One Strike (Switch)

One hit, one kill. That is the simple concept at the core of One Strike, and with the threat of instant failure or the promise of a quick victory always a single successful hit away, it’s easy to imagine the potential for a tense battle. What kind of mind games can emerge from such a hit or miss approach to attacking an opponent? One Strike sadly isn’t as intense as it might initially sound, and that comes from a failure to provide the player the options needed to make its battles as weighty as life-or-death combat sounds like it should be.

 

In One Strike, the player is given very few options for how to even engage in the battle. Set up like a traditional 2D fighting game, you don’t really have many options when it comes to approaching or attacking your opponent. While this might be part of the intended simplicity of this instant-kill concept, it instead robs the conflicts of the appropriate level of tension. One of your buttons is devoted to your attack, each character of the seven on offer having a different method for striking their foe. These vary in reach, speed, and can sometimes hit more than once, but the fact is your character choice locks you into one predictable means of attack. All the characters save one also have a guard button, this option able to prevent the damage of any incoming attack so long as it is activated at the right time, and you can’t hold the guard either, the guard dropping automatically after a set time limit. The only other option during a battle is forward or backward movement, most characters having the option to do a quick dash in either direction but there is no jump button or complex maneuvers to be found for avoiding your enemy’s strikes.

Each of these options has a flaw or two that ends up dragging down the conflict. The guard’s issue is its low reliability. Sometimes you can still get hit if the guard hasn’t been put up with perfect timing, the animation beginning but activating too late to protect you. There could be an argument for properly timing it or that it deliberately gives the edge to offense to prevent players from turtling, but the movement options really put a lot of pressure on guarding to pick up the slack. When a player approaches you, your options for movement are getting more and more restricted, there being no real way to turn the tables and force them back save trying to strike them, especially since the screen’s boundaries make up the entirety of the small battlefield, but depending on your character you might not really have a good option for retaliation. There are some characters who have clear reach and movement advantages that make default sword users suboptimal picks. Hinode the ninja can clear the entire battlefield when they strike, leaping into range when the attack button is pressed. Hangaku uses a kusarigama, a scythe on a chain that she can launch across the battlefield to hit the other fighter from range. Hangaku does at least lack any guard option to make up for such a boon and Hinode has a slight delay after her leap to make a counterstrike possible, but both force the opponent to rush in dangerously to invalidate the space advantage and risk their lives doing so.

 

Repeat play can get you accustomed to guarding properly against the long range fighters, but if you play computer opponents, many of them lack the intelligence to properly counter them. Hangaku can sit back and go on a tear through the single player modes with little resistance. The AI in general is pretty bad, primarily because the game’s lack of mechanical complexity is meant to be made up for by the mindgames between you and a human player trying to bait opponents into attacking or finding the openings in their habits and tactics. There’s no reliable behavior to the AI to predict or exploit and the rounds are too short to really give you the chance to learn any if there were. Trying to figure out a machine’s essentially random set of options for approach or attack is still too much to do reliably even with the limited ones available, and if you stick two AI players against each other, you can see them struggling to handle the rules of the game themselves. Even when they’re not in range of each other you might see them constantly guard, give up ground, or just stand in place and let themselves die. They can of course instead show surprising glimmers of incredible intelligence and any level of capability between these extremes, so trying to predict or react to such wild swings is often a losing prospect.

One Strike is definitely meant for human players to go against each other though, and unfortunately it puts a lot of the weight of any enjoyment from the experience on the player. In the regular one on one duels where the first successful hit leads to an instant win or instant loss, there really aren’t a lot of stakes to the conflict. If you lose, you just play again, the battles likely to be short because there isn’t anything of substance on the line. You can add external bets to the game if your friend group is so inclined, or maybe just try to spice it up by talking and taunting during the duel, but there are already better games with more options for dodging and striking like Divekick out there that don’t require the player to put in the extra work to squeeze out enjoyment. One Strike does have at least two mode options that add a bit more to the battles, the best one available perhaps being what it calls Arcade. In Arcade each fighter has five lives, so rather than just hoping you’ll land a strike first, there are consequences for getting sloppy and rewards for predicting an opponent. As a player loses more of their lives, they might have to take risks to catch up or they might be more careful to avoid a loss. Team Duel also helps with this, as players get to select three characters who take turns fighting, losing a life as one necessitating the use of the next character, players needing to preserve their fighters or potentially arranging them to better survive.

 

The last mode though is a bit of a dud. Tournament mode lets up to eight human players compete in a small tournament, and while this may seem to inject some stakes as well, it’s back to the single strike mode of battle where your limited attack and defense options prevent things from ever hitting the intended fever pitch of intensity. One odd quirk of this mode too is the way it handles having up to eight human players. Rather than assigning controllers to players properly, your controller is based on what side of the conflict you’re on. Left player uses the first player controller and the right uses the second player’s, meaning controller swapping is going to be constant and dependent on how the tournament arranges itself rather than a logical player-to-controller assigning method. There are certainly stakes to the higher battles if you buy into the tournament structure at least, so One Strike can overcome it’s low stakes at times when the proper framework is applied to the battles.

 

With less mechanical complexity than air hockey, it’s hard to get deeply invested in the play of One Strike. There are no rewards for single player, most of them just being battles against the AI based on the four modes from multiplayer, the player taking on every character until they receive the same generic, underwhelming, universal ending. If you stick to it as multiplayer only though, the onus is on you to try and make it interesting because otherwise it will wear out its minimalist approach to battle quite quickly. If anything, it compares less to the thrills of fighting games and more to a round of Slapjack. A Slapjack player can delay revealing their card or do a feint to draw a different player into slapping the pile when there isn’t a Jack, but it ultimately comes down to hitting the pile at the right time, whereas here it’s about striking at the right time, but you’re still pretty much doing a time-waster game with Slapjack when that deck you’re holding has the potential for both more exciting fast-paced games, more strategic games with those elements, or cards that could hold more purpose than just being anything besides a Jack. One Strike’s fighting has been so stripped down to its basics that it can tap into that ground level thrill of being the first to press the right button at the right time, but it removes many parts like jumping or attack variety that could have made the high pressure battles more involved and varied.

THE VERDICT: One Strike counts on the player buying into its premise without providing the tools to truly make the one-hit-kill nature of the fighting as intense as it sounds. Single round live-or-die battles are too quick to get invested in and too easy to restart, robbing them of the weight they should have, but at least the five lives option and team duels can get around that somewhat by having their being tangible downsides to not approaching battle carefully. Still, the barebones single-player modes with AI opponents you can’t play mind games with pretty much necessitate that the multiplayer be the true draw for the title, after which the intentionally limited game design makes it hard to get invested in playing for more than a few matches. With perhaps a jump option or another attack for each character it could have the level of variety that would make it much more intense, but One Strike feels too trimmed down to deliver on the intended intensity.

 

And so, I give One Strike for Switch…

A BAD rating. The concept of One Strike can be pretty deceptive. Play a few minutes of it and maybe you won’t see the issue, and with the right person, they might be able to add some excitement to the affair with external taunts or threats. Still, One Strike isn’t the best canvas for this style of fighting game, the player’s options restricted to a few moves that quickly wear out their welcome. There are other games with such high-consequence styles to their battles like Bushido Blade, Karate Champ, and Divekick, and all of them offer more interesting options despite the threat of quick, immediate losses. Restricted completely to the ground in a tight box can leads to battles that either end too soon with characters who can press range advantages, fights that lose their intensity as players turtle up, or conflicts that just ultimately lack the level of mind games you’d hope to find since you can only really pick to approach, retreat, attack, or defend, and those options come and go often. With little quirks like the weird tournament mode options, no real goals to shoot for outside of winning immediate battles, and graphics that don’t really excite, the game puts a lot of pressure on its one-on-one human battles and then hopes you buy into it enough to lend these simple conflicts some greater weight. The game boils down to waiting out blocks or spacing yourself so the opponent is pressured to mess up.

 

Any bit of competition can be made more exciting if the players engaged in it enhance it with their own injections of personality or consequence, even a coin flip able to overcome its simplicity and randomness in the right context. One Strike is of course more than a simple coin flip, and modes like Arcade and Team Duel do nearly overcome the weak foundation, but a comparison to Rock-Paper-Scissors is perhaps more accurate, there being some thought into how your opponent behaves, moments where neither player wins, and counters built into the design, and unfortunately, Rock-Paper-Scissors isn’t made more exciting even when it leads to an immediate win or loss. One Strike can catch fire with the right player or end up like damp wood, the merits of the game not really the part that will determine if it will be enjoyable. The incredibly low price might hide that this is a game that offers little, but there are better options out there for games that require quick reactions or involve high-stakes mind games, and putting a fighting game skin over a design concept that can be found in games as simple as Slapjack can’t really push it higher than the sum of its parts.