Hi-Fi Rush is a Kingdom Hearts.

Power of friendship, magic weapon, bad guys to good guys, pattern based bosses, idiot but cheerful protagonist.

Aside from that it's an okay character action game mixed with an okay rhythm game that manages to be better than the sum of its parts.
When it all comes together, it's sublime.
When it doesn't, it can get frustrating. The audio mixing can make it really difficult to stay on cue, or really easy to miss important sound effects in battle. The camera turns really slowly, which is bizarre. Visually, things get a bit cluttered too which, again, make it very easy to not be able to react to threats.

The combat flow is pretty standard character action game and gets much more interesting when you're given a parry. This does lead to some enemies getting block strings that that have a defined pattern that I don't think you can work out first time (unlike the pre-defined "duel" segments).

I played through on Hard mode, so I'm looking forward to jumping up a difficulty with my full game knowledge to see if it unlocks any complexity.

The story is all pretty standard shonen anime, but I thought the main gang of characters was really endearing and I'd be very up for seeing more from them!

In summary: It's a no brainer on Game Pass and it feels like a great deal at it's below-average RRP.

I've held off on Dead Cells for a long time, assuming that it's something I'll really enjoy.
Now that I finally got around to it, turns out it does basically nothing for me.

It's fun to play, it's snappy and some of the weapons are very satisfying... but the progression feels like a crawl, I'm already sick of running through the same areas which the proc gen does basically nothing to keep fresh and even when I feel like I've got a great build the bosses are like tanks.

Also, the DLC is in the game but you can't access it. So multiple times I've wasted time going one way only for it to tell me "You need this DLC" which results in wasted time and missed progression.

Also also, it has the same thing of all the indie games of this time where there's a million crossover items that I hate and just rips me out of the experience. Please let me turn it off. Thank you.

When you read or hear people talk about Tetris Effect, you'd think they'd had a religious experience.
Sat on my hard drive for months at this point I'd have a look and think "It's just Tetris. I'll get to it eventually.".

And then I had my religious experience with Tetris.

The thing about Tetris Effect is that it so quickly clicks as to what it is and how you're going to experience it. It is confident to let you play it and just let the euphoria wash over you.

It's genuine magic.

Oh man. What a disappointment.

Not so much a review, but a list of things to try and explain why I didn't like it.

This is probably my third or fourth go at it, but this time I was going to get to the end no matter what.

To get it out of the way: It looks and sounds nice, but I don't think even those aspects are realised as well as I expected.

I really did not get on with the gameplay at all. To an extent where I worry that it soured me on all the other parts of the game too.
I tried so many combinations of effects and everything ended up being the same "Hit for as much as you can, run away for five seconds". It's incredibly unsatisfying, with the most frustrating dash to ever be put in a video game.

I eventually settled on a combo that jumped through enemies, turned them to my side temporarily and did damage over time. This made every fight in the game a joke, so I swung from thinking the combat was bad to pointless.

The final boss just felt bad to play.

On the narrative side, I actually found the narrator gimmick super annoying in this (even though I enjoyed it in Bastion). I didn't really care about anyone in it. I know they were going for a "start in the action" type deal, but I just didn't see why I'd care about anyone or anything.

HowLongToBeat says 6 hours to play through; my total time (including probably an hour's worth of false starts) is 4.7 hours, so maybe I skipped half the game or something.

But that's just, like, my opinion man.

I'm sure I'll come back a re-evaluate this later.

I think it was fine! Good in some places, great in a few! I'm not sure if anything in the game ever surpassed those first couple of hours from the demo.

There's some amazing set pieces that I'd be hype as fuck for in Kingdom Hearts or something, but felt a little TOO intense for everything else that was going on in XVI.

I really loved the combat at the start, but by the end you never have to engage with any of the cool mechanics any more like juggling, and it's just Zantetsuken into Diamond Dust into Gigaflare, Raging Fist counter, repeat.
It's weird that there's zero difference between spells or Eikon elements. It sucks that the core actions never change after the first couple of hours. The enemies are dumb as bricks, and some more mages to mix things up is sorely needed.

The pacing with the sidequests totally sucked throughout but really killed the momentum at some key moments; especially right before the final story quest.

Some of the core cast is great, most of the baddies are good (except the main one...), many others have no personality (Jill is a real disappointment, even in her big moments).

I thought I'd be totally buzzing for New Game+, but that makes you slog through a lot of stuff I hoped I'd be able to skip, and the combat is just super spongey.

Yeah! I dunno. For all the seriousness of most of it, the last hour or so is just a Kingdom Hearts ending.

BUT, big fan of Gav, so swings and roundabouts.