Hi-Fi Rush came out of absolute nowhere, yet it is already being praised by critics and players everywhere, some already claiming that this is a big GOTY contender. And you know what? I absolutely agree. Hi-Fi Rush is an amazing DMC-like action game with rhythm based mechanics that are as addicting as they are fun. Though I will be slightly more critical than others, this is an amazing game to start off 2023.

Hi-Fi Rush wins you over immediately with its fantastic looking cell-shaded art style, soundtrack, and loveable characters. I've seen some complain that the dialogue is bad (akin to something like Forespoken), but I disagree. Sure, some jokes don't land, but I found the writing to be appropriate for a game that is basically emulating a cartoon series. Chai, Peppermint, and their crew are all loveable. The villains also shine with their own personalities and quirks. There really isn't anything to dislike about Hi-Fi Rush's characters. The story is pretty simple, but enjoyable from beginning to end thanks to the game's fantastic characters.

Of course with any rhythm game, the most important thing to get right is the music. And this game knocks it out of the park. With both kickass original tracks, as well as licensed music from bands like Nine Inch Nails, the game never stops being a bop. It almost makes the rhythm combat more natural, even for those who are a bit musically challenged (aka me).

The big focus of Hi-Fi Rush is the combat. Fans of DMC or Bayonetta will feel a familiarity with this title. While combos are a bit more simple than those games, the true test of skill is being able to keep your moves in rhythm with the beat of the music. This gives your moves more power, and increases your score for those coveted S ranks. It can be easy to get overwhelmed in combat, but if you go back to the basics of keeping the rhythm, you'll be fine more often than not. The rush you get from combat is unlike anything I've played in the rhythm genre. Bosses are a big highlight in particular, with each one feeling unique and entertaining to fight in every phase.

The game has a fantastic pace to it as well. New mechanics and abilities are introduced to you perfectly, with there never being too many mechanics at once to learn. You get plenty of time to learn what move(s) you have newly available to you before being introduced to something else that completely changes the way you have to think about enemies and combat. By the end, you're going to be able to pull off so many new combos, parries, dodges, and more that you won't be able to believe that you started the game with only a fraction of what you end up with.

The game has a ton of secrets for you to find: from upgrades to Chai's health and meter, to secret doors that unlock in the post game. Levels are pretty simple, and rather linear, but they all hold their own secrets and collectibles. Exploring levels was always fun, as they are incredibly well designed.

While the highs of Hi-Fi Rush are quite high, there are some lows as well. You probably have seen a lot of people say that this feels like a PS2 era game in some way. And while it does share all the positives that a PS2 game has, it unfortunately has some of its downfalls as well.

I was absolutely shocked that this game has no lock-on feature. Seriously, I looked everywhere for some evidence of one either in the game itself or online, but I couldn't find anything. If I'm just stupid, please let me know and I'll revise this section of the review. But not having a lock-on feature in a DMC-esc action game?? That makes absolutely no sense to me. It can make fights overwhelming, or cause you to go after an enemy that you didn't mean to go after. It doesn't happen TOO often, but often enough to be noticeable. This can also cause issues with enemies attacking from behind without you knowing they're coming.

There is also a really jarring difficulty spike with the final boss. The game has a great progression of difficulty for 99% of the game, but the final boss can be extremely overwhelming. This may just be a me issue (as I said, I'm not the best at these kind of games sometimes), but I felt as though the final boss was a little too difficult when compared to the boss that came before him.

Still, even with these issues, Hi-Fi Rush kept me smiling from beginning to end. I fell in love with these characters, the art style, the music, and the gameplay. This game wins you over with the passion that was clearly put behind it. Tango Gameworks has always been a studio that I have admired (as I am a big fan of the Evil Within titles), but I never thought that they were capable of delivering such an amazing experience as this one. Hi-Fi Rush is a slam dunk for the studio, and for Xbox to have as an exclusive game.

It's always fun to explain a favorite.

Remember this trailer from all the way back in 2010? Looking back on it now, there's a certain stink of "totally not pre-rendered" to it. The gameplay that's shown here is so limited and off the screen so fast that it's hard to believe this was a real vertical slice of what they actually had finished. Judging from the development hell that this went through, and the fact that it was quietly cancelled not even six months after it was introduced, I think I'm right about that. Maybe I'm just cynical. This was the trailer that introduced Blade Mode to an unsuspecting public, after all, and I shouldn't disrespect it. People talk about having their gay awakenings from watching Disney movies with attractive leads. I had mine when I watched Raiden slice watermelons with a katana.

To say I was obsessed with this would be an understatement. Baby Psychbomb needed Metal Gear Rising like he needed oxygen. I went out and paid $39.99 for a copy of Zone of the Enders HD purely so I could have early access to the demo. I never even played Zone of the Enders. I probably put well over 20 hours into a demo that barely lasted fifteen minutes per playthrough. Parrying became as second nature to me as breathing. I was immune to the great filter that was release-day Blade Wolf because I'd already put him down like Old Yeller a hundred times over thanks to ZoE HD.

The game came out three years after its existence was leaked, was helmed by a different studio, and had a completely different design philosophy from what was originally planned. Historically, games with a history like this are disasters when they drop. It's rare for them to be good, let alone great.

Revengeance is one of the best games ever made.

I was awed by the mechanics here a decade ago, and I still love them as if we kept up a healthy marriage to this day. It's your standard PlatinumGames character-action fare — back when that meant something good instead of something mediocre — with core systems that elevate it far beyond anything else the company has made. The decision to hyper-focus combat on being defensive was an outstanding one. Blade Mode tends to be what sticks out in people's minds as the main gimmick of Revengeance, but it's only one part of the greater whole. Parrying is what defines the game. Learning to watch the various enemy tells, ready your parry, and getting a massive counter-attack if you time it perfectly is going to make up the bulk of your gameplay. If you cannot learn how to do this consistently, you will not finish the game. Either that, or you'll knock the difficulty down to a point where you can bruteforce it, and then realize you're not having any fun. You have to learn, but the act of learning is where the entertainment lies.

You've got a variety of moves to help make this a little easier, and one of the best inclusions in any game's move list remains the Defensive Offensive. Making your dodge into an attack was genius. Even when the game is forcing you on the back foot and demanding careful play, nothing can stop the forward momentum. You'll keep dealing damage, keep landing counter-hits, keep stealing spines. The very first encounter of the game on Revengeance difficulty will straight up kill you in one hit if you don't get your perfect parries off. Adapt or die. The game is strict, bordering on cruel, but it will absolutely respect a player who learns. It never feels unfair. It nails the balance of being just bullshit enough to demand another try with every death, sweeping your legs out from under you and ordering you to stand up again.

Pull any song off the soundtrack here and it'll be all the motivation you need to keep going. How many games have tracks in them that get picked up as memes not once, not twice, but three fucking times, all of them spread out over the course of a decade? Get as many people you like to argue which of the boss themes is the best one and watch as they collectively geek out from nothing more than their memories of the songs. The music isn't all that reactive to your actions in terms of moment-to-moment progression, but saving these explosive choruses for the final finisher sequences is going to leave a mark on you. Good luck forgetting them.

It's a miracle that this canonically takes place after Metal Gear Solid 4 and manages not to feel contrived. It's nice to check back in on some of these characters after they've gone through their stories and see how they're holding up. Sunny being a childhood supergenius has led to her getting a key position in a space-flight company; Otacon has mostly moved on from his losses, though he still struggles to get close to people; Solid Snake has finally passed on after enjoying a quiet retirement.

Raiden remains the most interesting member of the cast, however, and he goes through a serious regression arc. Metal Gear Solid 4 ends with him putting down his blade and trying to be a family man, but money is tight, and it isn't long before he starts working protection jobs for PMCs to make ends meet. There's something especially bitter about the fact that someone who helped to save the world still struggles to support himself and his loved ones financially, and the war economy remains the only thing he knows how to thrive in. Things eventually go sour, Raiden is forced into another global conspiracy, and, without any of the people he relies on for support, has his traumas attacked over and over again by Desperado. And they break him. Raiden "admits" that he only cares for bloodshed, but we've seen so many times throughout these games that this isn't true. He keeps carving through people who he knows couldn't stop if they wanted to, with all of them forced into the exact same position as himself. He accepts being a killer. He gives up on reintegrating into society. He doesn't get better by the end, because everything in this universe has conspired to make it so he can't. He abandons his family all over again to become a vigilante. Even with all of the game's villains dead, their greatest victory remains in how they made piled on to a decent man's systemic struggles so hard that he broke.

Senator Armstrong is definitely the breakout new guy of the game, and he's probably on screen for no more than an hour. He's one of the best bullshitters to be put to paper. It really seems like he believes the garbage he's spewing, trying to spin everything in his favor no matter how obviously wrong it may be. Armstrong refutes that he played college ball for a cushy Ivy League by saying that he played for the University of Texas, a school with a football program valued at nearly a billion dollars; he claims to want a country where people are free to fight for themselves while only being able to operate at the scale he does thanks to enslaved child soldiers; he claims Raiden's suffering as his own, and weaponized it as a justification for why Raiden ought to listen to what he has to say. He's clearly pulling from Reagan — as much as people today are gonna be floored when Armstrong drops his "make America great again" line in a game released in 2013, he wasn't the first to say it — and it rules. He's the smuggest bastard alive, and he's deluded himself into thinking he's right. What an outstanding character. He sucks.

There's really nothing about Revengeance that I dislike. There's a few too many slow walking sequences that can make repeat playthroughs a bit of a slog, but they're over and done with before very long. Revengeance starts strong, stays strong, and ends strong. I've beaten it well over ten times on the hardest difficulty, and each playthrough feels as fresh as the first time I ever picked it up. It's a game with immense staying power. This is one of few foundational games where I immediately and forever disregard the opinion of anyone who hates it.

Quite possibly (and quite likely to be) one of the funniest video games ever released. David Cage is like the Ed Wood of the video game industry, but only if Ed Wood had zero charm, a legacy that’s seen as a joke rather than an inspiration, and a fandom of incredibly strange sycophants who have tricked themselves into thinking any of his stories would be able to hack it on daytime television.

Heavy Rain is an experience, and one that you legitimately owe it to yourself to play. This isn’t because it’s good, but rather because it’s atrocious. Games critics were over the moon for this back in 2010. People were desperate to totally own Roger Ebert for saying video games couldn’t be art, so they latched onto shit like this. It’s a poorly-acted, poorly-scripted, poorly-thought out mess. It's like a living guide on how not to make a game. It’s incredible. Get some friends together and make a stream night or two out of it.

Ethan Mars can have both of his children murdered and then be propositioned for sex by his new love interest while kneeling atop their graves. He then walks to his car and kills himself. This is supposed to be sad and not actually the most hilarious thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life.

The most fascist game I've ever played, and not at all in the way the writers wanted it to be. Our brave heroes of the resistance shove starving beggar children to the ground, throw their own to the wolves for the unforgivable crime of being visibly Asian in a sea of gruffly-voiced white people, and drop white phosphorous bombs on their own men by complete accident. Oops. These are our protagonists and ostensible heroes of this plot. No wonder America lost the war in this universe; I'd have defected to the North Koreans too if joining up with these guys was the alternative.