The PS-Plus catalog is a bit "hit and miss" in my mind and often I feel like they are putting games out there for free that most people would never pay for anyway. I'm not really a fan of rhythm action video games beyond a cursory glance at them and perhaps just a bit of a playthough. I don't really understand who these games are for but they must be reasonably successful at sales because people keep making them.
This one was interesting for a minute, or in my situation exactly 17 minutes before I lost interest and felt like it was really repetitive and not really a challenge at all.
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To be fair to the devs this game was $10 before they made it free and for the correct person, whoever that might be, perhaps this would be money well spent. For me and I think most other gamers though, this gets real boring real quick.
Like any other game like it in the rhythm action genre, you are meant to be moving around to the beat of the music and making your actions line up with certain things on the screen in order to make the music more interesting. I have only played one game ever that employed this system in a way that I found good enough to continue playing and that was probably because it was so much more than just the music. That game was Tetris: Effect.
In Wild Hearts there is some sort of story there as well that is kind of left up to you to determine, but for me, this was not enough to keep me interested in playing any longer than I did.
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each stage (at least from the few that I saw) consists of you going through slightly different landscapes and moving from side to side in order to pick up hearts. If you get enough hearts you get to gold level, which I guess if someone wanted to 100% this game you would need to memorize the patterns that the hearts appear on each level.
In a way I suppose it is aiming for some of that Guitar Hero appeal, but in my mind anyway, it fails to do so.
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The environments are good, the cyberpunk feel to it is good, the controls are easy enough and that's kind of all there is to the game. Unfortunately though, for most people I think this is going to get really boring pretty fast. Also, for people like me that don't have eagle-eye vision, it can be something that feels that if I was epileptic that it was definitely trigger a seizure.
The hearts come at you VERY quickly and it can be difficult to determine where you are meant to be standing at any given point in time in order to collect them.
Before I quit playing, which didn't take very long at all, I allowed one level to go by without touching the controller at all and I made it through the entire level anyway. Now, I don't know if this is how every level of the game is, perhaps there are ways that you can fail later on, but while I don't necessarily enjoy games that are hyper difficult, I am also not a fan of games that you cannot possibly lose at. Again, I do not know that this is the case on all the levels, but it was on level 4, which is as far as I made it into the game.
I think that this game would probably be pretty good if you were having a party or something and just had it on for your guests to have a go at with minimal difficulty and that doesn't apply to me because I am one of those weird people that while I do have a lot of friends, I do not invite them over to my place and therefore this is not something I would ever need.
The fact that the first 23 seconds of that 1 minute trailer doesn't even show any gameplay at all kind of backs up my attempt at pointing out that this game offers very little in the way of variety.
It received high marks from critics but I think that this rating is based only on the niche genre that it is in, not basing the rating on if it is a good game compared to all other types of games.
It's made by Annapurna Interactive, which is a studio that I actually quite like since they made one of my favorite story games of all time, What Remains of Edith Finch. By the way if you EVER find that you can play that game for free or near free, definitely play it. Other excellent games that Annapurna has been involved in or directly made include Journey, which is absolutely amazing and Stray, which is basically a ground-breaking game that everyone loved.
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Play this instead: Absolutely fan-friggin-tastic
I enjoy that Annapurna Interactive tries to do things a bit differently and I am definitely not going to disparage them for this one title that didn't resonate with me, but I am also not going to pretend that I enjoyed something I didn't just because I like a studio.
Beyond a cursory glance and a few minutes of "yeah, that's ok....I guess" I can't think of any actual good reason for anyone to actually get their hands on this one and perhaps that is why it was thrown over to the free section on PS5.