There was a time not too long ago when the term “shadow drop” was mostly associated with; we need to release something, so release this thing that we have zero confidence in out into the wild. Didn’t work when Netflix crashed the Super Bowl, and none of the many E3 drops did anything to have any staying power. But now Xbox and Bethesda are aiming to break that mentality with Hi-Fi Rush, a rhythm action from Tango Gameworks, who are currently working on putting the finishing touches of the Ghostwire Tokyo Xbox port, probably coming out in late March. To say this game is a risk is an understatement when you realize that this bright and colorful action brawler is from the same studio who before this was best known for their violent survival horror games. So, I went in with low expectations, mainly because I didn’t want to expect from this new IP. But to my surprise, the moment I finished initially setting up the game, it blew me away. It’s only January, but we already have a frontrunner for Game of the Year, or at least the biggest surprise of the year. To sum it up, this game rocks.
You play as wannabe rockstar Chai, who signs up with a robotics company in hopes to get a robot arm to replace his broken arm. The introduction is pretty basic, but it has this lightning-fast pace that gets you to the action very quickly. Shortly after the process begins, you are accidentally combined with an old Zune-like device, and it becomes a part of your new body. With this one addition, the world around, you react on beat to whatever song is playing at the current moment. It should also be noted that on top of an original soundtrack, the game has a handful of real-life songs from the likes of The Black Keys and Nine Inch Nails. The effect of that is one that never gets old as you cruise through the 12-hour game time to credits. That’s mainly because this game does something that I haven’t seen any other game get close enough since the original XIII back on GameCube. If you want a game that is basically playing through a motion graphic novel, this is the closest thing you are going to get in the year 2023.
With that said, the other characters you come across of varied and have their own personalities to stand out from one another. You have a hacker, an engineer, and a robot who expresses his feelings with a sharpie. You start to care about these characters more and more, even at times more than the one you are controlling. That’s because Chai is purposely an idiot. A large majority of negative events in the game are a result of his wit and ego, though it’s in an innocent type of way. At the start, I really hated him, but as the game went on, he started to grow on me; that or it was an issue I was able to look past to be able to play more of the combat.
As for the combat, it’s a lot less strict than what I was expecting from the single trailer they showed off before release. I was expecting something akin to BPM smashed together with Devil May Cry. But instead, I would describe gameplay as a mix of BPM and God Hand, which given the team’s past work, doesn’t surprise me. You are given the option to smash up opponents to the beat of the background music, with either a pulse meter on your floating robot cat head, or by hitting select and having a metronome take up the bottom of the screen. Now given that it is 2023, you do have the option to turn on a setting that allows you not to have to worry about keeping up with the beat, and just spamming attacks and watching everything go insane. But I tried that, and I couldn’t see myself playing with that on after putting 3 hours into the game. That’s what I love about this game is that it changes how you approach each combat situation on which enemy buffs you need to damage. That follows by ok, which enemies do I need to hit on the beat to cause the most damage. It’s addicting once you get the hang of it, and soon you’ll be bopping your head to the same beat as the game.
There is also an in-game store where you can buy costumes and upgrades for Chai. Now it should be noted that this is not a microtransaction front, as everything can be earned in-game and relatively fast from my experience with the game. But I never found any of the combat upgrades to be worth my time, except the heavy attack upgrades, which, if you know what you are doing, you can break the combat like a twig by the halfway point.
But I think the best aspect of the game, for me anyways, is the game’s visual style. Like I said before, this is a motion graphic novel unlike anything attempted before, but it keeps its style all the way through. The game’s transition at moments between the gameplay and the beautiful hand-drawn 2D animated moments are seamless and something that couldn’t be achieved on last-generation hardware, which is why I can see this game isn’t on Xbox One. It’s the closest example we have in gaming to the effects that films like Spider-Verse have had on the general creative scape as of late, and I’m glad for it.
In the end, don’t let the novelty of this being a shadow drop be a turn-off for you. Because if you push through the rough first hour, you are given an experience that is unlike anything else in the current zeitgeist. The closest example to the tone of the game I give is this is like an interactive James Gunn film. That being said, the game has moments of pure insanity, then has moments of pure emotion that get you right in the feels as the music in the background keeps hitting at just the right moments. It would be shocking to see this game not get talked about come December because if this is just a taste of what 2023 is going to offer us, then we are in for a great year.
Score: 9 out of 10
Reviewed on Xbox Series X