Fight'N Rage (PC)
Categories:
[blog]
Tags:
[video games],
[pc],
[review]
- Release Date: September 2017
- Time to complete: ~1hr
When done right, "belt scrolling beat'em up"s (that's games like Final Fight, or Streets of Rage), are a classic arcade-y experience that are a lot of fun, especially with a 2nd player. Fight'N Rage is up there with the best, with great feeling characters, a good juggling combo system, many branching paths (including slightly different endings), and some head-bopping music. The aesthetic is a saturated splash of dingy neon 90s, filled with mutant animals mixed with fighting game characters. The homages to Final Fight and Street Fighter (with M.Bison dictator cats doing slide kicks, Muai-Thai Adon birds upkicking you with every juggle tech you try, main ninja playable character F.Norris as Guy, just to name a few), are a blast every time I see them. There are also Ninja Turtles, including a surfboarding stage. There's more though, and in general the game itself feels like a complete homage to the old beat-em-ups, particularly Streets of Rage, of which this game's structure follows to a very predictable degree.
Not that that's bad though. Streets of Rage is still a favourite game of many to this day, and aping it with a more modern touch (and lots of unlockables) is far from disappointing. That this game (aside from the music) is created by a single person is incredibly impressive.
Playing with a second (or third!) player has a nice lifespan-extending mechanic - as long as one of you is alive, the other will be able to revive after a energy bar refills - even when your final life is extinguished. When both of you expend all lives at the same time, it's game over - but you have infinite continues (as far as I can tell).
It's a shame there's no online multiplayer though, that would have been greatly appreciated.