

Nailing these parts without dying or breaking your rhythm is like making it through a Mario level on pure reflex. Sometimes the game even locks the camera and becomes a sidescroller.

You have to time your jumps and quickly summon a teammate to break through shields and doors before the next beat hits. Geysers of lava and other environmental hazards make up the platforming sections. The only place the music remains important are the sections in between each battle arena. And without recognizable music or challenging tempo shifts, everything blends together. Other than a few gimmicky boss mechanics, Hi-Fi Rush rarely pushes back on button spam. I was suddenly playing an OK character action game where every fight I cycled through my summons and performed simple combos until the score screen came up. The game starts to use original songs that all feel like a similar tempo and aren't particularly memorable and the combat loses all its oomph. I'm not sure if it's because I funneled a lot of my upgrades into lowering the cooldown on the summons or by playing on normal difficulty, but Hi-Fi Rush eventually stopped being much of a rhythm game halfway through. Some attacks can only be dodged, but spamming parry when the song lined up just right almost always kept me safe. Because the enemies only attack on the beat and are telegraphed with lines and circles on the ground, you can easily dodge or parry them back for damage. By the end I could grapple toward a robot, launch them into the air, and then call in Peppermint to fire a massive laser beam into them, and if that didn't cut it I had Macaron on standby to smash them into scrap metal. Macaron smashes armor apart, and the final character you get is able to douse pockets of fire in the arena.Īs you progress and defeat bosses that test your parry timing and sometimes become just literal rhythm games, you can buy additional moves and passive bonuses. Peppermint blasts enemies with her gun and is necessary for knocking enemy shields out. At any moment (or as a finisher) you can pull in a teammate to help you.

Chai has heavy and light attacks that you can combo together and end with a finisher in time with the song. All of these characters (except CNMN) are available as summons during the beat-based combat.
