Some games I played in 2025: Big Action Mega Fight
I swear to god I thought I’d posted this back in the Summer — I might have thought “I can’t queue up multiple posts about beat-em-ups, for crying out loud,” but it’s not like I’ve had opinions on anything else this year!
This is a game that’s been on my Steam wishlist for a million billion years, long past the point of remembering what gameplay footage endeared it to me, but I assume, “if I put it on my wishlist then I must still be interested in it, surely!” A generous thank you to RifeXD for finally sating my curiosity.
I do feel bad that most games I’m gifted end up being critiqued to shreds, but I am grateful for the gesture and consider it nourishment one way or another. If it’s a good game, hooray! If it’s a not so good game, then I get to chew and gnaw at it like a dog on a bone ’til I can hopefully glean some faint praise for it, or at least an understanding of why it didn’t click. Everybody wins!(?)
A single-player beat-em-up; beat up waves of dudes with your punch, uppercut, grab and dodge, and maybe bust out a special move once you’ve built up enough metre. It’s very simple, and perhaps a sign I ought to actually research games a little more before putting them on my wishlist, because this is a mobile port!
Some of the touch input is still active via the mouse, moving by simply clicking your new position and attacks performed by swiping and double-tapping. Maybe it’s among the better attempts at translating brawling to touchscreen? Who knows! All I know is when it’s taken off phones and made to compete with the big boys, it’s more than a little out of its depth.
Its moveset is simple but satisfyingly functional. Your dodge roll covers good distance and renders you untouchable, and the grab is quick and snappy, with a lot of fun to be had just chucking dudes on top of each other. Explosive chickens are a common enemy (if you want an idea of the game’s sense of humour), and manipulating their detonations is a great way of running crowd control, so long as you don’t get overwhelmed yourself.
Because it’s a mobile game, it’s gotta have an upgrade system…! Alongside upping your strength and health, you unlock new special attacks and ‘buffs’ as you progress, and can spend coins to increase their effectiveness.
My big takeaway from this are the random factor they add: buffs manifest as power-up bubbles that appear at random from defeated enemies or destroyed terrain, and your special move for each stage is decided by a slot machine.
The special moves range from fairly standard fireballs and crowd control spins, to uppercutting dudes so high they make quakes when they return to earth, or raining explosive chickens from the sky.
As far as I can tell, the special metre refills just as quickly no matter what one you get, so there’s not even an inherent balance to it (besides gating the fancier stuff ’til later in the game), it’s just rolling with the cards you’re dealt… or spending coins to re-roll.
Likewise, the buff bubbles span the gamut from simple health and special metre refills, to temporarily enhanced strength, coin magnetism, or even outright invincibility. The last one is the final unlock, and totally changes the game plan, as you might expect — forget waiting for openings, just clobber the big guys while you can and tank their hits!
While the bomb buff used to knock down all enemies is pretty milquetoast at first, it finds its calling when there’s crowds of explosive chickens on-screen, detonating them all and dealing extra damage to enemies nearby.
As such, there’s a vague element of chaos, relying on last-minute fixes to get you out of a jam and spice things up. I’d argue there’s almost room for something rogue-lite-ish in this, having to make do with random special attacks and extremely random item drops that range from mundane to absurd.
Enemies can harm each other if they get in their way, most evident with the explosive chickens but also the big guys’ respective slam attacks. The damage is pretty negligible and largely to keep them stunned more than anything, but it’s an appreciated gesture that adds a little whiff of strategy to the affair.
I say all this because, honestly, there’s otherwise not much to get invested in. The combat is very simple, to the point where your strong attack leaves you so outrageously open there’s no reason to use it except when necessary to guard-break.
There are only five enemy types across the entire game (not counting the bikers who are obstacles more than anything), with palette swaps to change their health and attack speeds. In lieu of bosses, every area ends with a timed stage, where success largely hinges on how high you’ve upgraded your strength stat. Three-hit combos knock most smallfry down, and enemies take their sweet time getting up, so you learn to time your punches to mitigate this early on to save on time.
As seems to be the norm for mobile games, levels are very brisk, rarely more than two minutes, but slowly ration out content for the sake of tutorial-ising. Of the 38 levels, it feels like the first 20 are still teaching you your baby steps, taking its sweet time raising the difficulty.
I did hold off from upgrades for the longest time to try and preserve some sense of challenge… though what that means is two hits is enough to kill you, and there’s no mid-stage checkpoints. Either get good or pay for those upgrades!
The problem with playing PC ports of mobile games is I view them by totally different standards. An economic design that makes the most of its assets and keeps player investment by promising new unlocks, I instead read as feeling unfinished. Surely I’m going to encounter a boss or something, right…? It can’t just keep rearranging the same stuff across each minute-long level…!
Though mobile games don’t typically do 2-player unless it’s online or turn-based, it feels wrong having a beat-em-up without an option for co-op, especially when all the art and cutscenes show Brick accompanied by female fighter Brooke. Brick’s sprites are even labelled “player1” in the data, suggesting there’s gotta be a player 2 as well, but there’s no trace of it to be seen. Not even appearing as a special summon seems like a missed opportunity…!
To its credit, I do really dig its aesthetic. Its clean lines and chibi proportions evoke OK KO! or other Cartoon Network sensibilities, and its character designs are a lot of fun, especially the silly voices from the smaller goons. The sweaty efforts at jokes and references in every single line of text is perhaps a little less charming, but it was the early 2010s, we had to get it out of our system.
According to Derek C. Tillotson’s review on Gamezebo, the original mobile version didn’t even have cutscenes — something presumably added to its Ouya release. It’s an excuse plot with non-sequitur quips and flimsy reasoning for why you’re fighting in crystalline caves all of a sudden, but it ties a ribbon on its dopey sense of humour, I guess.
It’s nice the game is ‘preserved’ in some capacity by still being available to buy, but it is a bummer it’s not on a touchscreen platform where it’d feel most at home. I know it’s often discussed that emulations of arcade games lose a certain something by making credits no longer an obstacle, but I feel the same can be said for mobile games, even if it’s somehow the opposite.
(CLARITY??? HELP????)
Like, an ideal arcade game is still presenting you with a challenge or an experience in spite of the difficulty spikes — you gotta insert more credits if you want to see what comes next! But a free-to-play mobile game is a tightrope balance of “how much can the player endure before they need to pay for a leg-up?” More about the grind and time investment than presenting new things.
You’ve effectively seen everything the game has to offer in 20 to 30 minutes, and after that it’s just supplementing with bigger numbers; more enemies, more damage, quicker reactions. I understand you can distil a lot of games to that definition, but the contrast in ideology still stands: Am I paying for the chance to prove I can overcome adversity, or to just flatten the challenge?
This is why I don’t like reviewing mobile games, because I get far too hung-up on the monetisation practises than the game itself! BAMF is cute. It’s adequate, it’s just not the richest of experiences. A good effort from a tiny studio who’ve since gone on to bigger things, so fair play to them! It’s just hard to recommend this on anything other than phones, as much as I’d like it to be up my alley.
