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These Xbox Series X and PC deals last through April 20
The inaugural RPS Game Club liveblog session is here! From 4pm BST today, March 30th, we’ll be chatting all things Hi-Fi Rush, which the RPS Treehouse has been playing throughout the month of March. We hope you’ve been playing along too, so why not come and join in the discussion with us? See you at 4pm sharp!
Man, do I love the feeling of jamming out a guitar riff in games. Sure, in reality, I’m slumped on my couch in a position that my body will give me payback for when I’m thirty, but in my fantasy, I’m a musical prodigy whose guitar licks are so epic it would make Slash cry. My joy for virtual jamming came as a direct result of playing hours and hours of Guitar Hero. Harmonix held my music taste in its death grip, and almost breaking my fingers on those flimsy plastic buttons trying to conquer Through The Fire And Flames is a precious memory of mine.
So yeah, I love a good guitar sesh, so when I saw that Hi-Fi Rush was about a wannabe rockstar that smacks evil megacorp robots with his guitar to a catchy rock OST, Tango Gameworks had my attention.
I like to think I have rhythm, in the same way that a wobbly air dancer lunging about sporadically has rhythm. That is to say I have none at all, and that any time spent dancing turns me into an uncontrollable set of limbs flailing in the wrong directions. Think Octodad in a night club and you’d be on the right track (although the disastrous limb flailing is enough to keep me out of the clubs).
That lack of rhythm isn’t just native to the dance floor of an awkward family party, though. Even nuzzled into my chair with a controller in hand, I simply can’t stick to the beat. My eyes glued to notes floating across the screen, trying to hit them at just the right time, you’d probably see Time hiding in a corner to my left, giggling at my repeated failure. A barrage of borked bleeps and bungled notes tend to leave me with spirits sunk.
In Hi-Fi Rush, though, I always leave with my head held high.
Hi-Fi Rush, our inaugural RPS Game Club game, sets its on-the-beat beatdowns in some pretty interesting places. Glistening sci-fi skyscrapers. An underground volcano lair. A Smaug-pleasing gold hoard, conveniently adjacent to a finance executive’s office. Who’d have guessed, then, that its absolute best fight – not just a thrilling brawl in itself, but the point at which a stumbling adventure plants its feet back in greatness – would take place in a canteen?
When Tango GameWorks announced Hi-Fi Rush was getting a photo mode, I knew I was in trouble. You know I have a tendency to get emotionally invested in games with photo modes (one might say too invested, in the case of my Death Stranding BB Boys road trip diary), and yep, you couldn’t have predicted a more likely turn of events if you tried. Because yes, instead of bopping along to its excellent, punchy rhythm action combat and, you know, actually playing the damn thing, I’ve spent most of my early hours with Hi-Fi Rush fiddling about with image sliders and lining up Chai and best video game cat bot 808 into daft, stupid poses for the sake of a good screenshot. But hot damn, what a great game it is all the same.
Hi-Fi Rush is one of the coolest games of the year so far. If you haven’t picked up Tango Gameworks’ surprise hit, now’s your chance to get it for its best price yet. Fanatical and Green Man Gaming are selling Hi-Fi Rush for only $23, down from $30, for a limited time. Steam Deck owners will be happy to know that Hi-Fi Rush is verified for Valve’s handheld.
Offering colorful graphics, flashy combat, and a cast of memorable characters, it’s one of the most stylish action games in recent memory. It earned a 9/10 in our Hi-Fi Rush review. “It feeds on the power of nostalgia by evoking games like Jet Set Radio and Viewtiful Joe with its old-school vibes and contagious energy, but it’s also completely fresh and exciting in its own right,” critic Richard Wakeling wrote.
Bethesda and Tango Gameworks have pushed out an update for Hi-Fi Rush that includes a brand-new photo mode for the game. It is available now.
Players are able to use filters and presets to spruce up their own photos, as well as adjust Chai’s posing and facial features. Other allies can be brought into the pictures and positioned too in order to get group shots. However, only characters that have been unlocked in the story at that point can be chosen for the pictures.
It’s also worth noting that if Chai is in the middle of a jump when photo mode is activated, players won’t be able to adjust his pose or bring in other characters. His facial expressions can still be changed, though. Overlay frames are available too, such as classic comic book panels and dynamic action lines.
A new thing for RPS in 2023 is the RPS Game Club, a kind of monthly book club for games where we pick a game to play each month, write some cool things about it, and have a big all liveblog discussion with you lot, our readers, at the end of it. It’s a project I’ve been wanting to get off the ground for some time now, and finally, the Treehouse Game Club doors have been busted open… and there’s some toe-tapping guitar music coming from inside? That’s right, we’re playing Hi-Fi Rush as our first RPS Game Club game, and we hope you’ll join us on this month-long musical journey.