Warriors of Fate

Just like the portly yet agile main character in this old-skool beat-'em-up, Warriors of Fate sprang out of nowhere.

Now, before we go too far, know this: You're reading the inane and macho ramblings of a meat-brained beat-'em-up jock right now, so any game that features no questions but lots of muscle-bound answers is a winner for me. You might feel otherwise – preferring a game that challenges your intellect, dexterity or offers more of a socially conscious form of entertainment (you've also probably got an elastoplast around the middle of your milk-bottle-bottom nation health glasses, too). If that's the case, your time might be better spent playing Dungeons & Dragons, reading a bus timetable or being lonely rather than absorbing a review where I get all nostalgic and overexcited about beating up a colourful army of nondescript miscreants while salivating blood.

Anyone still with me? Excellent. On with Warriors of Fate, brave soldier!

Beat-'em-up junkies like myself might recall this little known Capcom coin-op from the silver age of the arcades, which was the 1992 follow-up to Dynasty Wars of three years previous. Set during the Three Kingdoms period of ancient China, you fight single-handed (is there any other way is a good beat-'em-up?) against the evil Cao Cao and his vast number of vitriolic minions. Three of the original five playable characters are available, with the most diverse of the quintet having been chosen for the mobile adaptation.

Converting a classic, 2D scrolling beat-'em-up to the mobile platform is destined to struggle not through graphical restrictions, but control issues. Fortunately Warriors of Fate was born during Capcom's Final Fight phase, and therefore uses a single, well-mashed attack button rather than various control combinations seen in most fighting games of the time. This serves the mobile controls quite nicely, with the action button shored up by additional flying-kick and super-move buttons at the bottom of the keypad.

Warriors of Fate recreates the colourful, action packed visuals of its arcade grandfather extremely well, though the system can get a bit breathless as the screen fills up with enemy drones. The audio falls short, however, providing not much more than short, repetitive background tunes. The crunch of bone against bone is a pretty significant aspect of a classic beat-'em-up, and the game would undoubtedly have been served better by foregoing the music and including the SFX instead.

It's difficult to see how the co-op multiplayer of the coin-op could be retained in the mobile conversion (the arcade game afforded three simultaneous fighters), so naturally Warriors of Fate is lessened somewhat from being a single-player game. Everything else remains faithfully intact, from the badly written dialogue of the cut-scenes to fighting on horseback and between round bonus bouts (the eating competition is a great touch to lighten the overall mood).

Allow me a brief historical diversion. This side-scrolling beat-'em-up, despite having appeared mostly unannounced on our mobile phones, is steeped not only in Chinese and Japanese literary history, but gaming history as well. At first glance it might not seem particularly important, but it represents a triumphant time in Capcom's illustrious life. It was one of the founding games to use the CPS-1 arcade system, and was built on the foundations of immortal Final Fight.

But to the Japanese it was (and still is, considering this conversion) so much more. Warriors of Fate, and Dynasty Wars before it, weren't only based upon the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms – it was also a video game interpretation of a popular manga series called Tenchi Wo Kurau (Destruction of Heaven and Hell). The westernisation saw characters like the evil Cao Cao renamed as Temujin Khan (better known by his Sunday name, Genghis), and the mighty warrior Kuan Kung rebranded as the selectable character called Porter. When we bow at the beginning of a kung fu class, we're bowing to Kuan Kung; such is this real, historical figure's fine legacy – a legacy respectably perpetuated by his in-game likeness.

And Warriors of Fate now reappears at a time of cultural revolution for the Chinese. Fights featured in Warriors of Fate, such as the Battle of Red Cliffs, are about to be represented in full, cinematic action in a John Woo epic, while Koei continues to build heavily (and increasingly successfully) upon its Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms franchises – all featuring the same events as Capcom introduced in Warriors of Fate.

Perhaps the gameplay is rather shallow, like most beat-'em-ups inherently are, but Capcom has chosen a significant piece of arcade history to be remembered and celebrated on our mobile phones. When considering the vast, historical grandeur Warriors of Fate is a small part of, the game takes on a far more momentous feel – one which was clearly understood by the original developer and the team who worked hard to give us such a faithful conversion 16 years later.