Fantasy Strike

DETAILED REVIEW

Fighting games are always a fun way to pass time, especially when you’re stressed out about life and just want to let out steam. However, trying to learn the combos in Mortal Kombat or Injustice is a challenge on its own right, one with most people shy away from, and rightly so. Along comes Fantasy Strike claiming to be a “simple, easy to control” fighting game, able to be played on a guitar hero controller, for crying out loud. But does it live up to its tag? Let’s find out.

Story and Narrative

Full disclosure: There isn’t a story. While this does bother me some bit, because an overarching story is always a plus, even if it’s something you make up as you play along, many players of fighting games don’t really care. YMMV, and I’ll leave it there.

Speaking of narrative, however, each character gets a dedicated video explaining their strengths and weaknesses, their fighting styles and a bit of a backstory. While nothing ground-breaking, it gets the job done. Kudos on that.

Gameplay

This is where Fantasy Strike gets interesting. Just as promised, no complicated controls. There’s no dedicated block button, and no complicated combination of buttons to execute a combo. Backward blocks, then you have a jump, punch attack, two special moves, and a throw. There’s no crouching, so kicks are tied to back/front + punch. This is a great way to handle fighting, and I’m a fan. The simplified mechanic indeed does lower the bar for entry and makes it a whole new experience to learn this fighting system.

As I’ve mentioned, there’s no story mode, but there’s a small caveat to that. The included “Arcade” mode, which is a series of 6 matches one after the other, has a few tiny story cutscenes with an ending. This is a fun mechanic, I really liked this, with the pleasing art-style.

There’s also a deep tutorial which explains all the mechanics the game has one by one, in order of complexity. The narrator for the tutorial explains the game like a grandfather would to their grandchild. Warm fuzzy feeling included. While the tutorial only focuses on one character, it’s more than sufficient to get the feel for all characters, since the basic controls are pretty much the same.

There’s also the standard daily challenge mode, where you take on CPUs one after the other to climb on top of the leaderboard, which is nice. A “Survival” mode is also present, which is similar to the daily challenge, but there’s also “Shadow” and “Metal” bosses in the game.

With the 1.0 release out of Early Access, a new Boss Rush mode has been added, which incorporates an RNG power-up card system. Before each round, you get to pick a power-up which will help you out that round. The bosses also get tougher, so adapting the available power-ups to your playstyle is part of the fun.

There’s also a multiplayer mode in the game, with the standard Ranked, Casual and Fight-a-Friend modes. The netcode for the fights is solid, and I had no hiccups playing whatsoever. However, there is one thing I want to mention. The game needs users to sign up for their service to play online. It took me around 3 hours, connecting with the devs on discord, trying to fix it, to no avail. While this may be necessary to implement crossplay, it can be a bit annoying to have this happen at all. But, credit where it’s due, the devs tried their best to help me (even without knowing whether I was a reviewer), so props for that. Not everyone cares about random members of the community these days; this was a breath of fresh air.

Visuals, Performance, and Sound

The visuals of the game are crisp, clear and captivating. From the main-menu avatar of the character to the characters in fights, the effects of the specials, they are all crystal and make the game a joy to play. The fighting animations are nothing short of Street Fighter levels of finesse, and perfectly complement the game’s art style.

The performance of the game was top class as well. Being unity-driven, I didn’t expect anything less, but the game delivers. Solid 60fps, maxed out detail level. It also worked at a full 768p on my age-old laptop, so great work on the optimization.

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows 7+

Processor: Intel Core i5-4302Y @ 1.6GHz, Celeron G1840 @ 2.8 GHz / AMD Athlon II X3

Memory: 4 GB RAM

Graphics: GeForce GT 555M, 9800 GTX / Radeon R7, HD 8500

DirectX: Version 11

Storage: 6 GB available space[/toggle] [toggle title=”Recommended Requirements”]

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows 7+

Processor: Intel Core i5-5200U @ 2.20GHz, Celeron G3920 @ 2.90GHz / AMD Athlon II X4 645

Memory: 8 GB RAM

Graphics: GeForce GTX 960, Radeon R9 280X

DirectX: Version 9.0c

Network: Broadband Internet connection

Storage: 2 GB available space[/toggle] [toggle title=”Review Specs”]OS: 64-bit Windows 10

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 1600

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 1060

DirectX: Version 11[/toggle] [/toggles]

The soundtrack. It’s VERY good. It’s kinda repetitive in the menu and feels loopy, but it’s calming and fun. The fighting music is subtle and is unique for each of the 10 characters. I would definitely consider purchasing the soundtrack to this game, it’s that enjoyable. Apart from the music, the sound design for the rest of the game is spot on as well, from the hit sounds to the special move sounds to the voice acting in the tutorial and narration, it’s all very high quality.

VERDICT

Fantasy Strike sets out to simplify the fighting genre and succeeds with flying colors. Whether you’re a fan of the fighting genre or are a new player waiting to get in, this is one game you should definitely try out. With innovative fighting mechanics coupled with solid visuals and sound design, it presents a fleshed-out, polished fighting experience. However, its distinct lack of story mode and the ₹700 price tag might make it slightly out of reach for the standard Indian gamer, but the hours of fun that can be had in the game make up for the price tag. Recommended.