Galaxy Fight

I've been playing fighting games since I was 12 years old. I can tell you why I prefer King Of Fighters '97 over KOF '98. There's a Tekken 6 arcade stick sitting on the shelf behind me as I write this review, and I'm wearing my red Fatal Fury cap. I am well-versed in brawlers.

So when I heard Galaxy Fight was coming to the PSP courtesy of MonkeyPaw, I was initially excited at the prospect of playing a little known 2D scrap-'em-up. Unfortunately, this excitement very quickly evaporated.

Released in Japan on the PSone after a stint on the Neo Geo AES and MVS systems, Sunsoft's fighter looks strange and yet stunning.

Pale and flat shades produce a washed-out tone that contrasts with the bold, multiple scrolling layers of the backgrounds, and only the fluidity of movement leaves any room for improvement. But for a game that's over 16 years old it's still impressive.

Equally weird - though no less pleasing - are the electronic synth-rock beats accompanying your beatings. There are bright cartoon themes mixed in with ominous ancestral chanting, dance rock and candy sweet pop side by side, clashing to create a soundtrack with a paradoxically dissonant harmony. Speech is sparse but clean, as are the thwacks and smacks of fists on torsos.

The game has been directly ported by MonkeyPaw, so this is the full Japanese release, including the native language in certain areas.

Most of the important stuff that affects gameplay - such as the options menu and 'mode select' screen - are in English, so while you'll miss out on the story of Galaxy Fight the game itself doesn't suffer from the lack of translation.

Instead, where the game suffers is its exceptionally cheap AI and consequentially brutal difficulty, rendering the single-player almost completely without merit.

It's a four-button system of fighting: weak, medium, and strong attacks, and a taunt. Specials are your typical quarter turn and charge affairs, though it has a decidedly old skool feel without Super bars to fill and unleash huge combos.

You have to building large chains of attacks manually, so understanding that your character can get in three ducking punches and a leg sweep before the animation loop is broken and your opponent may defend again becomes crucial.

The trouble is that there's no time to learn any of the fighting styles of the eight different characters. There's no training mode to speak of, and changing the difficulty in the options menu has no effect on play whatsoever.

It appears to be plain broken, permanently stuck on a high level, even when Very Easy is selected.

Your enemy foresees every single move you throw at him, blocking almost everything you launch and countering with mid- to high-tier combos that sap your health bar significantly.

I can destroy most Arcade modes of fighters on default settings, but with Galaxy Fight I struggled to get to the fifth round after a two hour-long session.

The AI is also set in very regimented attack patterns, calling on the same box of tricks over and over again, always with the perfect solution for whatever you have in your arsenal.

As a test, I simply held 'crouch' and 'defend' for an entire round and to my amazement my opponent didn't make a single attempt to strike me, resulting in a draw. Galaxy Fight is nothing if not predictable.

Of course, all of these criticisms of the artificial intelligence are rendered null and void in multiplayer, which is the only other mode included with the game. Against another human being Galaxy Fight is a decent semi-traditional brawler with a lot of speed and often bizarre characters.

But none of that matters, because getting good at a fighting game is the fuel that fires the desire to compete with others in the first place. There's no opportunity to practise in this game because the AI simply beats you to a pulp.

In two-player it's good once you become comfortable with the characters, but while the fundamentals are strong the AI is unfair and over-powered. If a game isn't prepared to give you the time to learn it then it doesn't deserve your time in return.