Anger Foot Review: Not the Sequel to Happy Feet

For the longest time, Arkane’s Dark Messiah of Might and Magic wore the monicker of the definitive “First Person Booter” proudly. Sure, other games like Necrovision, Bulletstorm, and Zeno Clash let the player set aside the typical guns, swords, and magick to revel in up-close boot-to-the-face combat here and there, but none could match up to the glorious kick-assery of DMOMAM. That was until last week. Anger Foot, the First Person Booter from Broforce developer Free Lives and Indie powerhouse Devolver Digital is a bizarre mix of 90’s toilet humor and fast-paced gameplay systems that work in tandem to create an alluring kicking experience seldom found elsewhere.

Worse Place to Live Than Gotham

Anger Foot is set in a weird and frankly, disgusting dystopian future straight from the lofty imaginations of a 1990s edgelord. Set in the aptly-titled “Shit City”, the game follows the adventure of the Anger Foot, a true footwear aficionado. Seemingly a masked vigilante and a lover of all things feet, Anger Foot’s passion is collecting designer sneakers, dubbed Preemo Sneakers. Tragedy strikes as Anger Foot’s prized sneaker collection is robbed by the powerful gangs that rule over Shit City. Enraged, Anger Foot and his badass girlfriend set out on a one-night revenge tour to get the sneakers back and be home for movie night.

Aside from its dopamine-producing gameplay, one other thing that stands out in Anger Foot is the “interesting” world it’s set in. Anger Foot revels in its bizarre and crude humor often related to filth, puke, feces, and all sorts of repulsive things below the skies. It’s hard to go one minute into the game without running into these questionable scenarios starring Shit City’s “colorful” cast of citizens deal with. Heck, even one of the bosses you fight is a giant green “unflushable turd”. While juvenile sex and poo jokes like these would feel out of place in any other game, it works out for Anger Foot for some reason. In what other game can one find a criminal organization that camps out in the sewers and whose sole ambition is to be as filthy as possible? Anger Foot looks and feels like the lovechild borne out of a threesome between Hotline Miami, Postal, and Cruelty Squad, and this worked for me. Props for an original setting!

Nonsensical Fun

When it comes to the nitty-gritty, Anger Foot can be generally summed up as a physics-heavy first person iteration of Hotline Miami but leaving it at just that would be doing Anger Foot a great disservice. Anger Foot also takes place in tightly crafted linear levels encouraging a risk vs reward gameplay loop seen in Hotline Miami. Playing as Anger Foot, players will get to use a dozen disposable firearms to dispatch the many enemies occupying a level while listening to an eardrum-thumping OST. Moreover, similar to how masks shook up the gameplay experience in HM, unlockable shoes do the same job in Anger Foot. But unlike HM, the main objective of Anger Foot is just to get to the exit of the level and whatever happens between the spawn point and the exit is completely up to the player.

Staying true to the name of the game, the two mighty walkers are our hero’s most reliable weapon at his disposal. A single kick from Anger Foot is enough to blast open doors, make goons fly away hilariously,  or even feed popcorn to his girlfriend. Enemies typically die in one hit (unless they’re armored) but Anger Foot is a bit more resilient, and it often takes a close-up shotgun blast to take him down. The game is divided into five chapters. The first four chapters are divided equally among the main four gangs, with the fifth chapter reserved for he who pulls the strings. There are 64 levels in the game, with the majority of the levels distributed among chapters 1-4. Each chapter culminates in a three-phase boss fight against the leader of the respective gang and I have to say, they are pretty fun. This goes without saying that each chapter has its biomes, enemy types, weapons, etc.

While the objective of all the levels is the same, i.e. get to the very end by whatever means necessary, it’s the challenges and unlockables that add the much-needed variety to the game. Upon completing a level, the player is rewarded with a star. Furthermore, each level comes with two challenges each and rewards the player with one star each, bringing the total to three per level. These challenges range from completing the levels in X amount of time or tasking the player with doing something specific like using feet only to dispatch foes. These stars can then be used to unlock a total of 23 footwear that look visually distinct as well as alter the gameplay drastically, providing for new approaches to encounter design. They unlock stuff like double jump, charged kick, low gravity mode, etc. as well as gameplay modifiers like making everyone’s shots wildly inaccurate, shrinking Angry Foot, kicking flies to turn them into allies, and more! There’s even a shoe that makes the whole game resemble an early retro shooter.

Another aspect I like about Anger Foot is how far it manages to go with a very simple gameplay loop. Just as you’re sure there isn’t anything to see, the game throws a new setpiece to spice things up a bit. Furthermore, now and then, players are treated to intermission areas in the style of mini-hubs. These serve as more relaxed affairs where Anger Foot is free to explore and talk with the city’s inhabitants without having to worry about getting shot at. There are quite a lot of NPCs to talk to and they have some goofy stuff to say, which makes the whole process very rewarding. I especially love how these non-combat missions are used as vessels for world-building. NPCs would comment on the previous actions of our unlikely hero, acknowledge what transpired in previous chapters, and overall, be general goofballs. I have to admit, some of these dialogues managed to get a chuckle out of me.

Anger Foot is at its best when levels are played and re-played to complete these challenges or even self-inflicted challenges by the player. Players will likely have a terrible time with the game if they play it like your typical BoomShoot. This is why I kind of started getting bored midway through Chapter 4. I managed to unlock all non-Boss footwear by that time and got tired of seeing the same five challenges come up again and again. This was not due to core gameplay overstaying its welcome but largely due to how repetitive the challenges are and how easily you can acquire all the unlockables before Chapter 4. A slew of fresh challenges and more unlockables would help in staving off repetition. Another gripe I have is that, while the rave music is great, most of the tracks loop over and over so much that it gets very annoying. At least, that was the case for me.

Then there’s how the game runs on PC, which is not very well. The first few hours of Anger Foot are fine and the game runs at a high refresh rate maxed out on my 3070. However, as the game progressed, I ran into levels where my fps would tank for no reason whatsoever. It’s now the fun kind of fps drop either. Frames would wildly fluctuate between 144 fps to the low 40s randomly at specific sections of levels. It goes without saying how inconsistent frame times and micro stutters can suck the joy out of a fast-paced game like Anger Foot. The devs have acknowledged some of the issues and said that they’re on it, so that’s good. I hope to see a performance update this month itself because these performance issues betray the excellent gameplay flow Free Lives has crafted.

Real Talk

With Anger Foot, Free Lives has made a unique, memorable, and above all else, a “fun” video game. It’s another testament to Devolver’s passion for publishing original, eccentric, and creative indie games. Moreover, it’s got great regional pricing on top of its replayable nature. Anger Foot— featuring feet so fine you’d think Tarantino designed them.