Picking Up Steam: One Finger Death Punch (PC)

The action in the martial arts game One Finger Death Punch is so simple to control that the game is able to completely describe it while it’s doing its first load. You only ever need to press two buttons, the left mouse button allowing you to attack nearby enemies to the left and the right mouse button used for those attacking from the right. While you can set it to be controller buttons instead, that doesn’t change the fact you only ever have to worry about two buttons to fight back literally hundreds of martial artists, One Finger Death Punch gradually becoming a test of speedy reflexes most of all.

There is no plot to One Finger Death Punch, you are just playing a faceless white stick figure who must fight back every stick figure that is running towards them. While the menus have detailed art of martial artists and the backgrounds of your two-dimensional battles can be quite detailed, the stick figures being the choice of combatants makes a great deal of sense. While your enemies will use a range of attacks and even weapons to hurt you, the most important visual information is simply seeing if they’ve entered your strike zone indicated by a glowing bar beneath you. If they are close enough to make the bar glow, you can attack and immediately defeat any standard opponent, but later enemies come in different colors that necessitate repeat blows. These can be something simple like a stick figure who just takes additional strikes to kill or they might dodge back and forth, requiring you to properly alternate striking left and right to avoid them getting the drop on you. There are even brawler foes where you’ll enter a close range quick fight where you must press a long sequence of attacks in a row quickly enough to come out on top. To do well in a round, you need to be able to instantly know what the enemy is, how close they are, and properly prioritize who you wish to strike, especially when the game starts to reach incredibly high speeds where you’ll only really have enough time to make out the color and position before you need to strike to avoid taking a hit yourself.

One Finger Death Punch eases you in gradually, but there is also a dynamic difficulty element at play. While the specific stages will always feature about the same enemies no matter how many times you replay them, the speed of the fight will shift based on how well you’ve been doing lately. Beat many levels in a row without a sweat and the battle speed will be amped up a point you’ll start barely hanging in there or might not be able to clear the level, but thankfully losses also help mitigate the difficulty as they’ll pull the speed down a bit. However, for the most part, the rewards in One Finger Death Punch don’t really care for the battle speed, making it more a point of pride if you let it get to incredibly high levels. Most stages only need you to survive to the end to win, but there are also medals to earn as well as credit for perfect rounds. Perfect rounds mean you never got hurt and the medals are higher in ranking based on how few whiffed attacks you made. If you attack in a direction there’s no foe, this can often lead to an immediate attack from a foe to punish you, but misses aren’t necessarily always punished with damage. If you care for achievements you will need to get a considerable amount of perfect rounds and platinum medals for no misses, but One Finger Death Punch also has an incredible amount of levels before you even count the two unlockable difficulties, meaning if you do care for this extra challenge, you don’t have to perfect each stage and instead can afford to be more selective.

During a regular round of battle, One Finger Death Punch is the kind of game that is easy to lose yourself in. The need to be quick on the trigger keeps you consistently engaged, the punishment for a slip-up means you won’t button mash, and even at lower speeds most levels are quick to throw baddies at you and tend to take just a minute or two to clear. The Mob Round is One Finger Death Punch at its most basic, baddies run at you and you need to make sure you fight back every single one of them. Because they are so straightforward they can start to feel a little repetitive the deeper you get into the game, and while adding in the new colored stick figures who require the right inputs to kill does add to their complexity, they also start to get quite long without huge disruptions. Mob Rounds also will probably will be where you first experience the game’s occasional pace-breaking efforts to provide some cool action animations. Despite being simplified silhouettes, the characters in One Finger Death Punch are using real martial arts at times and at others gleefully engaging in some bloody kills. The game may suddenly pause the action to do a zoom in on a kill for extra dramatic effect, even having bone-splitting animations and strangely enough one where you knock the eye out of stick figures that don’t normally have them, and weapon kills can also suddenly bring the action to a halt as you watch a slow impalement. This can give you a second to decompress but might also lead to an accidental input or a disruption of the action’s flow, although slow motion is usually on your side as the game will slow things a touch to help you get back into the fight or handle when there are a great deal of foes on both sides of you.

The Mob Rounds mostly just feel overdone rather than truly harmed by their format, and One Finger Death Punch has many other round types to add some needed variety. There are ways the regular fights try to spice things up, weapons often just allow you to attack foes from farther away but some like the bow and bomb are long range attacks and the death ball is a particularly entertaining idea where you try to strike a ball into enemies for as long as you can bounce it around for easy kills while trying not to have it reach speeds where you can’t respond. Some rounds are based completely around weapons, dagger throwing rounds for example requiring you to rapidly identify who to throw at since you can’t throw another dagger until the first lands a kill. Some weapon rounds just up the intensity, the light sword and nunchaku rounds all about sprinting foes who come in droves to really test your responsiveness. Speed Rounds are timed battles where you can basically kill foes as quickly as you can press the buttons but need to space it right so you don’t lose time on the tougher opponents or leave them hanging too long. Boss battles feature one stick figure who can change their color during the fight, this perhaps the best place for giving you the feeling of truly mastering the system as you get the flashy sight of two figures weaving around each other constantly as you’re trying to wear them down. Some rounds feature simpler adjustments like only letting you take one hit although the sheer number of levels does mean the gameplay format feels a little strained even with the special round types, but it does feel like One Finger Death Punch is a game you’re meant to come back to now and again rather than blitz through, the two button combat and uncomplicated battle concepts making it fairly feasible to pick it up and play.

Over the course of the main adventure you will gradually unlock abilities as well, this adding an interesting tactical touch to the affair. Some are simple but very useful abilities that let you use weapons for longer which is especially good when it can turn a bow and arrow into a guaranteed means of three kills even on the strongest foes. You can get abilities that will activate after a certain amount of kills that can do things like launch a screen wiping attack, slow foes down, prevent damage for a time, and many other effects, although you can only have a few set at a time and practicality will probably win out over anything too specific when you’re making selections. Like who you fire that bow at or when you decide to take on a brawler though, knowing you’re building to a special attack can help you strategize which incoming foe is best attacked first, the simple combat having more value because there is on the fly decision making deeper than just whether you want to strike to the right or left.

While the main adventure is beefy enough on its own, One Finger Death Punch also offers a survival mode as well as a few unlockable difficulties for it with special complications like hiding the meter that indicates if a foe is close enough to strike. A fight to stay alive as long as possible, there are chances at healing along the way in these endurance challenges although they can certainly drag on, One Finger Death Punch’s combat certainly better in snappy bite-sized chunks so that you can focus and won’t feel the sting of repetitiveness that arises in the longer Mob Rounds. In a rather cute touch, after battle results in One Finger Death Punch come with a little “Pro Tip” at the bottom, and while at first it is giving you relevant information for playing the game, eventually it starts to reflect more on the game’s developers. A pair of Canadian brothers made this game and those Pro Tips start to share their history of game creation as well as their excitement for the then rising indie game scene, it certainly a little self-aggrandizing at times but still earnest in its appreciation for how independent development was becoming feasible and broadly appreciated around the time of this game’s creation. One Finger Death Punch may be sort of simple at its core, but its willingness to explore that space without deviating too far from the format gives the game its addicting heart-pounding action.

THE VERDICT: One Finger Death Punch is a high octane martial arts game where you just click left or right on your mouse to fight, but it brings the intensity and a small range of shake-ups so that the action remains thrilling despite its inherent simplicity. Weapons, special stick figures that take more hits to take down, and the special round types keep the game from getting too repetitive, the energetic action easy to lose yourself in as you develop the laser focus needed to swiftly and professionally wipe out hundreds of foes. Some elements like the abilities could afford to be more adventurous, but the developers definitely aren’t the only ones excited how such a simple but effective indie game could be made and embraced for its strong central gameplay concept.

And so, I give One Finger Death Punch for PC…

A GOOD rating. While One Finger Death Punch can get a bit repetitive if played for longer sittings, compared to other games on this year’s Picking Up Steam series, I think the reason I never finished it just had to do with how many levels it had. It felt like the kind of game that I could return to and play any time for some quick exhilarating action, it not too hard to get back in the groove of the simple controls so you can focus instead on trying to expertly react and make those split second decisions for things like how to use a weapon. There being so many stages before you even factor in extra modes make it a good fit for short sessions but it does feel like the quantity of them stretches some round concepts like the Mob Round a little thin. Besides trying to make a more robust set of abilities that make choosing which ones to use less straightforward, a little more time brainstorming some extra round types could have kept the levels flowing just as well as the regular action, although the world map already has branching paths that let you sometimes pick your own way to inject some variety. Having the rankings to reward playing expertly but also letting even a sloppy player continue on if they survive is a good format for not letting harder stages trip you up, although the speed adjustment relying on losses and wins can have its moments where it goes too far so perhaps it needed more careful tuning than constant climbs or sudden falls. For the most part though, it’s just a matter of tinkering some systems rather than touching that effective heart, the responsiveness needed to survive keeping you on your toes while the presentation makes it satisfying even if you’re just knocking inexplicably bleeding stick figures around to incredibly intense music.

One Finger Death Punch may not be the best remembered or most imaginative of the wave of indie games that were coming out in the early 2010s, but it does embody what the rising indies of that time could do well. It has a strong central gameplay mechanic, iterated on to some degree but not pushed aside for other gameplay types, and it has some personality even when you see some compromises in its look like the stick figure characters. It’s addictive, easily understood, but not so shallow it loses its charms, One Finger Death Punch aiming to do one thing well and certainly succeeding.