‘Anger Foot’ Is Amazing, What More Do You Need To Know?

Anger Foot is what happens when you take the deadly door-kicking gameplay of Hotline Miami - you against the other guys with guns and the clock that keeps ticking and the beat that keeps throbbing - make it 3D and turn your foot all green and gross and oddly articulated. It’s breathlessly exciting as you go from room to corridor to another room to stairwell to a different room to cupboard booting in fixtures and fittings and bad guy faces alike, occasionally pausing to pick up a firearm for some bullet-flavoured justice and exploding barrels just because they’re red. It’s undoubtedly the most fun I had with any hands-on preview of Gamescom 2022 - and while there isn’t much more that needs saying about it than what you’ve just read, let’s try anyway. Not much of an article otherwise, is it?

Here’s a trailer, watch it and want it…

Made in South Africa by Free Lives - past form: Broforce, Genital Jousting, GORN - and published by internationally renowned purveyors of effed up ess and just occasionally a game that milks your tear ducts like so many farmer fists around a Friesian Devolver Digital - past form: Inscryption, Cult of the Lamb, Olija, Death’s Door (and loads more, including Hotline Miami) - Anger Foot is the sort of game that messes you up, smashes you to the floor but then says: huh, that was fun, wanna go again? And you scream back at the screen: eff yes, Anger Foot, lemme back at you. That’s the relationship. You start, you run, you kick goofy enemies in their goofy heads, you finish - and then you look at the time from start to finish and wonder: can I do better? Eff yes you can, so you do - and this is the play pattern. Start, win, win again, win better, win faster, win cooler. When they win they all do a lil hip-thrusty dance in your dead face. It’s further motivation to kick everyone’s arse.

Devolver Digital

THERE’S oops all caps but what the hell it fits the game… There’s a story here, but it’s thinner than the chances of you being satisfied with a first run at any of this game’s mazey levels of slapstick ultra violence. You, Anger Foot, resident of Sh*t City, have a collection of shoes, as you do - and one pair’s been stolen. So off you go, booting your understandable fury right up and into every bad guy schnozzle you run into (and you will run). You don’t need to clear out every nasty piece of work in a stage to finish it, but there’s a stat for it right there, next to your speed of completion. So you go again, again, because you missed that sucker sitting on the porcelain throne otherwise minding their business except who takes a pistol to the p*sser, honestly. Dead. Go again, and this time sneaker meets swing-door meets noggin meets death and everyone’s happy - except the expired whateverthatis that had its bowel movements so rudely interrupted. At least the game offers modesty pixels.

Enemies come in a variety of exaggerated forms, the first being crocodile-ish lads in comfy jackets swinging melee weapons, and then come angry purple hoodies whose pea shooters you can pilfer, spraying their load ‘til you're empty and have to chuck the gun itself at the last enemy’s brainbox, stunning them so you can again connect your heel of justice with their jaw of pain. Why is everyone like this? What do they have against my footwear? And what is in these trippy energy drinks? Are all questions you’ve no time to ask: the clock is ticking and the beats are throbbing. Perhaps answers will arrive when the game releases in 2023. Until then, download the demo on Steam. Unless you don’t like fun, obvs.