Retro Fighter – Dragon’s Revenge

Genre: Arcade Brawler

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Digital Game Group

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Review:

Retro Fighter is an Arcade-style Brawler released as an asset on the Unity Asset Store in 2020 as Beat Em Up Game Template and brought to Nintendo Switch in 2021 as a low-effort asset flip.

The presentation here is mostly passable, but forgettable. The pixel art visuals are decent, but extremely repetitive. You will be taking the role of a young woman inexplicably taking it upon herself to fight the local mohawk gang and their elders (seriously, the story in this game is beyond stupid), walking through extremely repetitive environments, fighting palette swaps of the same one enemy over and over again – a generic-looking mohawked punk with a randomly selected name from a hilariously mundane list of names like Jeremy and David. This will be followed by bosses that are just laughably-enlarged versions of those same enemies. These visuals are backed by energetic but forgettable music.

If the lazy visuals weren’t a dead giveaway that this game is an asset flip, the rough, unfinished, brain-dead gameplay would be. The game will endlessly input commands as long as the button is held down. You might as well do that, though – as long as you position enemies so they’re all on one side of you, they’ll endlessly walk into your repeating fist as you hold down the button. I was literally fighting off a horde of enemies without even looking at the screen, just by holding down the punch button. Bosses are even easier – they’re not tougher in any way, and since there’s only one of them, they can’t even flank you.

Even if you want to find some nuance to the combat here (and why bother?), there’s none to be found. Just a three-hit punch combo, a kick, a block, a jump, a jump kick, and one-use knives you can pick up and throw (held knives appear to float above your hand, oddly). That’s it – no running, no special attacks, no grapple, no melee weapons. In fact, in trying to press multiple buttons at a time to test for special attacks, I caused my character to glitch out, looking as if she was permanently in a blocking position as she glided around fighting enemies without seeming to throw punches. It was very strange.

In any other entry in the genre, I would chide a game like this for not supporting two players, something I consider to be a staple of the genre. However, in Retro Fighter, this may well be a blessing in disguise – this way, the game won’t let you inflict this terrible experience on another person. In fact, I almost hesitate to call this a game – this is an incomplete mess of pre-made store assets, and in the worst way too. It lacks a brain, a heart, and the guts to be original or interesting in any way, except perhaps as the worst Arcade Brawler I have ever played. Do not buy this.

tl;dr – Retro Fighter is a horrible, buggy, repetitive, incomplete mess of an Arcade Brawler that makes it painfully obvious it is a zero-effort asset flip. Do not waste your time on this game.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Asset Flip, Worst Game

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