The Way of the Pixelated Fist

"The Way of the Pixelated Fist" is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This badly made GameMaker Studio template job is a craptastic pixeltrash platformer with a loose martial arts theme featuring a lot of hack and slash as well as your usual wall jumping, double jumping, hazard avoiding, and there's a minor "adventure" game element. None of these individual factors is implemented remotely well. It's the third of these from this developer and they're all practically the same game, the developer is just copying + pasting the same template, changing a few things around and pretending it's an entirely new game. This kind of self-asset-flipping is just about as harmful to gamers as real asset flipping... multiple copy + pastes of one bad game is a lot worse than just one of them. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. Another problem here is that you can't alt+tab out of the game properly, another shortcoming that should have been picked up with even a basic amount of software testing. This is extremely frustrating in the modern era of gaming and it's a shortcoming that gamers are unlikely to accept. The game seizes the foreground and removes your ability to access your desktop, however you can get around this in Windows 11 by pushing the game to a secondary desktop... a frustrating workaround that was inflicted on gamers by this hamfisted development effort. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. PC gamers will be insulted by the demand from the developer that a console peasant children's toy controller should be used, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for, and must never, under any circumstances dictate to gamers how their games are to be experienced. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Blaze Epic has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. "The Way of the Pixelated Fist" didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for fighting "Ling", something that happens very early on in the game, trivial to get, but less than 25 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 11 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. "The Way of the Pixelated Fist" is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIO8F6cbhNw ♥♥♥♥ this game. COMBAT JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE I've played it for over 7 hours and I've come up with tree good things to say about it, the movement system is the perfect balance of realism and platforming, even interacting with other vertical walls and "third" walls. The animations are so much better, actually fluid and yet quick at the same time. the soundtrack is really a step up too... 3 things that are nice when the game is about platforming... so to the rest of it remember the first games where fighting was very simple, but actually fun? remember the last game where combat was pretty much do anything to the red guys, keep the blue guys at a distance, and mash and mash and mash against the ones that looked like underground fight club Rambo? well now its even worse. i dont know how this dev does it, WITH EACH GAME THE COMBAT JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE. he struck gold with the combat in the first one: punchy, easy to use hard to master, every enemy had a different style and move set to take them down. then the second one where blocking was decided by a random generator, but you could still fight or fly over their heads third game was bad, and had the fighting style listed above, but hey, it still had a blocking button!!! with this game, the key-board and the controller comands are ♥♥♥♥♥♥ AND THERE'S NO WAY TO CHANGE THEM (also a downgrade from jump Boxer). with every game movement changes, and in the latest two COMBAT IS MANDATORY. the first one was a joy to fight in. second was less fighting and you could actually avoid entire groups of enemies, and hey in the last one did i mention the blocking function; i know it was half way functional!!! let me tell you what this game is: its a nut shot simulator. no way to block or avoid it, you can run away all you want but sooner or later the enemies will pin your sorry ass down, with no blocking function, and blitz you into the pavement. then it really turned into nut-shot-sim when i found out that the farthest reaching move in the game was the standard kick and i started mashing more acorns than an august bound produce salesman! im completely serious! it looks and feels like a kick in the balls any time that you are fighting. the last straw came when i got lost. yes that's right in this balls to the wall, ball slapping, ball-APA!-loose-ah didn't even give me a hint. and you need those hints to get into the now HIDDEN and partially LOCKED challenge courses. see i seem to remember friendly NPC's in these games that would strike up conversations and tell you where to go or plot stuff... "well, those were in earlier games"...DAMN RIGHT THEY WERE IN EARLIER GAMES!!!!! AND THIS CONSTANT DOWNGRADE IN QUALITY WAS FINE AS LONG AS A SENSE OF ACHIEVEMENT WAS AT STAKE! in every game from this developer so far there has been the perfect balance of stuff to make me want to keep going. the game play, the movement system, and the visuals and the mood played off of each-other in the past. but no, not here; the insanely crap combat and confusing map design and stripping away key features DESTROYS the presence of the better qualities of this game which leads me to the plot: game 1- master's dead and them supernatural gangsters are trying to kill you game 2- you mysteriously come back to life and get these epic platforming skills game 3- your a free runner in china and start halucinating that ancient chinese martial artists are trying to kill you this game- your part of some weird martial arts gang that is now testing all the free runners on the roofs with mortal kombat style arena fighting and platforming challenges. beat bosses and stuff to get hints once. thats right, one single hint which is actually easy to skip because of all the button mashing you need to do in order to survive! no, don't have the bosses repeat directions, this isn't like a majorly confusing repetitive pain in the crotch, or anything... not to mention 1 boss that i fought (and managed to not skip his dialogue) said "the door above me is now unlocked"... IT ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ WHAT!? there aren't any doors next to this guy! and there is no path leading directly up a few stories either. after mapping it out, my confusion was only strengthened by the fact that there are FOUR DOORS AROUND HIM! 1 IS PRACTICALLY TO THE EAST and the rout to get there ISN'T really UPWARD and 3 are so far UP across the map, you might as well have put a door directly above the boss arena JUST TO SAVE TIME!!! AND THERE WAS ANOTHER BOSS ARENA THAT IN FACT DID HAVE THAT ARRANGEMENT! so the dialogue is either in the wrong place, or this level design of one door to the east and all the others being too far away and too hard/tedious to get to is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RETARDED!!! if you as the developer do end up seeing this: do you know how to make games like this better (1) a map, or some system of navigating. samurai_jazz was sprawling and complex, but anyone with half a brain could navigate it because it made sense, and was plotted (seemingly like real architecture). shin samurai jazz and jump boxer got away with janky architecture because puzzles and key hunting was usually confined to one area or a hub of some kind (2) a block function that actually works. in the last two games, the block function doesn't even partially work for "off hits" and the characters have no split second wind up... this would be bad enough, but most of the enemy fight moves require you to press either up or down with the block button to work. i can understand up for high kicks and down for sweeps and grappling but all kicks require down and all punches require you to press up!? well at least the special moves don't require an up or down modifier, but if there's not at least 2 or three frames of "telegraphing" for each attack, then the directional modifier is useless and this one is unfair and sadistic... se nut shot simulator quote above (3)friendly NPC's and defeated bosses that repeat what they say... maybe some vending NPC's selling drinks or T-shirts... (4) make some real fighting controls. done as for the players: if you want to know how to succeed then here are the final tips: (1) draw a map (or go to the guide section for this game and look at mine). get on microsoft paint and draw a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map of screen shots, even if the geometry makes no sense. (2) record all boss fights. the combat is mash heavy, and the IMMEDIATE text dumps are not a good way to communicate information THAT YOU CAN NEVER ACCESS AGAIN. I finally beat this wanna-be free roaming mortal kombat in 2d, but only after 5 hours of playing while i was mapping it out. after an hour of the 3 previous games i was hooked. this beautifully animated mess just felt like another kick in the balls! every time i got lost or saw more than 1 enemy on the screen: WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WAS THAT CLEAR AT ALL? GOOD! ... i know im about a year or two too late, but how did you release this game in this state? i'm just going to spoil it here THE ENDING SUCKS!!! the gang of free running MK enthusiasts put you in challenge courses and they test you with strange alien teleporter drones, and in the last locked zone: they boss rush you and are so impressed with your fighting they say you can join the club, then everyone goes out for dinner... the ending wasn't even worth it... it feels like blase was going for some kind of mortal kombat mythologies thing... and the ending wasn't even a real good mind ♥♥♥♥. after that boss rush, i was expecting it to turn out that you were joining some alien street gang or it was all really a means of recruiting informants for the CIA or something. sorry blaze... your product still needs a lot of work. funny how the smaller in scope, simple in design, and attention in detail world of _jazz is still a better waste of time than this one... but still samurai_Jazz, shin...jazz, and jump boxer were good in their own ways, here's hoping for the next one...

First, the nice things: the game has vision and I really really like where it's going. Music and visuals feel good, and I am happy to have paid a couple of quid for it. The problem is: it has bugs: I got stuck into walls and sometimes the camera crops the wrong part of the screen (headless enemies). None of these are really bad, however the game could have been received better if those had been fixed before release. What I would recommend to the dev is to mark it as "early access" until those issues are fixed. Meanwhile I will leave the game there and try it again in a week or so to see if the issues have been addressed. I really like the game idea and I think there is potential to expand on it. I'd recommend to buy it anyway if you like the vibe as it costs less than a coffee.

This game is awesome and worth a shot. The controls are good. The animation is fine. The difficulty is balanced. The price is cheap. The fun is guaranteed. A retro-classic-look-like game which i find myself enjoying till the end. You can check this video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4ecuw1Ekp0&list=PL1yqWiFvAHOuwQNzdERQUNc-ZVtcfvW5Z

Outro bom jogo do(a) Blaze Epic. Na mesma linha de Jump/Boxer, com o combate aperfeiçoado e um toque cinematográfico charmoso que pode ou não agradar (e atrapalhar também). A trilha sonora desses jogos é sempre um ponto alto e não é diferente aqui. Vale a diversão rápida e despretensiosa.

Has great gameplay with a slightly broken fighting system [spoiler] if you just spam down kick you can beat any of the basic enimies with 10 hits[/spoiler]. The music is great for setting the right mood, although I would like a different theme for the bosses. The only problems I have with the game are that it never explains wall running (more like a jump really), and the backgrounds, while charming, get repetitive. I got lost, user error though, so don't let that stop you from buying this great 2-3 hour game.

Yeah it's like one of those games you play when you have no internet and you have lots of time to repeat levels. Better than Super Meat Boy TBH.

ШОТА НЕ ОЧЕНЬ 1 СРУЩИЙ ГУСЬ ИЗ 10

Well the "throw you in the middle of a large open world" aspect is a bit scary, once you understand the game it's a lot of fun. I expected it to take a lot longer than it did as i beat it in under 2 hours. Blaze Epic makes a lot of short games so not really surprising. Anyway its original and its fun. Definitely reccommend. (The combat is a bit too easy though)

一款2D平台动作游戏 游戏更接近于跑酷游戏，全程都是在不停向前行进中，游戏里没有大地图可以显示 但确实是不是随机的，具体结构可以参考指南 https://steamcommunity.com/app/365340/guides/ 不会死亡，如果跳跃失败则重新则重新在当前区域的入口出现 难度主要在于二段跳比较难，可能是个人手法的问题，但感觉用键盘比手柄稍微容易一些