This game truly came out of nowhere. It’s from Tango, who made… questionably okay games before (I really wasn’t a fan of Ghostwire Tokyo gameplay-wise, though visually it was very nice). There was something of a “Microsoft Direct” to showcase 5 games, which felt completely pointless… except for this new game being not only announced, but released a couple hours later. Nice! I think games need less time between announcement and release, not more, especially nowadays.

So I picked up a 1$ trial of Game Pass to play this, despite it being a budget-release at 30$. And that was weeks ago and I’m finally writing this review, oops (created the template for this review 15 days ago and only writing now lol).

So let’s go and see if this surprise announcement/release is good!

Developer: Tango Gameworks
Publisher: Bethesda/Microsoft
Release date: January 25th 2023
Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X/S (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Rhythm Action game

Review

The plot is maybe a bit confused but it’s fine. You play as Chai, a young man who wants to become a rockstar. His arm is broken or something, but the Vandelay Technologies company is doing a project where they get volunteers to get robotic limb replacements. The procedure messes up because, but pure chance, the villain of the game tosses Chai’s iPod aside while talking to his staff and it ends up falling on top of Chai during the procedure. This embeds the iPod into Chai’s chest, which powers up his new robotic arm, but the mistake marks him as a defect and the company decides they must eliminate him. He’s saved partly by Peppermint, a “resistance fighter” type who wants to investigate and possibly destroy Vandelay, at which point she recruits Chai since he’s good in a brawl. At that point you end up having to go against the big bosses of different branches of the company, getting their access keys to the system to learn about Spectra, which seems to be a massive mind control project by Vandelay’s newer boss, Kale. You get some new friends along the way, and stuff, and uncover the whole conspiracy.

There’s a few “issues” with the story which I don’t feel really matter. Namely, why’d the procedure that is meant to replace arms and legs end up embedding an iPod in Chai’s chest and why does that iPod power him up? Why destroy him when they could just… kidnap him and study why that happened and improve the procedure? After the intro and reveal of Spectra, nothing really actually happens until the ending, beyond a reveal about Peppermint that you probably figured out the instant she popped up on screen (and they get more blatant about it until the actual reveal). I feel more actual stuff could happen here, it’s really just “we go fight the boss lol”.

Before anything else, we gotta talk about the graphics, because holy fuck. This game looks absolutely fucking amazing. It’s bright, colorful, has cool designs, emotive characters, insanely smooth animations with a lot of personality… it reeks of amazing design work as far as world-building and technical design. The cel-shading helps make it look just absolutely badass. Like… holy shit why do so few games look this good nowadays? Why are there so few cel-shaded games nowadays? This game will still look amazing 50 years from now. The constant push for realism is so limiting and boring, when we could have games that ooze style. I rarely even talk about graphics anymore in reviews because it’s so… not interesting. But this game, I have to highlight the absolute amazing work of Tango. Heck, Ghostwire Tokyo, even with its more realistic style, looked amazing too (with the exception being the pretty boring human characters). These guys might be some of the best in the industry as far as graphics. My only problem with the graphics? Peppermint, despite being cute and badass, getting the generic boring/ugly “half-shaven with all the rest of the hair to the other side” haircut that all stories give to all “strong women” characters nowadays for some reason.

And PC performance is top-notch too. I had framerate ranging from 220 to 380 fps at 1440p (5800X and 3080), depending on the area and effects required. With the 165Hz monitor I use, that means I always had better framerate than I needed, so it was consistently as smooth as possible (higher framerate than the display is beneficial generally). Some areas I’d get around 220 if there was a lot going on, some areas I’d get way more. Drops were exceedingly rare too. This game is beyond smooth. This game is the standard all games should abide by when it comes to PC versions.

This is what at least looks like a fairly standard hack n’ slash action games in the vein of DMC. But there’s some really unique stuff going on with the gameplay here.

Chai’s iPod power-up gives him the power of rhythm. He now experiences the world in rhythm to the music played on his iPod (or maybe it’s a Zune, who knows), which means his attacks, the enemies’ attacks and even elements in the background move to that rhythm. So if you need to block an enemy attack, the attack will hit to the rhythm, so if you time your parry to the rhythm, you’ll parry. It’s a very unique gameplay method, since it still works largely like a combo-focused action game. Hitting enemies damages them, but pressing the attack buttons to the rhythm deals more damage or additional effects, as well as extra attacks if you do a full combo string to the rhythm. This means there’s some boss battles that are fully rhythm-focused, while others are more standard combat, of course accentuated by the game’s overall rhythm gameplay.

You have many options in combat. You have normal attacks that go to the beat. You have a heavy attack button that runs at half-beats instead. You can dodge, jump, double jump, eventually you unlock a parry option and you have up to 3 partners to summon as you progress through the game (only Peppermint at first) who have different actions in and out of combat, you have a wire thing that move around faster (or draw enemies to you), and of course you have a super meter that fills up to allow you to do a super attack that deals a lot of damage. The summons specifically either deal with weaknesses (like Peppermint easily breaking force fields), or just plain deal damage. All of these perform better if you do it in rhythm, and some have rhythm-based QTE-ish features which I think actually works in this game because it’s so rhythm-based in the first place (so more damage for supers and stuff like that if you follow the rhythm correctly). It’s really hard to express how well all of this works, there’s so much visual and audio feedback to everything, such as a crowd cheering on Chai when you properly time your attacks, the level bopping around to the music, and small visual clair like action lines when you jump to the music. So much work was put into every little thing in this game.

In-between missions (or at specific spots during missions) you can power Chai up a bit. There’s combos and specific gameplay features you can buy, so you can have a more varied moveset. There’s power-ups you can buy to the summon characters, there’s bonus health/meter upgrades, there’s new supers, and there’s a system where you get a few slots to put things into it, which can either boost Chai or the summons. It’s pretty simple stuff overall but it works.

The non-combat moments of the game are probably the weakest, but there’s still much to like. The platforming is solid, the exploration of levels, while fairly straightforward, still has puzzles and stuff to find more resources… It’s pretty standard but pretty good. Even the bigger “setpiece” moments use the standard gameplay, instead of making up setpiece-only gameplay for them that feel like the game plays itself. Yeah there’s QTEs sometimes, but they fit in the rhythm styling of the game.

Overall

This is an early candidate for GotY. It’s a super well made game. I just gotta appreciate when a single-player action game comes out and it’s not open world boredom, and it separates the game in levels, and each level is allowed to be unique and finely crafted. There’s a lack of games like this nowadays, with the heavy focus on big open areas with copy-pasted assets.

The gameplay itself is fast, fun and actually has a good original concept with the rhythm. Before playing I thought the rhythm aspect might be bad or underdeveloped or would get annoying, but it never does, it works quite well. The visuals are insanely good. The animation is nice. Even the voice acting happens to be pretty okay, a bit exaggerated but it works. I have pretty much nothing to complain about here.

Definitely get this game. I probably will at some point, just to give them more sales. I think the 1$ I paid for a month of PC Game Pass was WAY too little considering how good this game is. Buy this game, it needs real support, not subscription support.