Spartan Fist Review: Punch, Punch, and Punch Some More (PC)

    I'm not going to make the obvious joke here. I have pride. I also know when a meme should stay dead. It's easy to see when it's the kind of meme that should have never became a meme. Such as messianic gorillas or goofy-looking but racist echidnas. Liberally applied fists don't do much to put them back in the ground, but they do work pretty well against conventional foes, like the ones in the first-person beat-em-up Spartan Fist, by Glass Bottom Games. (Launch Version)

(I don't know why the logo isn't on the title screen, either. It drops you on this menu when you start.)

    This game apparently acts as a bit of a sequel to the studio's previous games, Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore A Fedora and Jones On Fire. These games all star Emma Jones and her cat Franky. It seems the private eye business hasn't been very lucrative, as Emma is now fighting her way to fame and fortune in a gladiatorial arena competition. At least that last sentence is what I gathered from reading the Steam description. In-game, there's no reference to a story, even though a few of the achievements reference a revolution and the Steam cards have lore bits as well. The game doesn't really seem to flesh out that part, though, so it might just be a case of lackluster world building, and I've expressed my frustrations on that before.
   The gameplay is super simple: you punch enemies. Left click to punch with your left fist, and right click to swing your right fist. You can also dodge enemies with Shift, use special attacks with Q and E, and change your fighting stance with the mouse wheel. Between the rooms, you can change your fists for different kinds that apparently have different attributes, and you can sometimes dip your fists into special fountains to imbue them with special powers, like healing slightly when you hit someone with that fist. Between runs, you can chat with The Fixer and spend guts (the game's currency) on improving different things like the chance of getting a health pickup when killing a foe (hint: listen for the cheering crowd) or boosting the strength of the different fists.

I dunno. I don't think being burned to death could be called being "North Starred"...

    I haven't really said much else about the game because that's about it for the gameplay loop. You enter an arena, punch guys, go through a tunnel, possibly mess with the new fist/fountain in there, repeat until boss. This would be fine if the core gameplay loop felt strong and the fighting felt good, but it didn't really pull me in. There's no reason to explore that much for special rooms or secrets unless you want to earn more Guts by killing enemies. Sure, you can find some new fist or imbue the ones you have, but the gloves and really didn't feel that different to me. Most of the imbuing buffs also didn't feel like they did much, except for the healing one.
    While it was cathartic to watch low-poly enemies explode into cube-shaped chunks of blood, but the fighting didn't really feel skill-based. The game seems to choose the combos you do based on your stance, the fists you're using, and pure blind RNG, so I couldn't really set up a particular fighting style. Changing stances was only really useful for getting by an enemy's guard. I rarely dodged or used my special punches. Special punches take a good second to charge up, can be interrupted by an enemy punching you, and they felt rather lackluster for a special attack. Combat ultimately broiled down to mashing the mouse buttons when I got in range, and hoped I didn't take too much damage, since enemies don't really give a tell on when to dodge. The bosses are the only real point where dodging is important, because the only really good strategy is to wait for the boss to attack, rush in with a couple of basic punches, and run away.
    The game also felt a tiny bit unfinished to me. I think what made me think that was the lack of a logo on the title screen. The options screen didn't really have tooltips for the options, including some that really weren't self-explanatory, and the key binding screen looked a lot different from the other options screen, almost unfinished. The enemies also had some pretty simplistic pathfinding. They would never jump down from elevated platforms to attack me, and if they spawned in an arena with more active traps, like the one in the above picture, a good percentage of them will die without you having to do anything at all.

Oh, yeah. You also want to turn off auto-lockon. Emma has a tendency to lockon to enemies across the arena instead of the one right in front of her.

The key binding screen. See what I mean about unfinished? Just a completely different aesthetic compared to the rest of the menus.

The guy stuck here isn't the worst bug. Once, when I broke down the door to an arena and paused, some guys didn't get the "don't move" memo.

    Spartan Fist felt a bit disappointing to me. I was expecting there to be more in the game, and the very simplistic combat system didn't keep my attention for long. I really would have liked a more concrete fighting system where I actually have to time mouse clicks and button presses to combo my enemies. The game could definitely use some polish in places, and I hope maybe they can improve it in future versions. If you don't mind your first-person brawlers feeling particularly mindless, you might enjoy Spartan Fist, but I personally found it lacking.