Fight Club (Xbox)

For those unfamiliar with what Fight Club is about, it might seem like a good fit for a fighting game, but there’s much more going on under the hood with the book and movie than just men punching each other. The fight club in the story is meant to be how men who have grown fat and complacent through corporate culture and consumerism recapture some of their lost primal masculinity, and while any product with an anti-consumerist message is going to hit issues when selling themselves, it makes sense that an artist wants some compensation for their work. However, the Fight Club game is certainly not trying to deliver on the central themes of the works its adapting, the game released five years after the film to cash in on its cult popularity, lazily integrating brief flashes of the film’s message into a fighting game that isn’t even designed well enough to please people unaware of what it’s trying to adapt.

Fight Club’s fighting game mechanics didn’t have to be much to avoid being the mess they turned out to be, because even if they were simple or underdeveloped, they could still slot into their role of perhaps being passable action. However, rather than trying to capture the untrained violence you’d expect from an underground fight club full of amateurs, the creators of the Fight Club game try to implement actual moves, combos, and counterattacks but do so in a sloppy manner that gels poorly with player involvement. Despite there being multiple playable characters, some new ones and some recognizable characters from the film, every character actually belongs to one of three archetypes. The brawler is your basic fighting style, perhaps the closest we’ll find when it comes to untrained street fighting, but grapplers are characters focused on throws who can string together moves better fitting a wrestling ring rather than a basement or outside a bar, and martial artists just straight up use flashy action movie moves for their attacks. The movesets of these three types are all different and there are inputs to do special moves in battle, but unless you’re a computer player, you won’t find them really worth the effort. Basic attacks do the job and don’t leave you as vulnerable or lead to missed inputs like the often weaker and riskier special moves, although there is enough basic influence on your attacks with just directional inputs that you aren’t just going to whale on your opponent by hammering a button. Instead, you need to keep pressing combinations like backwards and then your attack button, after which you move away in a hurry . You have two types of punches and kicks available, the weaker ones meant to combo into their stronger versions, but any strategy or flashy action is hampered by the game’s block and counter system.

Blocking is done with a button press and is definitely a necessity despite its negative impact on gameplay. Characters move rigidly around 3D arenas, meaning that you can’t always get away from attacks in a hurry. However, once your guard is up, you’re pretty safe, and a foe trying to break it is really going to endanger themselves… well, if they’re human anyway. Computer players can certainly break through easily and can read how you’re blocking to strike appropriately, all while often having their block game solid enough to inexplicably anticipate even random attacks coming from you. You can try to grab an opponent who is guarding, but whether you go for the grab or for a regular attack, there is a counter system that is a bit too complicated for repeated human use and fairly risk-free any time the game’s opponents attempt it. By tapping guard and the direction that correlates to the attack region, you might be able to turn the tables on the enemy and land some damage on them, but expect the game AI to be much better at it and excellent at turning one counterattack into a string of damaging blows that, especially with grapplers, can take multiple seconds to complete if you don’t wiggle out fast enough. Since movement is difficult and guarding and counterattacks are so strong, this makes Fight Club absurdly defensive, the player attacking always in more danger than the defender. Even if you do slip through the guard, you likely won’t get a lot of damage on them, further discouraging aggression and at best encouraging cheap tactics that won’t put you in as much danger, like constant grabbing or slide kicks.

There is one nifty feature that Fight Club probably doesn’t deserve to have, and that comes in how it handles character health. During a fight, when you take damage, you might either take permanent damage or flash damage, flash damage represented by part of your health bar that is filled with a darker shade of color than your main life. Flash damage will heal gradually (something that does unfortunately encourage defensive play again) but also can be healed by performing a taunt, your character delivering some line or gesture that leaves them vulnerable but will instantly replace the flash damage with normal health. It’s proper risk-reward, the player leaving themselves open to gain something useful but also potentially giving the enemy a chance to land an attack if you do it at a bad time. Battles are all single round affairs of getting the enemy down to zero health or, in the occasional break away from formula, you might have to break a foe’s limb to win. This just comes down to doing a grab when they’re at critical health, after which a cutscene showing an x-ray of the bone-shattering attack occurs, and while it can wrap up the match, it can also be used a bit before the end to remove one of their limbs from the fight and limit their moveset potential… which might as well be a finisher anyway. However, this potential flashy finisher also goes on to ruin another element of the game: custom characters.

In Fight Club you can play as an assortment of characters from the film, or if you unlock them through the tedious trials that are the single player modes, Fred Durst and Abraham Lincoln. There is an option to make your own fighter though, the player given some experience points to start off with to increase their speed, health, strength, and special move accessibility. It’s not much to begin with, the game expecting you to carry this character into the game’s modes like Survival or Multiplayer to earn more points to spend on stats, but rather than being a way to potentially make the game’s strongest fighter, it’s just a gamble that isn’t worth taking since if they suffer any of the bone-breaking finishers, you need to spend experience points to repair the injury, something all the regular characters don’t have to deal with. The combat already reveals itself pretty early to be shallow, slow, and tilted in the AI’s favor, so trying to train up a character is inevitably tedious, boring, and full of setbacks rather than something potentially personally rewarding. If you think playing against other humans might rectify some of the fighting system’s flaws, you’ll find that you’ll be safer from counterattacks on one hand, but you’re still dealing with a fighting system that doesn’t involve much active strategy or clever involvement. Things will likely be slower and more defensive if they know the game or button mashing if they don’t that can only offer up some blood splatter to make it feel like something’s being accomplished in a very weak and hollow fighting experience.

Despite the AI being so much better at its fighting style by way of understanding it better than a human has a hope to, the single-player modes are beatable, Arcade giving each character a unique but not very interesting ending for completing a sequence of battles and Story actually trying to string its sequence of battles together into a loose plot. Outside of Survival you will always have the option to continue after losing, a very useful feature to be sure considering the game’s advantage with its counterattacks. Story mode doesn’t follow the main character of the original Fight Club works, instead having it follow the very dull quest of a character you name. First, he goes around looking for Tyler Durden by fighting guys at different places mostly as an excuse to squeeze in some battles, and then he’s integrated into the anti-consumerist Project Mayhem, the game sometimes spouting one or two lines about how they’re taking down corporations but mostly just having your character go off and punch more guys as if the plot had never changed gears. The plot of the movie will sometimes pop up in what almost feels like cameos rather than something tied to this new character’s personal journey, things wrapping up without really having told an original story and not leaving in enough of the source material’s stuff to make its intersection with the plot coherent or readable.

THE VERDICT: Fight Club undoubtedly fails at adapting either the book or movie well, the themes and story present in them shunted aside for a weak, boring excuse for fist fights, but those fist fights could have at least been decent violent action if there was any competent design to be found in the battle system. A heavy emphasis on defensive play is encouraged by just how risky any action is considering how devastating counterattacks can be, and your guard and counterattacks are free and barely punishable, meaning they’re often the best approach. The game’s AI has an advantage in reading your moves though, and while beating them is achievable, it’s done more so through mindless luck and a battle system that, even when it leans towards heavier action, is dull and doesn’t reward the player much for strategy or knowing any of its special moves. Unable to even capture one of the simplest thrills of just letting you beat up a guy, Fight Club makes it seem like the more boring alternative to the passive consumerism the original works rallied against.

And so, I give Fight Club for Xbox…

An ATROCIOUS rating. I am undeniably a fan of the Fight Club film, but I did not expect its messages or even its plot to be found in the game. It seemed like it was trying to be a basic brawler and while it wouldn’t have been as interesting without the messages of its source material, it could have still been passable entertainment. However, the fact it is such a cheaply made cash-in is almost too much of an ironic situation not to address, as the fighting system in the game is such a failure that it’s hard to think that much thought or work went into it.  Characters have a lot of moves but no reason to use them as the worst and most boring strategies are the ones that are safe and work best, and even when you can land a violent looking attack, its during slow and rigid battles that are either mindless with human players or a battle with luck when the AI might suddenly deal huge damage to you with perfect responses to actions you take, even able to accurately respond to button mashing tactics somehow.

There is no value to this adaptation of Fight Club. Its side story adds nothing and only slices out segments of a greater plot to parade about to remind you of what you’re playing, and its battle system can’t even hit a generic level of acceptable video game action to make it enjoyable for those who don’t know anything about Fight Club. There’s the now famous rule from the film that feels more appropriate for the game than any other way of summarizing this game’s issue. We should not talk about Fight Club.. the game at least, as it has nothing of value to offer us.