I want to preface this by saying I knew exactly what I was getting into here. Plenty of these reviews are horror stories from the people following this game since its Fig campaign in 2017 and it not being anywhere near as good as they hoped, but I didn't know of this game until it was already panned and clearly abandoned. I enjoy experiencing a trainwreck of a game from time to time, but I also wanted to approach this dead game as a new player in a post-[i]Fraymakers[/i] world and put it through its paces. Even if there weren't many paces to put it through.
I think what stings about this game's failure for most is that, on the surface, there's a ton on offer. An indie crossover fighter is just conceptually cool, and 30 characters is way more than any indie fighter I'm aware of. The gameplay takes cues from both traditional and platform fighters to form something wholly its own. There's a uniquely grandiose feel to the presentation, elevated by the awesome opening movie. Add on 16 themed arenas, optional power-ups, and a cool "minion" system, and there's seemingly a lot to sink your teeth into.
But then you actually start playing and everything falls apart. Let's go point by point:
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[*]Just by watching the game, there's something undeniably cheap about it. The way characters move looks stiff and janky on top of their somewhat crude animation, and the colors feel washed out. I get the grandiose feel they want, but this just comes off as lifeless.
[*]There's a general lack of polish all over. My favorite example: victory screens zoom in on a character's idle animation at center-stage, and they don't even stop the match to make sure they're not getting hit by a lingering projectile.
[*]The mechanics are poorly explained even with a tutorial. From what I figured out, you get two attack buttons tied to five attacks each (counting air moves), a few defensive moves, a grab, and an "ultimate" attack and "special" attack (not sure what conceptually distinguishes them). Everything other than weak attacks consumes energy that replenishes. It's a fine base but shockingly limited, more so than any contemporaries I'm familiar with.
[*]Bounty Points are a resource that, as far as I can tell, is only really used to summon a "minion" character (tutorial mentions "special moves" but I haven't found any). Minions aren't like a quick fighting game assist; they stay on-stage until you die and just walk around, attacking at unclear intervals, and there's no real strategy other than to summon them as soon as you're able to. It's pretty worthless considering the game was seemingly named after this system.
[*]The gameplay just doesn't feel well designed at all. It quickly becomes a button masher with so few attacks, and even with so many defensive options it's hard to break out. There's also a system where you suddenly freeze in place for spamming an attack for what seems like an arbitrary amount of time, which feels so tacked on and still doesn't effectively stop characters from having infinites.
[*]The audiovisual feedback is pretty terrible, mainly making use of tiny icons above your character and poor sound cues, if any at all. This becomes a big problem considering how little is explained, especially with status effects like reversed controls.
[*]Arenas can be either closed-in spaces or Smash-like ring outs. Walls make infinites all too easy, and ring outs feel cheap without Smash's damage system; a well-placed throw is often enough to insta-KO, or at least force some energy to be wasted. Most don't even have other platforms, and it concerns me that the ones that do were only added post-launch.
[*]The character roster has some great games attached, though maybe it lacks that one huge character who reels everyone in. Plus, a lot of it feels like... filler? There's five characters completely original to [i]Bounty Battle[/i] and two more from unreleased(?) mobile games by the same dev. Some more are from games that weren't out at the time they were revealed, some didn't turn out the hottest and others are trapped in development hell if not outright canceled.
[*]While their playstyles are surprisingly distinct, the small movesets aren't very interesting and don't leave much room for source material. I'd have taken a smaller roster if it meant the big pulls this game does have got to be fleshed out more.
[*]There's so little to do here. Aside from the tutorial and training room, there's a "challenge" mode that's just a bunch of regular fights, and a "tournament" mode that's really just a bunch of challenges (how confusingly named) with a horrible progression system. There's also little customization in multiplayer aside from picking a costume and arena, both of which are bizarrely absent from even the training mode.
[*]Then there's just bugs. I've been sent permanently out-of-bounds, tournament mode has an easy exploit to go right to a character's final challenge, and challenge mode just straight-up doesn't work. Brilliant.
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It feels like they were trying to pull an [i]Indie Pogo[/i] with the gameplay, in that it takes a lot from platform fighters but lacks the mechanical depth, so they strip back a lot of tropes in favor of a wholly unique system. But I think [i]Indie Pogo[/i] was a lot more focused in what it wanted to be, whereas this feels aimless with all its tacked-on systems. Combined with the limited movepools, the end result is something far shallower than either the traditional or platform fighters it's inspired by, lacking the skill ceiling of the former or the player expression of the latter. I won't lie and say the mindless button mashing is never kinda fun, but it's never $20 fun.
Between the original characters, implied story, and bombastic launch, this feels like the start of a much larger project that never ended up happening. I guess there's nothing forcing the developers to keep supporting it, it's not an early access title and I have to assume it launched with all the content it promised, but everything else still very much feels like a work in progress. I've been following the early access indie fighter [i]Fraymakers[/i] since its reveal and that may have launched with plenty of bugs and substantially less content, but it also has a dedicated team sticking with it through thick and thin, and I guess that's the cost of a game like this skipping early access and going right to 1.0 with limited edition physical releases to boot. I understand Dark Screen is a tiny dev team and I'm willing to excuse a lot, but going from that big launch right into 5+ years of radio silence is just baffling. In that sense, I find it poetic that [i]Fraymakers[/i] hit Kickstarter right around when this game got its last update, as if to pass the torch onto something with more passion put into it.
It feels rude using "passion" in that sense, but it's also weird seeing the lead dev so casually move onto a successful trading card game instead. The card art reminds me of the faux-3D drawings at the end of tournament mode here, so whatever, I guess in the end they found their true calling. But I also pity the mess of a game they left behind; it's already not built from a great foundation, but I think it could've been salvaged with consistent updates and player feedback... but that's just not what it got. If anything, I guess I can at least say this game works well as a case study, and in that sense I'm glad I played it just to experience it myself and discover all the unique ways it fails, and try to speculate the chain of decisions that led to a game that looks and plays like this in spite of all the cool indies it got on-board.
As an actual game you buy for the purpose of playing though, this is far from the "Ultimate Indie Fighter" the tacky logo suggests it is. Lifeless, dull, and devoid of content, dare I say that even the indie games that never ended up releasing deserve better than the treatment they got from [i]Bounty Battle[/i].
