Hi-Fi RUSH

打寇西嘉那关遇到了恶性bug，主角直接不可选中了。还有这个游戏很多boss都只能通过格挡反击，我就没玩过这么恶心的游戏，喜欢吃屎的可以买来使劲吃，我反正卸载了。

Hi-Fi Rush is nothing short of masterpiece, such a gem. Microsoft is truly full of incompetent fools and absolute r*tards to close Tango Gameworks. Thank God for Krafton reviving Tango. Really hoping to see a sequel or any other game from the studio.

Однозначно рекомендасьон! 🎸 Мир, музыка, герои — в сердечко. Думал, что на этом история закончится из-за закрытия студии, но корейцы из Krafton вовремя всех спасли. Вторая часть официально в пути, так что врывайтесь в первую без раздумий. Это было легендарно!

Runs pretty clean on the steam deck and the sound track is pretty nice.

JUEGAZO, GOTY

Very polished game, nice music and legitimately funny

I really wish Steam would let us having Mixed recommendations, because I do think that this game has significant successes, but unfortunately for me, the problems with it are too glaring for me to recommend in good faith. For context, I beat the story (exploring fairly well but not thoroughly) but did not enjoy the game enough to want to do any of the additional content. Hi Fi Rush is a game that's on rails - quite literally, at certain points. The game is divided into levels, which are mostly linear and divided into slightly free exploration/exposition segments separated by combat segments (called "Choruses"). There are also intermittent bossfights. The world you explore takes place on a large island containing a high-tech campus, and I think the game does a pretty good job with the environment and making sure things don't feel too samey from level to level given the overall theme. A critical part of the game design is that pretty much everything is synched up to a beat. This not only includes the combat, but also (to an extent) voicelines inside combat, but even the wider world itself, with hedges and rocks bouncing in time to the beat. Even the cutscenes are, impressively, synched to this beat, with action taking place in time with it - a person may bounce along the floor animated in such a way that their body collides on the beat, a keyboard's keys are pressed on the beat, etc. I think this occasionally becomes a little *too* much, but 99% of the time it works well, and I can't help but appreciate the effort that went into it. The game does much to reinforce this, to the point of suffering from overtutorializing it in the first level. Practically every aid imaginable is given to you to try and drive the point home that you want to time your button inputs to the beat. To clarify: just randomly pressing buttons will make you *act* on the beat regardless (I assume there's some animation slowing/speeding to ensure this), but you only get real results from *pressing the buttons* on the beat and thereby matching your actions. This all... *mostly* works. Kinda. Sorta. This is where my own personal problems come in, I suppose: I *thought* I was decent - not great, not even good, but okay - at staying on a beat in combat in these sorts of games, with some practice. I can now confidently say I was wrong, and ironically enough, despite all the hypertutorializing, I never improved at matching the beat. I don't think I got above a D in that category once, whereas I was getting consistent As and Ss in the other things like score and time spent in sections. I don't think this is necessarily a fault of the game, to be clear, though keeping up with a BPM of ~120 just seems like a rough prospect in general (I do kinda wish for a version of this game where you have to match something more like 60 or even 20/30 BPM). What I *do* think is the fault of the game is the generally poor presentation and display of combat, in which everything rapidly becomes a total mire of chaos. By the midgame, I was dying maybe once per Chorus on average (AKA several times per level) on Normal mode. My lack of good beat matching obviously did not help, but I was regularly too confused by what was going on ingame for me to even try and keep on it. To a certain extent, you can just dodge/parry on the beat and, because the enemies *also* attack on the beat, you don't need to see what they're doing and react to it per se. Nonetheless, keeping track of enemies - the myriad lasers and explosions and sword swipes and hammer blows and shields and armor plating and floor hazards and so on - and where your character is in relation to all of those so as to avoid getting combo'd to death, is just really difficult in this game, to the extent that I probably should have just switched to Easy to avoid frustration. How the game is even physically completable by a human on Very Hard, let alone Rhythm Master, is a total mystery to me. But the parry system is truly where things fell apart for me, and where I switched from "Hmm, this might not be exactly for me but at least I'm having fun" to googling the length of the game to check how close to the end I was. The timing required to parry things in this game is absurdly brutal. Easily 75% of my deaths came from failing a parry section, and at one time I was stuck for a good 20-30 minutes just on a single Chorus because I couldn't get the parrying down (a level takes 50-60 minutes if everything goes well). When the mechanic was introduced and I kept failing, I reasoned that perhaps I could maybe just not engage with it. Unfortunately, there are many enemies where you will *need* to successfully parry them to defeat them, and even a major boss which is exclusively parrying - that sure wasn't a great time for me. Speaking of the bosses, I would describe them as generally good, but not amazing. I think they suffer from both too much and not enough personality, but that is obviously partially because this game's campaign is relatively short and there just isn't much time to develop them as characters. Every boss ends up being a parody of themselves to a certain extent, and that makes them less believable as characters. The fights themselves are, as before, good but not great. Some are more memorable than others, to be sure, and there is an interesting mix of environments, attacks, and overall fight pacing, but they suffer from the aforementioned visual chaos and an almost comical mixture of extremely rapid attacks and ones with delays that would make Elden Ring's Margit blush. The writing is pretty mediocre. By 2023, I had hoped that writing rooms around the world had kicked out the "Well, that just happened!" people who bafflingly adore these kinds of quips, gaffes, and goofs. The story is predictable and saccharine - a team of wildly different personalities who are initially at odds come together and beat the villain with the power of teamwork and friendship, yadda yadda, we've all seen this before. It certainly doesn't gain the writers any points, but equally, there's nothing new under the sun and coming up with writing free of tropes is impossible, so it feels unfair to dock points either. And, as a matter of fact, I do think the story does something at least a little interesting when it (minor spoilers ahead) pretty much becomes unapologetically a pro-corporate story, where the point isn't *if* the tech corporation headed by a near-dictatorial CEO on this island *should* exist; the point is *who* should control it. And (substantial spoilers ahead), the most hilarious part is that the corporation becomes controlled by the person who was in charge before the current CEO, Handsome Ja--, I mean, Kale Vandalay. When you turn back a clock, it's not as if the clock stops ticking - time will just return to the point at which the problem occurred. It's akin to Thanos (wow, none of us are free of Marvel brainrot, including myself!) killing half the population and then destroying the gauntlet - what happens when the population returns to the level it was before in like 100 years? Perhaps the corporation shouldn't have this much power at all, regardless of who wields it, so as to prevent this whole mess from happening again with a different tyrannical CEO? Stories with both implicit and explicit anti-corporate messages are a dime a dozen, so this game defying that is pretty interesting. To end on a more positive note, the art style is generally pretty great and I like the overall style of the game. There are certain moments and character drawings that I think are a little uncanny, but I have no serious complaints about the art and graphics.