Featured Image Credit: Red Moon Workshop
All fighting games are challenging in their own way. You need to invest a lot of time and a lot of patience into learning your favourite characters and all of their combos.
Shot One Fighter throws another level of challenge into the mix though, rogue-like elements, making each run not unique but incredibly vexing (in a masochistic way).
Only a handful of characters were available for my demo, and for the following 15 minutes, I was put through one of the toughest battles of my life. I should say right now that I’m famously bad at fighting games.
A sprawling pipeline of paths was laid before me, giving me the choice of battles, treasure chests and boons.
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When you start a run, you’ve got a very basic moveset, and you can acquire upgrades and new combos as you go.
One way or another, you’ll be forced to fight one of the game’s many enemies. The first was a relatively simple encounter. It was a robot that packed a measly punch but had a decent area-of-effect move, but it telegraphed it well and so could be easily avoided.
When I entered the second available fight though, it felt like I’d been dropped into a different run entirely… This robot was much scrappier, and I was told by the event staff that all players had encountered difficulties with this guy, and it wasn’t hard to see why.
This was a real bruiser enemy that liked to get in close and deliver a malicious beatdown the second you dropped your guard. Using any aerial attack was a death-sentence because once you’d achieved a mere second of air time, the robot would leap and punish you for trying to escape it.
I was beaten rather brutally and encouraged to construct my next build around a ranged attack that my character could use. So, my next run was all about bolstering this ranged attack, and when I got to the stage that I thought would be that same bruiser enemy, I was reminded that this is a rogue-like and nothing is set in stone.
This time, it was what I can only describe as a demonic fridge equipped with a missile launcher. As you can imagine, I was hopefully outmatched at range, so in this scenario, my previous close-quarters build would have made more sense.
Like any solid rogue-like, though, all was not yet lost when a run came to an end, as the more you fight, the more you level up, and that unlocks permanent upgrades to make later runs easier.
Out of all the genres to mix rogue-like elements with a fighting game, oddly wouldn’t have been high on my list, but Shot One Fighters pulls it off nicely, even if I’m terrible at it.
Shot One Fighters doesn’t currently have a release date, but when it does launch, it’ll be for PC via Steam.
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