[This is a guest review by Cellulose Man. If you’re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]
Beau Blyth, of Fish Face fame, recently released his largest work to date. Action Fist! is a side-scrolling shoot ’em up modeled in the style of (and as a tribute to) classic games like Gunstar Heroes.
The basic premise is thus: Domingus, a man of action, has had everything he loves stolen from him by an insidious villain known only as The Madman. He and his monocle-wearing platonic lady friend Ina are armed to the teeth and will fight their way through countless dangers and hordes of robot guards to take back what’s theirs. (Well, what’s Domingus’s, but you get the point.)
The game sports two-player co-op mode, several unlockables, fabulous music by the creator’s brother, and a weapon upgrading mechanic that keeps gameplay feeling very dynamic. It spans several stages, each split into two acts with a boss fight at the end. The stages are gorgeous and the boss battles polish them off expertly. The alternate characters have different mechanics (which I won’t spoil) and the difficulty modes range from relatively easy to near-impossible. It took some effort on my part to beat normal mode but I’m a crappy gamer. Replay value is quite present though – I’ve had three or four play throughs and I’m not done yet!
Of special note to the game designers out there is the detailed polish that went into every corner of the game. You might not notice while playing, but every enemy gives a warning prior to firing its weapon. Sounds are used extensively. Enemy bullets are easy to see. The player characters flash visibly when hurt. It’s clear when you’ve defeated an enemy. At times the game goes to lengths to sacrifice realism for player intuitiveness. (See: in the highway level you can jump to shoot enemies behind you.) Effort to this effect – gameplay tuning – has dramatically improved the feel of the game from its early versions.
My criticisms of the final cut are as follows: The color-matching mechanic (wherein the player can do additional damage to enemies with like-colored bullets) seems ill-explained, and many of my friends didn’t pick up on it. The game’s second level has no way to get power-ups. The second-to-last boss is a pushover, especially compared to the ones preceding it, and you can’t wall jump until you double-jump. The final fight is dramatically harder than the rest of the game, though I’m not certain if I really mind. Lastly, the fun of massacring enemies with an upgraded weapon tends to be lost on less skilled players who die frequently, losing said upgrades. Additionally, many of the weapon crates are well-hidden.
All that said, the ending deserves some kind of goddamned award. The game’s well worth the zero dollars you’ll pay for it, so give it a try.
TIGdb: Entry for Action Fist!