Shot One Fighters [Preview]: Rogue-like leg sweeps

We go hands-on with the upcoming fighting game focused on the single player experience

Shot One Fighters, the new project from Red Moon Workshop, is targeting an audience of people who have been on the sidelines of fighting games. For them online fights and multiplayer are too much, often leading to either a lot of losses or a long, long time to build up the prowess needed to compete at a decent level. But they still like the power fantasy of punching, of kicking, and of beating the crap out of opponents in one-v-one battles, something that tends to be in the back of mind of many fighting games.

So the team aimed to create a game that let players learn the ropes of the fighting experience and improve gradually along the way, while still feeling like every battle was enjoyable and worthwhile. To do that they crafted a rogue-like system that starts at essentially ground zero, tasking players with building up their fighter, and their skillset, during every run. Eventually, as the hope would entail, they would become good enough at the game that even the beginning of each run was easy.

At Summer Game Fest the demo we play focuses on the character Volley, an all-around fighter that starts off with the most basic of move sets. There are light and medium punches and kicks, and that’s it. It’s mean to be just enough to familiarize us with the game without throwing fancy power moves to confuse us right away. Those do come later, as in between battles (should we win) we’re given the option to upgrade our fighter with new moves, more powerful versions of the moves we have, better defense, etc etc.

Thy first battles in each run are against a broken down robot, which is extremely easy and feels more like taking down a practice dummy. After that first battle it’s crucial to select the right move card (we’re offered three choices) but because of the random nature we may not always get a new move or specific type of improvement. That could very well leave us at a disadvantage, because the next battle is agains a very similar robot, but one that wasn’t busted up and put up more of a fight. That wouldn’t be that difficult to defeat if we had acquired a special move, but if we make the wrong selection then even this second battle can be a trap. And it is, because both Sam and I struggle a couple of times to take down this second opponent with the lack of efficient attacks. You can only do so much with proximity punches, it turns out.

The difficulty level ratchets up quite a bit more after that, as we face off against a tank fridge and then a really powerful melee combatant. Again, it all depends on which of the modifier/upgrade cards we choose to advance with, and if we choose wrong then we’re all the way back at square one. Luckily the fights don’t last long and each run, even the long ones, are really only a couple minutes or so.

The visuals come off really nice, bringing a fresh style to fighting games that has characters with mass and personality on top of backdrops that are fully detailed and evocative of the locations we came across (the few in this demo seemed to be based on a desert-style or junkyard appearance). The audio as well is coming along strong, as anyone who plays fighting games a lot can attest to how important syncing hits with sound cues is to the overall presentation.

We’re hopeful that as the game continues to develop there will be a bit more of a balance to what comes up in post-battle move/card selection, hopefully always pushing us forward with a sweet new attack that we can learn or utilize, but until then this is a strong start for a game in a genre that needs a bit of reinvention for the single player side.