Fight’N Rage Review: A New Challenger Enters the Game

For as long as I can remember, I have used Streets of Rage 2 as the standard for beat’-em-ups. Out of the hundreds of titles that call this genre home, that is the title that stands out as being near perfect – the difficulty, the length of the levels, and the variety of enemies are all in a place that is fair yet challenging. It’s something that has been imitated time and time again, and in a rare instance, Fight’N Rage manages to walk a razor-thin line between a rip-off and tribute flawlessly.

Despite some major similarities, the game sets itself apart from the pack by incorporating a branching narrative that changes up the story mode significantly based upon the difficulty selected as well as the paths you choose at regular intervals resulting in each run feeling different than the last. The themes of a race war between mutants and humanity is one that I could get behind, but failed to remain vested in due to the branching paths often not lining up in a cohesive story, offering little more than some tongue in cheek lines that would be at home in the early days of the Resident Evil saga.

There are three playable characters that look and play like a mashup of the popular Streets of Rage protagonists and other games from generations past. The options include Gal, who appears to be a gender-swapped version of Guy from the Final Fight/Street Fighter lore, F. Norris who is essentially Axle cosplaying as one of the ninjas from Mortal Kombat, and Ricardo, the anthropomorphic man-bull who looks and controls like Max. The animal/humanoid crossbreeding doesn’t end there, as most of the enemies you’ll face off with follow the same theme, often incorporating key moves from the characters that inspired them. These instances of fan service became a meta-game of sorts for me, as it was almost as much fun picking out the characters and settings as they played out in a supercut of my childhood.

On top of what you’d expect, it incorporates a massive vault of unlockable modes, skins, and more. One of the unlockables is an “Easy” difficulty that you must spend your hard-earned in-game currency on. This requirement I feel is a bit unfair since you’ll need to struggle your way through the staggering difficulty enough to earn the coin to purchase it since the “Normal” difficulty is more in line with hard, or even very hard options in similar releases, at least in the single-player mode. The difficulty seems to be a bit more accommodating when you’re playing the game in couch co-op (no online play is offered) with up to two friends; however, no adjustment to the number of enemies results in an uneven experience.

Despite free play being a thing, the way the continues are handled make the normal difficulty a struggle, simply because continuing places you at the start of your most recent checkpoint and in some cases, these are multiple rooms behind where you may have fallen. The normal everyday enemies don’t pose much of a threat aside from their numbers, which vary from perfectly balanced to overwhelming depending on the area you’re visiting; but the mini-bosses and level bosses are another story. The game borrows these bosses almost entirely from the Streets of Rage catalog, but doubles down on their most frustrating attacks, often taking huge chunks of health and being generally annoying with their often unblockable skills.

There are a fair amount of other modes, with the most noteworthy being the versus battle mode, allowing you to pit one of the main characters or an unlockable enemy in a 1 on 1 battle with either a local player or the CPU. This was a fun addition to the core game that was very reminiscent of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters release for the NES. Unlocking all of the modes, characters, and skins is no small task, requiring you to sink a considerable amount of time into the game to reach 100% completion, pushing the replayability to the max beyond its normal one-hour runtime per attempt.

Regardless of whether you’re playing the campaign, the versus mode, or one of the other unlockable options, the combat remains the same; the three-button control scheme utilizes an attack, jump/dodge, and the devastating special attacks. The game manages to incorporate a sizable lineup of attacks despite only being limited to the classic three-button controller layout by combining the various face buttons with directional attacks. The combat opens up a lot of possibilities based off of your playstyle, allowing you to button mash your way to success in most instances, but some battles will require you to venture out in risk vs. reward territory. Is it worth busting out one of the special moves prior to the painfully slow gauge filling up at the cost of some of your own health, or risk taking the terrible beating you’ll likely undergo at the hands of one of the enemy’s longer than average combos?

Fight’N Rage doesn’t topple Streets of Rage 2 as my all-time favorite brawler, but it comes damn close. With tons of content that is just begging to be unlocked, a solid campaign and satisfying co-op, it’s a beat-‘em-up that deserves your attention, at least until Streets of Rage 4 releases.

9 out of 10

Pros

  • Loads of Fan Service
  • Satisfying Combat
  • Hours of Replay Value

Cons

  • Uneven Difficulty

Fight’N Rage was developed by sebagamesdev and published by BlitWorks. It is available on NS, PC, PS4, and X1. The game was provided to us for review on X1. If you’d like to see more of Fight’N Rage, check out the publisher’s site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

Check out OpenCritic for a better idea of how our review stacks against others.

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