Game Reviews

Fright Fight

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| Fright Fight
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Fright Fight
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| Fright Fight

Platformers and beat-'em-ups - two genres that are tricky to get right on smartphones and tablets.

So when a developer decides to mash them together while bandying around the name of a genre classic, you have to admire the sheer chutzpah.

Unfortunately, like an overly gobby boxer, Fright Fight's pre-bout bluster ends with a swift put-down thanks to a lack of offensive smarts and the perennial distraction of money.

Smash hit

The genre classic that Fright Fight has been likened to is Super Smash Bros, Nintendo's light-hearted brawler series.

Fright Fight follows the same multiplayer competitive arena combat structure with up to four combatants (though I struggled to find more than 1v1), but with simplified touchscreen controls and a horror-themed universe.

Rather than a sprawling crew of beloved video game characters, here you're fighting as one of four mythical creatures - a Yeti, a werewolf, a vampire, or the Grim Reaper. I picked the latter for his far-reaching scythe attacks, which managed to best many an aggressive werewolf player attempting the direct frontal approach.

Oh, and when I say 'one of four,' I mean it. You're stuck with your initial selection unless you open your wallet and cough up some money. And just four characters? Seriously?

Fuelled by rage

But let's back up slightly and address the mechanics of play. Touching and sliding your left thumb on the screen directs your character left or right. Swiping up jumps, and swiping down ducks.

Your right thumb, meanwhile, initiates attacks by tapping (for light) or holding (for heavy), and you can dash by swiping the screen.

Landing attacks also builds up a rage bar, which can be used for the aforementioned dashing, blocking by holding both thumbs down, or launching a special rage attack once the bar is full.

There are several moves that can be achieved through combination play - attacking whilst dashing, for example, or holding attack whilst in the air - but fights generally involve mashing the basic attack and timing your heavy hits for when your opponent lands nearby.

The stage is set

Any depth comes from how you move around the levels and where you chose to fight. You can knock players off the edge of the stage for an instant kill, and you can leap to the top-most platform to pick up periodic stat-boosting power-ups.

Like the character roster, there's a critical lack of range in the level selection, with just four stages set on a single (and not particularly 'horrific') theme.

The other attempt at depth is the in-between-bouts upgrade section, which lends a certain RPG feel to the game. Here you can soup up various elements of your character's attack as you earn coins from your fights.

Fight purse

Ah yes, the coins. Besides having to splash out for more characters, you'll be prompted to pay to speed up the cool down timers when improving your character. These timers, of course, lengthen the further into the game you travel.

It's one thing to adopt this kind of approach in a slow social city-builder, but it's quite another to stitch it to a fast-paced multiplayer beat-'em-up. Still, at least you're not made to wait for another round.

Online performance is okay, if a little glitchy. You get a choice of servers across the globe, but at present there's only free-for-all, and no local multiplayer. This will doubtless change, but we can only review what's in front of us.

Really, though, the core scrapping in Fright Fight just isn't quite involving enough. It's immediately satisfying, but just a little too button-mashy and one note, and there's too little in the way of pay-off or variety.

Fright Fight

An immediately fun multiplayer scrapper that requires an injection of depth and content if it's to remain on your playlist
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.