"They got one of their vowels mixed up; it’s really “Fighting Farce”"

I recall vividly when I first heard about this game, I was extremely excited. Always having been a fan of the Final Fight and Streets of Rage franchises, the idea of developing a beat ‘em up type game in 3D format had a very intriguing draw. I had my doubts as to how well it would work, but I kept faith that it would transition well and create a whole new level of entertainment. After purchasing the game the day it came out and giving it a good play through, all I could say was one thing: wow. Of course, this wasn’t an exultant “wow”; this was an exclamation made with unduly contempt and disgust. If Core were attempting to make the most grotesque, jejune game conceivable, then they truly do merit recognition for it. I don’t think they could have disappointed me by any greater of a degree if they had tried. Repulsive graphics, flat and blatantly boring sound, combined with lethargic and disengaging controls mix together to solidify into this mess.

Despite having four characters to choose from in play, it is simply amazing how little difference there is between them. Hawk, Mace, and Alana play almost exactly the same; only a few of their grappling moves have completely different ranges and animations. However, due to having similar lag times, start up times, etc., you will be using them in all of the same situations and as such, they really play exactly the same. Smasher is the only one that plays slightly different, due to the fact that he swings out punches at a slower rate. However, due to the fact that enemies stagger for longer between his blows, he doesn’t have anymore difficulty in stringing his combos together than any one else, and largely plays the same as they do. All the characters, despite their size differences, run and walk at about the same rate.

Is there any actual differences between the characters? Yes, there is. Just like in all great beat ‘em up games, there are weapons. The rate of speed at which you pick these items up is largely dependent on the size of the fighter you are controlling. Since Smasher is the biggest, he can obviously pick up tires, barrels, and other various objects from off the streets at a slightly swifter rate in comparison to the others. Not only that, his massive size allows him to pick up much larger objects that the other three characters can’t. Does this make Smasher the best all around character to use, then? Not necessarily.

The problem with picking up weapons and other such items is that regardless of who you are using, it is a slow and arduous task. Your character doesn’t simply crouch, grab, and rise like in the 2D side scrollers. In Fighting Force, your character will have to slowly bend down on their knees, extend their arms and grip the item, then rise once again in an equally sluggish manner. During this entire animation, you are vulnerable to enemy attack. If the enemy so much as taps you while in this process, you will then either return fully erect and drop the item while flinching, or fall straight on your ass. This is a really annoying problem, since if you ever get surrounded by a group of thugs it is impossible to pick up a weapon to help in defending yourself. You’re far better off beating them back with your fists and hands. So you just avoid picking up these items, right? Wrong. They are everywhere. The developers likely did this to further antagonize and taunt the gamer because there is so much stuff that you can throw at the enemies if you only had the full twelve seconds of time it takes to stoop down and pick the damned thing up. That’s still not the end of the dilemma, though. The button you use to pick something up is the same button you use for the basic hitting combo. So if the floor is cluttered with junk and there are a mob of guys around you, hitting the attack button will once again result in you bending down to pick something up, and then some idiot kicking you in the face as you are about to start rising again. It wastes tons of time and accomplishes nothing. Ugh.

That will usually leave you with grappling the enemy, which only works part of the time and due to the fuzzy controls and awkward connection animation. It can be quite difficult to determine if you even grabbed them or not. This is another point that is extremely visible in Fighting Force. In the earlier 2D side scrolling brawlers, you just ran into the punk to grab him. Here, however, you have that obtuse animation to attempt to decipher whether the button you use to grab actually succeeded or not. If you are going to even bother with the grappling option, you’re better off just mashing an attack button simultaneously with the grapple. That way all guess work is eliminated and you just smash there face in right away before they have an opportunity to break out. Even then, your options are limited with the grappling hits, and the few moves that do toss enemies across the screen won’t knock down other enemies. This sadly eliminates one of the fun methods of crowd clearance from the old 2D side scrollers. Hell, there is essentially no crowd clearance at all unless you pick up a barrel from a vacant area, walk into a new one, and chuck it into a group of incoming enemies. You just don’t have those kinds of options available when enemies are actually trying to pummel you to death due to the horrible and inefficient grappling system and the ultra slow weapon grabbing animations.

So, what does that leave you with? Running attacks! You have two running attacks, a leaping one and a ground based one. The ground based ones are awful due to the incredibly bad recovery time. For instance: both Mace and Alana will slide along the ground for a trip, but the last few seconds of animation have them sliding along the ground at snail speeds; with clouds of dust being thrown up behind them despite the fact that they are moving slower than walking speed. Oh, and if you somehow manage to miss, enemies can hit you during this wide open recovery time. Even then you usually don’t have to worry, though, because of the pathetic enemy AI. More on that later, though.

The running jump attacks are great, though. They tend to hit broad areas, have fast execution and recovery times, and… wait, they do abysmal damage. In the later stages of the game these running techniques will hardly even scathe enemies. Thus even though they are the most useful and logical to use, the sheer lack of damage they deal is probably enough to keep most people from using them.

So what does that leave you with game play wise? Nothing. The attack combos are awkward and clunky, and because the attack button is the same for picking up weapons, you’ll likely stop in the middle of many combos to pick some random metal bar up, only to get slapped across the face and knocked over. The grappling moves are unintuitive and difficult to read; it is almost impossible to distinguish whether or not you succeeded in grabbing the enemy. The running attacks are the only attacks that aren’t obnoxious to use, and they can only do a pittance of damage at the most. Get ready for many long levels of boring recycling of poorly animated attacks with low frame rates, awkward grappling, and generally have to spend a lot of time whittling your enemies down without going nuts due to how disengaging the whole experience is. The unrealistic and low muffled moans and cries your opponents make won’t make it any more of a rewarding experience, either.

Hey, that reminds me… the enemies bland and phony sounding grunts aren’t the only thing destroying the audio area of this game. Everything sounds bad. Punches made by all the characters sound exactly the same, regardless of how hard they hit and who is making them. It sounds like someone breaking a bundle of sticks, being recorded with the lowest quality microphone they could find. Kicks are even worse. The sound of Mace’s foot crushing the side of an enemy’s head sound roughly like me hitting a wall with a piece of Styrofoam. It’s muffled, dull, and extraordinarily unimpressive. Even the sounds of gun shots and explosions seem to have a bit of static in them, tainting the impact that those sounds ought to provide. Yet still it doesn’t end there; they had to go on and concoct the most lifeless music for BGM ever. When there is music in the back ground, it is some form of extremely repetitive, hushed percussion with a couple infrequent bass booms. That’s it. Most of the time, you can’t even hear it unless you are listening for it, and even then it adds absolutely nothing to the game. It’s just there. Hell, sometimes it’s not even there at all. Some levels feature absolutely no music; just random traffic sounds and police sirens that are as poorly recorded as the rest of the sound effects.

Could it possibly get any worse? Oh, but you have no idea, it’s only beginning! After making a complete failure out of gameplay and play control, along with an obnoxious and boring audio department, the very appearance of the game is slaughtered. In a sense, the graphics for Fighting Force aren’t completely awful. The bodies of the characters are fairly smooth, especially for the N64… until you get a good look at their faces. The faces of all the enemies and the characters are exceptionally ugly; marred by countless jagged edges. From there it goes down hill due to the absolutely abhorrent textures. They are all smeared and seem to run together. Light coming out of windows looks very fuzzy, as though it were poorly painted onto the wall. The gravel on the ground looks like soggy oatmeal; it’s painfully unrealistic. The paint job on a van looks like it was done with cheap colored pencils. It is impossible to distinguish muscle contours on enemies from tattoos. The dark smudged lines on character’s faces might be an attempt at drawing a face, but it just looks like a repulsive mass of swiggles instead. Even in the few instances were there is a single solid colored texture, it looks runny and unattractive. There is simply nothing aesthetically pleasing about this game; the range goes only from bland to unbelievably unsightly.

Well, for such an mess of a game you’d think they actually provide you with a half-passable storyline, right? Unfortunately, no. Even in a genre rank with subpar storylines, Fighting Force manages to percolate below all expectations to the bottom of the barrel. There is no visible story throughout the entire game; there is not a single explanation for why you have to fight this next steroid induced boss or why it even matters. The ending sequence in all its brevity fails to shed any light on the situation. Fear not though, confused readers, as I read the instruction manual! There is some semblance of a plot, believe it or not. As it would seem Zeng (who is the big bad boss) is some genius business tycoon with a huge corporation of loyal followers below him. He had predicted that the world would end in the year 2000 and, much like Y2K, it resulted in nothing. Well, Mr. Zeng must really hate being wrong, because this apparent absence of world destruction on the turning of the millennium somehow inspired him to put the gears into motion himself. There were no actual specifics on how he planned to destroy the world, but you get the general impression that he has begun the mass manufacture of biological weapons. Wait a minute, though, how can this idiot be a genius? Are all the people working under him so blind as to see how stupid this whole design of their leader is?

Hold on folks, it is about to get more ridiculous. The city where Zeng’s base of command is located at is now more or less in shambles and as such the police force and army reserves are unable to remedy the situation. A special task force of get this… 4 people, just 4 people, have been assembled to save the world. Who are these people? Are they top of the notch assassins? Trained marines? Oh, hell no!

First, we have Hawk. I still have no clue who the hell he is supposed to be. Judging from his clothes and general appearance, I’d say he’s some random hobo they picked up off the streets. Why’s he fighting? Well, he just likes to fight. Yipee. Next we have Mace, who is a rather stereotypical female detective that wears too much make up. She’s just in this because she likes to fight too. Oh joy. The next two are a bit more interesting, though. Smasher is an gigantic and volatile convict, and this is his opportunity to win his freedom by helping to smash Zeng’s face in. Would you trust this guy to help save the world, though? Last is Alana, who is the illegitimate child of Zeng. She was experimented on as a child and as such she fights not for revenge, but to keep Zeng from bringing harm to others. Without a doubt she is the only one with a shred of possibility for plot advancement and originality, but due to the fact that there is none at all in the game and the rest is so incredibly bland and cliché, her little bit is completely lost in a sea of nonsense.

So the reader might now be thinking that this is just an incredibly boring, ugly, frustrating game. This is for the most part a true statement, but it is still off. This game is not frustrating. Not as far as difficulty is concerned. Despite the horrible controls and the inutile move sets, this game is incredibly easy. Most of the time, you can run circles around groups of enemies and they will be too stupid to be able to hit you and stop you. Even during those absurdly slow animations where you pick up items, the computer never uses it to its full advantage. The baddie will simply hit you once, then continue to stare at you like an idiot. They will rarely combo, and I think I had only been grappled by an enemy once in the time it took me to beat the game. And I managed to break out of that grapple with almost no effort. Actually, I may have been grappled more than that single time, but I certainly didn’t notice it. Even the bosses are pathetic; they can usually be beaten by just standing in front of them and mindlessly pounding attack, or by throwing stuff at them when they are too dimwitted to walk around desks and benches that get in their way. So, Fighting Force in actuality is a boring, ugly, mind numbingly easy game.

Indeed, this piece of work earns a salute to Core on my part. The cleverly changed vowel in the title was meant to keep you from seeing what Fighting Force really is when browsing the shelves at your local gaming retailer. That, of course, being a complete farce of what it could have been. This game is atrocious in every aspect of the word, possibly even deserving the title of “Bebe’s Kids: The Next Generation”. If you are one of those people who loves to watch awful movies for the sake of watching awful movies, then you might want to possibly give this game a look. The appalling nature of it just might appeal to you. Everyone else can just keep it at bay with a sharp pointy stick.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 03/16/04