Fight'N Rage Review (Xbox One)

STAFF REVIEW of Fight'N Rage (Xbox One)

Friday, March 24, 2023.
by Adam Dileva

Originally released back in 2017, solo developer, SebaGamesDev, released Fight’N Rage, a love letter to the classic Beat’em Up genre that Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Double Dragon, Battletoads and TMNT made so popular back in the day. Now released for current consoles, a bunch of additions and improvements have been made, and if you’re a fan of the genre, Fight’N Rage is certainly one to check out, especially if you want to play up to three players in local co-op and want a challenge.

With games in this genre you’re generally playing for its gameplay, not so much the narrative. While there is a story here that revolves something around how mutants are taking over the planet where it’s now “the law of a jungle”, being led by “The Boss”. Of course there are a few that are willing to try and stop this from happening, beating up everyone in their way.

You have the choice of three initial characters: Gal, a quick and agile martial artist who favors her speed and aerial combos rather than strength. Being quite quick, she was easily my favorite of the group, and if she reminds you of Blaze from Streets of Rage you’re not alone. Next is Ricardo, a Mike Haggar clone, though he’s a minotaur instead of human. Being huge and absolutely ripped, he’s got the power and strength, but he’s so slow I found it quite difficult to play as him. Lastly is F. Norris, a ninja who sits somewhere in the middle for power and agility. He has some cool combos but I found it difficult to get myself out of sticky situations with him compared to Gal.

While most Beat’em Up games simply have you moving from the left side of the screen to the right to clear enemies in the way, you’re sometimes given options to go in a different direction, opening up multiple endings based on your decisions. Thankfully you’re also able to fully skip or fast forward cutscenes if you’re simply going through for another run or speed running.

If you’ve played any Beat’em Up in the past, you’ll be very aware of the general setup of walking to an area, defeating all your enemies until allowed to progress forward, clearing that area and repeat until you reach a boss at the end. While the core design isn’t all that different here, it certainly brings back some nostalgia to a time when the genre was much more popular.

While ‘easy to play, hard to master’ is a bit cliché to describe its gameplay, it’s absolutely true. Sure you might get through a good portion of the game by simply spamming the attack button, you’ll eventually hit a wall and be unable to progress if you don’t learn all of the other combat mechanics. Fight’N Rage is actually much more difficult than I expected, so it will take some time to learn how best to fight each type of enemy.

Also like most classic Beam’em Ups, you’ll replenish your health by smashing barrels and finding food on the ground like apples that replenishes a small amount and roast turkey which is best saved when critically low on health as it refills it completely. Some enemies will also drop weapons like a throwing knife, ninja star, a pipe or even a sword to help you get a few extra hits on your enemies.

While most Beat’em Ups are challenging, many utilize unlimited continues so that you can progress, and while Fight’N Rage is no different in allowing unlimited continues, there’s a few caveats to that that absolutely infuriate me. When you ultimately die and lose all your lives, you’re able to continue, but instead of just restarting where you just died with a new set of lives and freshly filled health bar, you are sent back to your last checkpoint, generally the start of the section or level. Sometimes this isn’t too bad and you only need to fight through a few groups of enemies to get back to where you originally died, but there are a few sections that stood out and were incredibly frustrating.

One of the last portions of a specific level has you fighting on a very small raft where you need to fight waves of almost every single enemy you’ve encountered to that point. The problem is that when you inevitably fall off the raft into the water, you lose a good portion of your health. Sure it’s great that you can knock off enemies into the water to instantly kill them, but you’ll no doubt lose a lot of health or lives here. Even worse, the last section of this is a boss fight, and if you die during that battle, you guessed it, you’re doing the whole section all over again.

There’s another section at the very end before the final boss that again, once I died, I had to fight the room of enemies in the previous room before being able to try the boss once more. The problem here is that there are a few enemies that are so overly challenging that it loses all its fun when you’ve already lost a few lives before clearing the room and attempting the boss once again. And yup, when you continue you’ll have to fight the Dobermans that have invulnerability moments and can easily stunlock you. Even on Easy mode, getting through the campaign was a challenge, but more on the difficulty options shortly.

While there’s really only three buttons you need to worry about (attack, jump and special), there are some different combinations of moves and attacks based on your chosen character. Spamming attack will work in the beginning against the basic enemies, but the ones in the latter portions will require a bit more strategy to defeat. You can grab enemies and toss them into others to group them all up and attack multiple at once, also able to utilize dashes and jump attacks.

Like most in the genre, there’s also a special move that you can use, but there’s a downfall to this as well. You have a Special Meter (SP) that refills over time, able to be used for a ‘free’ powerful attack, usually best saved until you’re in trouble or surrounded. If you want to use your special attack when the SP meter isn’t full though, you can do so but at the cost of a small portion of health. Remember all the continue issues I listed above? That means you’ll basically never want to use it for fear of dying and having to redo a section all over again. Food for health refills weren’t rare, but certainly not plentiful enough to actually want to use my specials.

There is a parry system in place, but it’s not explained very well initially and I found it quite difficult to pull off properly. In most sidescrolling Beat’em Ups like this, you simply move out of the line of attack from an enemy, which is certainly an option here, but you’re often surrounded by enemies so you’ll usually just walk into a different attack if so. Parries allow you to negate some of the damage, but having to press away from the enemy as the hit lands much of the time simply had me now facing the wrong direction.

You know what would have been appreciated? A Tutorial or Training mode. Much to my surprise, there actually IS a Training Mode, but it’s locked away initially. Yeah, I don’t understand that logic either. The more you play the more coins you earn based on your score. These coins are then used to unlock a number of different things from playable enemies, modes, costumes and yes, a Training Mode. You have to play the game a bunch to earn enough coins to hopefully go explore the unlockables section and then find there’s a Training Mode. This mode teaches you how to properly play each character, their moves and combos, and even earn new belts as you pass each tutorial. Good luck actually getting the Black Belt unlock due to the 60 second timer though, but it’s something to strive for. If the Training Mode was available initially, I probably wouldn’t have had as much frustration as I did in the beginning.

New character costumes are generally pallet swaps, but there’s plenty more to unlock, even an Easy Mode. Yes, you have to play and die on Normal to earn enough coins to unlock an easier mode, which is still challenging at times. The problem is that even a full run doesn’t earn you a lot of coins, so you’re going to have to play through numerous times if you want to actually unlock everything Fight’N Rage has to offer. Unlocking enemy characters to play as in VS Mode is fun, as here you can have 1v1 matches against a friend or even watch the CPU only battles.

While you can certainly play solo, it’s quite challenging on your own, especially in the later stages. Thankfully there is local 3 player co-op available, but sadly online play isn’t an option. I hope you have friends or family to play with, as solo did eventually become frustrating and repetitive, and if you want to really have some arguments with your co-op partners you can toggle the optional friendly fire as well. Manage to beat the game on Normal or Hard and you can actually unlock CPU partners to play alongside in co-op as well, again, an option that should have been a default.

With smooth framerates and 120FPS support, Fight’N Rage certainly looks good with its pixel art. Sure you can opt to turn on a bunch of classic filters like CRT mode, scanlines and more, but it’s smooth regardless and I never had any hiccups or slowdown. Animations are well done, enemy designs are done well (even if repeated quite often) and each backdrop is unique as you fight through it. The only thing that I found questionable was how overtly sexual some of the women designs were, even the pose Gal has when choosing her. The soundtrack is exceptional, full of dozens of rock tracks from Gonzalo Varela, and hearing your enemies explode from a full combo is always satisfying.

Fight’N Rage may initially look like any other Beat’em Up brawler out there if you judged it solely on some screenshots, but for a solo developer, it’s quite impressive. That said, Fight’N Rage is incredibly challenging and I question some of the design choices for being unlockables instead of default options. No online co-op is a bummer, but if you have friends and family to play with on the same couch there’s some fun to be had. I missed Fight’N Rage the first time, but this is the best version to check it out if you've never heard of it before like myself.

**Fight'N Rage (Series X|S) was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series X**

Overall: 7.8 / 10
Gameplay: 7.0 / 10
Visuals: 8.5 / 10
Sound: 8.0 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of Fight'N Rage (Xbox One)

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