Fight’N Rage (2019) [Switch]

A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.

-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Any in-depth discussion of Fight’N Rage must be framed by the context of yesteryear. In the dim and musty arcades of the 1980s, full of the smell of cigarettes and body odor, glimmering with bulbs and bleeps and brightness, the beat ’em up reigned. Through the ’90s, several of these coin-crunching giants migrated to home consoles. Konami, Capcom, and Sega dominated the brawling scene.

Streets of Rage and its sequels, Turtles in Time, Final Fight, X-Men: The Arcade Game, Alien vs. Predator, Captain Commando… the Double Dragons, the Golden Axes, The Punisher, Battletoads, King of Dragons, Spider-Man: The Videogame, Captain America and The Avengers, The Simpsons… these are just a few of the names of the game, “the game” being one of the most popular and celebrated genres of its time.

And then it all vanished.

What happened? Where did the beat ’em up go? Why did they go? Did they simply adapt from the side-scrolling simplicity of coin-op cabinets to the more complex hack n’ slashes and action RPGs on consoles today?

Revival

2018’s Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle collected several arcade classics all in one place, some for the first time ever on console.

Comparatively, the genre has dried up. Sure, the odd revival title hits now and then in games like Dragon’s Crown or more recent indies like River City Girls. While these are popular, they don’t seem to capture an entire generation. Not like this genre did in the old days of CRTs and quarters.

In the midst of this modern desert, in which many vast and trunkless legs of stone lie half sunk in the sand, another resurrection title steps forward to exemplify everything I’ve been talking about. It’s very much flown under the radar. It’s buried beneath the buzz of honks and waking wind fishes. And it’s not going to bring the beat ’em up back from the dead. But it is pure gold.

Fight’N Rage doesn’t deserve the passing glance you gave it. You. Yes, you. In a figurative sense.

Look, I get it. There’s so much to play and you take a look at this game and its… err… “assets”… and write it off as some oversexualized teenage wet dream or just another pandering indie with a retro fetish. I saw a multitude of such games today right before I began writing this article!

But I’m here to tell you that Fight’N Rage fixes a lot of the problems with the beat ’em up genre, and in doing so elevates itself to a position among the best brawlers out there. Let’s explore this: the original beat ’em ups, and by extension their home ports, were designed with a different kind of replay value in mind.

Replayability And The Classics

Old, but not a classic.

Developers designed the classic arcade beat ’em up to eat your money. Unlike a normal home console game at the time which you paid for once and then got to enjoy as many times as you wanted, an arcade beat ’em up charged you each time you played. You got charged for lives. Lose too many lives and you’d have to stick more of your grandma’s money in the machine. Some games had been designed to kill you, as well, stuffed so full of dangerous enemies or insanely brutal bosses that you couldn’t possibly make it through the game without dying. On average, you could expect to spend a buck fifty on a few titles. More than five dollars on the harder ones.

How many times was nana going to dig into her purse for you? Doesn’t matter. The machine didn’t care. They designed it to eat whatever you could throw at it.

The arcade beat ’em up’s replayability factor back then: it was hard and it charged you for it. You lost and wanted to get further, so you’d have to pay to play.

Replayability At Home

Once the home console ports and unique beat ’em ups hit, they ran into a new problem: how do you manage the fact that money was no longer the gatekeeper of progress? At home, you couldn’t shove a Chuck E. Cheese token into a Super Nintendo (believe me, I’ve tried). You paid for the game once and that’s that. So then, the home versions regularly came with multiple difficulty modes. The harder the mode, the fewer lives or continues you had before a game over.

The problem with this, though, is it instantly lowers the stakes. Once you secured enough money to purchase the game for your console, you didn’t have to worry about finding more money to play the game, so losing has less of a negative impact on the player.

What’s left, then?

The drive to achieve a high score (also in the arcades) or the drive to make it as far as you can before running out of lives (also in the arcades), but the home consoles removed one of the strongest motivating factors to play well and therefore play longer, by their own nature. And so in this way beat ’em ups, I suppose, watered themselves down on consoles and arcades evaporated.

As good as a lot of these games are, they have castrated replay value.

How could beat ’em ups survive when they eventually became exercises in button-mashing across horizontal stages? Punching (or the occasional flying kicking and using your special) gets old eventually and wears, keeping beat ’em ups shorter. Some games attempted to combat the monotony by introducing more playable characters with truly unique differences between them as in Dragon’s Crown. RPG elements as in Knights of the Round and River City Ransom went a long way.

Still, nobody seemed to crack the code. Introduce too much complexity and risk alienating fans of the genre or making this type of game something it isn’t.

Cracking The Code

Thence cometh Fight’N Rage, originally released in 2017 courtesy of sebagamesdev on Steam, where it holds a 9/10 rating. Freshly unveiled for the Nintendo Switch, Fight’N Rage is the stop-gap that the beat ’em up genre needed.

It comes with a variety of features significant to the deepening of the brawler experience: three playable characters each with dramatically different playstyles, attacks, speeds, and special moves; multiple branching storyline paths and a host of different endings; extra difficulties and extra modes including score attack, survival, and time attack; an in-game store where you can spend coins you’ve accumulated by racking up your high scores, purchasing new unlockable costumes, unlockable enemy characters, even more modes, tips, and AI partners; there’s a training mode, a battle mode, and stage practice, as well.

I’ve played through arcade mode multiple times on three different difficulty settings with all three characters, both solo and with friends I invited over for couch co-op, and I still haven’t unlocked everything.

Renewed Replayability

Maybe the funniest name I’ve seen in years.

When I finished playing through Fight’N Rage for the first time, I immediately went right back into it and started a new game on arcade mode. This may represent the first time I’ve ever done that for a beat ’em up. In fact, this is one of those rare games I would much rather play than write a review for. It’s that much fun.

More importantly, these unlockables and extras give you something to do as the player beyond just completing the game or earning a high score. Failing to complete normal mode without using a continue on solo is harder than it sounds, and you can’t get an unlockable costume if you do fail. Stakes like these pull out the determination from the player, providing measurable, quantifiable goals past making it to the finish line.

The 8-bit Review

Visuals: 9/10

As per the usual, Fight’N Rage comes equipped with all the throwback, retro settings you could wish for. You can emulate a CRT or arcade cabinet, beveling the screen, create scanlines or squares in raster mode, mess with the HDR (luminosity), the image clarity, and the saturation. By now, these are the bits of icing we come to expect from pixel art indies capitalizing on nostalgia. Fortunately, these familiar display settings are just icing. The actual cake is a rich, multi-layered centerpiece.

The high-paced action is layered with colors and gradients, particle effects and lighting techniques, atmospheric aesthetics, explosions, sparks, and clever, limited use of 3D (or 2.5D) techniques. It’s an arresting game to look at, all the more to play, for all that happens on the screen at once. You could never call Fight’N Rage “dull” or “pedestrian”. “Garish” at the very least but that’s still selling it short.

Developer Sebastian Garcia should be immensely proud of the graphical feat he composed. I certainly would be!

This sewer stage is particularly impressive. Players occupy a raft drifting slowly into the background, down a hallway of consecutive semi-circles representing the walls. I have not seen a more fitting homage to the Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 this generation.

 Audio: 9/10

Music by Uruguayan composer and sound designer Gonzalo Varela is on par with Sebastian Garcia’s flashy, frenetic visuals. It’s an action score with range, covering rock, acid, blues, funk, a soundtrack which seems perfectly at home with the 16-bit epics of a bygone age, albeit with non-synthetic instrumentation. I can imagine this soundtrack standing shoulder to shoulder with your Streets of Rage, even your Mega Mans. It’s clearly as ’80s influenced as the rest of the game.

When playing the game, I had to stop and exclaim just how great the music really is. While not all the tracks are created equal and distinctive character themes would have been more than welcome, the music that plays across the stages pleased at least these retro-loving ears.

 Gameplay: 9/10

While there is a basic tutorial for arcade mode, I recommend spending some time with basic training before attempting to play the game on normal difficulty. Beyond the simple matters of waiting for your SP gauge to refill so you don’t drain your life with special attacks, and beyond the forward and backward throwing, the grabbing and grappling, the running attacks, the multiple aerial maneuvers, the standing combos, the retrievable weapons, the health pick-ups, and parrying enemy strikes, there are moves unique to each character that it’s essential to get a hold of.

Playing through the game without training first (training must be unlocked, so you have to play a bit of the game first anyway), I found myself saying “how the heck did I do that?”. After playing through the training modes for each of the three main characters, I got a better feel for how they each play, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to best utilize them. They aren’t simply reskins of each other, but there are more differences between them than the classic “the girl is fast and the big guy is heavy and the third dude is somewhere in the middle”.

That’s true, to an extent, and so Gal is the fastest, but as the weakest, she also needs to rely on stringing together combos that don’t allow the enemy to recover, which requires understanding exactly how to move from one of her multi-hit moves into the other.

On the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, Ricardo plays exactly like the giant musclebound bull that he is. He’s much slower than the others but his attack power is very high. This means he can easily get surrounded and take a lot of damage (presumably his hitbox is larger), so he’ll have to rely on grabs and throws to manage mobs. His Zangief-esque tornado punch can clear some space, but of course you can’t spam it or you’ll just deplete his life bar.

F. Norris would be the middle character, but beyond having middling strength and speed, he also specializes more on aerial combat than the other characters do. His range is better than Gal’s but much shorter than Ricardo’s. Playing him, I found that I needed a more surgical approach compared to the others: Gal has an AOE standing and aerial special and her forward special affords momentum. Some of Norris’ specials carry him into the air, potentially leaving him vulnerable. It’s wise to pick a target and stick with it, string together attacks and then retreat for another hit and run, in my opinion.

The concrete differences between the characters make playing the game exciting and fresh, across multiple difficulties and modes. I had no problem racking up tons of coins because I kept wanting to swap characters and give it another go.

And the shop provides an endless resource of goals, represented by the secrets and unlockables you can purchase with those coins.

Online multiplayer represents perhaps the biggest gap in Fight’N Rage’s design. As delightful as couch co-op is, we’re not all in a position as adults where we can orchestrate meetups with real-life friends. Unfortunately.

 Replayability: 10/10

I already made a big fuss about the replay value of Fight’N Rage in the context of the proto-brawlers of years gone by, so I won’t beat that horse again here. Branching storyline paths are something that these kinds of games greatly benefit from, allowing you to skip stages and explore new ones, encouraging curiosity, and rewarding trial and error.

For instance, shortly following this scene, which is only accessible by taking the route of cowardice in the first stage, the game gives you the choice to help or ignore the plea of an NPC. This will determine the order of the next stage.

Accessibility: 6/10

Ok, so I still find myself saying “how the heck did I do that?”.

Fight’N Rage introduces techniques more akin to tournament fighting games to the beat ’em up genre. This means canceling, parrying, teching, and having to be much more deliberate about input than smashing your thumb on the controller. For instance, each character has a kind of non-special aerial finisher activated by pressing down, then up, then attack, which I accidentally caught onto by sliding my thumb over the d-pad.

“Accidentally” is a keyword there. Adding complexity to the gameplay (potentially) lowers any game’s accessibility: that is, how easy it is to pick up and learn. While the basic moves are simple, the advanced techniques and combos are quite difficult. I have yet to complete training for any character because of this.

Fight’N Rage has a surprisingly complicated underbelly. There are even apparently “secret” moves for each character and I have no idea what they might be.

Challenge: 9/10

Fight’N Rage is pretty tough. Easy mode will chew you up and spit you out if it’s your first time playing (data accumulated from multiple gamers). Normal mode can provide a solid challenge even after you’ve begun to master combos and linking them together. I have just barely begun to play hard mode, but players looking for more suffering can jack up the game’s speed or play an unlockable unfair mode…

What’s most important to note, though, is practice is crucial here. You can actually see your skills improving if you find the determination to keep playing. That, to my mind, is a game with fair difficulty.

 Uniqueness: 8/10

Beat ’em ups in the past played around with ideas like those in Fight’N Rage, but it took a game about a distant future wherein humanity is enslaved to a mutant master race of anthropomorphic animals to bring it all together.

Further, the branching adventures of Gal, Ricardo, and F. Norris are full of references to the glory days of beat ’em ups, fighters, arcades, and action heroes, parodying Tatsumaki Senpukyaku, Haggar’s suspenders, Ninja Turtles, Battletoads, and Bruce Lee in one fell swoop.

Maybe you noticed the title not-so-subtly calls out Final Fight ‘n Streets of Rage?

 My Personal Grade: 10/10

Maybe you’ll be as surprised to hear this as I am. Fight’N Rage is now one of my favorite beat ’em ups. Yes, of all time.

It fixes some of the longevity “problems” intrinsic in even the most iconic members of its category. It provides dozens of routes to explore, collectibles and unlockables galore, and more modes than you can shake your minotaur horns at. I think that I’m going to get back to playing it right now. I really could only wish for an online mode, even if it was unlockable.

I’d like to thank sebagamesdev and Blitworks for providing us with a copy of their game for this honest review.

Aggregated Score: 8.8

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.