
	Platform PlayStation Genre Action Publisher Eidos Developer Core Studios ETA 1997
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Fighting Force

Developers have rarely had much luck trying to bring the beat 'em up into 3D gaming. The genre was extremely popular thanks to series such as Streets of Rage, Final Fight, and a host of one-offs, but as the PlayStation, and later the PS2 came onto the scene, finding a decent beat 'em up became harder and harder. One of the more spectacular failures was Core Design's Fighting Force for the first PlayStation.

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Suffering from a lack of originality, and difficulty, the game was an easy target for a lot of reviewers and message boards to laugh at in the late 1990s. Making the matter worse was that Fighting Force was getting hyped up quite a bit in the ramp up before its release, so expectations were fairly high for the game. Alas, it was sub par at best, and was largely ridiculed as a result.

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Players had the choice from one of four characters in single-player or coop modes as they marched from one urban setting to the next, punching hordes of evil henchmen in the face at every turn. There were plenty of moves at one's disposal, but that didn't really matter since all you really needed to do was run around hitting the X button all the time in order to win. Enemies didn't put up a much of a fight, so battles were trivial, even the final boss.

There just wasn't anything exciting about the game when it came out. It was just a very by the numbers brawler that just so happened to use polygons instead of sprites. Fighting Force didn't bring anything new to the table, and what it did do was very stale. What probably killed it, though, was the hype. People started getting their hopes up for a game that would barely clock in at mediocre, and got burned for it when the thing finally got released. What's particularly frightening is that the game almost got a sequel. Thankfully they pulled the plug on that fairly quickly.

Mr. Nash
April 8, 2011