From a developer of Codemasters, Hard Lines, and Carmageddon comes a brand new game on the indie scene: FIST OF AWESOME (it’s even pronounced in all-caps). Originally made as a testament of his love and strong bond to the developer’s girlfriend, the game is packed with a huge amount of retro action and bear-punching. After it was apparently well-received, Nicoll Hunt decided to make it into a full game through Kickstarter funding. Picking up a sound artist and polishing the original, Nicoll Hunt is finally ready to develop it into one of the first touch-oriented action games where touch isn’t a gimmick and actually adds to the gameplay.
You start off as a logger named Tim Burr, devastated that his log home burnt down and his family is nowhere to be found. His hand picks that moment to achieve self-awareness and proceeds to become the FIST OF AWESOME, dragging Tim along with it. In your travels across the dimensions, you will find a society where bears rule over humans, humans live alongside mutant velociraptors, and battle bison are chasing after you. It’s definitely not a serious plot, but it does more to tie everything together than most retro-style fighting games do.
The alpha gameplay only has a few modes of attack, and the character is limited to punching and kicking down bears (perhaps with a bit of flaming fists added in). It also appears that the game can be entirely controlled by touch, allowing you to jump and kick without resorting to the keyboard, and also making an iPhone and Android platform both simple and beneficial to fans of the game. Movement and powers can also be adjusted by the motion controls, so the entire game has been carefully crafted around its controls of choice. Hopefully this means there will be a smooth action game that isn’t buggy for a mobile platform at last.
As far as presentation goes, the game has an obvious retro style. Fans of Sword & Sworcery should take kindly to the minimalist graphics, and fans of old arcade games should be at home nonetheless. With some of the sprites not more than six pixels wide, the developer uses this low resolution to his advantage and allows you to fill in the graphical ‘holes’ with your own imagination. You can recognize the typical logger, the shape of the bears, and maybe the bison, but everything else is up to you to figure out. Although that might seem bad, the game preview manages to pull the look off. To go with the retro-style graphics, Nicoll hired on Brendan Ratliff, a legendary chiptune artist and the composer for Pineapple Smash Crew and Gun Runner. The chiptune theme matches perfectly both with the trailer and the gameplay, so hopefully the rest of the soundtrack will sound similar.
The only thing this game seems to be lacking is more attack moves and more detail in the environment. Obviously the funding will go towards adding in new attacks, but adjusting the background might take some work. Hopefully the developer takes more inspiration from Sword & Sworcery and adds detail to his already-tiny sprites. It would go a long way. If this game interests you, be sure to swing by its Kickstarter page and support it!
0 Comments