, engage in more spectacle (though to be honest I can’t imagine a game out-spectacling this one, god damn), or just generally are “more of what the algorithm thinks gamers want.” Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m proven wrong.
It is definitely worth noting, though, that this is a game that could only have been dropped the way it was and still have the reaction it has garnered because it is a game attached to Bethesda, and in turn, Microsoft. I literally learned of its existence because when I turned my Xbox on the day the game came out, my Xbox took me to the Developer Direct without my prompting. No, and I do mean no true-blue indie game has that level of player capture ability. At all. Period. Very few studios of any size do. Other games that get put on Game Pass don’t even have that level of instant, on-demand visibility. Hi-Fi Rush is the rare first-party AA game born with a silver spoon in its mouth, and it will absolutely benefit from that in a way basically no other game will ever even get the chance to.
By no means do I begrudge Hi-Fi RUSH any success it has, nor do I wish for it to fade into obscurity, though. It’s colorful, funny in a way that makes you cringe but doesn’t necessarily grate on your nerves, and goes down super easy and smooth, gameplay-wise. I thought the story’s very last few scenes kind of landed on a flat note (but that’s because the whole game is very pro-corporation, just not pro-“bad” corporation, and you really get a whole wallop of “what if we made the massive multinational conglomerate a better, kinder one” nonsense there at the end), but I can’t deny that it was a goofy good time up to that point. To its credit, the game doesn’t have any microtransactions or weird always-online server nonsense to deal with, which is always nice.
You can absolutely do worse than Hi-Fi RUSH, is what I’m saying. If you’ve got Game Pass go play it, and otherwise it’s absolutely worth the $30 or $40 it costs to buy it on places.