Drunken Fist (PS5)
In video games, if you’re out fist-fighting in the street, it’s often with some lofty goal like saving the city or someone important to you. In real life though, if you’re in a street brawl, it’s probably just because you got really really drunk. Drunken Fist is a brawler with the goofy premise of making a video game beat-’em-up closer to that unflattering reality, right down to the game also going by the name Drunken Fist: Totally Accurate Beat ’em Up. That may be a charitable read though, because the polygonal art style and floppy characters certainly evoke the popular comedic indie game Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, but perhaps the more offensive part is that Drunken Fist is the kind of game that has one joke to tell and it’s used up before you even beat the first level.
As is appropriate for the premise, the drunken old man you play as in Drunken Fist has no clear motivation for his night out on the town socking whoever his fists can reach. Other people are lingering around the city streets often just as blitzed or at least just as ready to attack you with no provocation. The goal of the game’s seven levels is to knock out a certain amount of each enemy type you encounter in that section of the street, as well as sometimes collect some simple pick-ups like milkshakes or ice cream. However, since your character is deep into their drink, their coordination is pretty awful and you’ll feel that as you try to send him stumbling towards the foes you need to fight. Because you are so drunk, simply walking too fast can cause a fall that takes quite a while to get back up from, and even if you do get a hang of just guiding your character around, you’ll find the fist fighting is not only impeded by your character’s inebriation, but by a pretty poor physics system as well.
Our nameless hero has a fair few moves. He’ll alternate his punches and his kicks meaning you have to account for if you’re able to hit with your left or right limb as he sways back and forth, but you do have a few special moves as well. The leg sweep is the clear best, the drunken man showing some combat skill in a fairly clean motion that can often hit most any person in front of you. You do have stamina to watch so you can’t just flail and hope to win and the leg sweep does use a lot of that stamina, meaning if you are up against a group of punks it might leave you vulnerable as you recover. If you try to use some of your other special moves though, you’ll usually find most of them are inaccurate and not helped by the game’s hit detection. While there is some amusement in seeing the old drunk man leap into the air for a double kick, you’ll also probably suffer for it when your legs maybe didn’t hit a body part square on. The game feels fussy about what it deems as damaging contact with the special moves that are difficult to even line up to start with. Lining up your moves leads to constant woes already, your basic punch probably your best bet since it wastes little stamina and you can throw out more blows and hope the fist properly connects. If your arm hits instead, no damage is dealt. Maybe your punch will get caught on something nearby like a car or a wall and fail to hit. Repositioning is a pain especially since you’ll probably be attacked as you do so, and many fights you may find yourself facing a little too much to the left and right of your targets so your punch launches just to the side of someone’s head. Even with enemies making no effort to dodge they still avoid attacks just because you are a stumbling mess, but your dodges conversely are fairly useless because you can’t guarantee they’ll even move you in a helpful direction.
Every fist fight in Drunken Fist ends up feeling like it relies more on hope than any sense for controlling your character, this clearly meant to be a game about trying to overcome limits on how well you can do what you’re attempting but also forgetting to make that process enjoyable. New enemy types will be introduced as you progress, punks who throw rocks, businessmen who swing their suitcase at you and run away, and gangsters who outright fire guns at you, and while they all have floppy bodies too so sometimes you might see guns pointed off towards nothing in particular rather than you, if they are lined up properly, you can take heavy damage that can add up quickly as you can’t convince your drunkard to wander to safety. Often the safest place is right up in someone’s face hammering the punch button and hoping you win out, but the physics can do even stranger things. On more than one occasion an enemy would be walking and suddenly teleport across the level as their body freaks out. A group of guys you need to beat might suddenly turn into a tangle of limbs as something in the physics glitches and twists their bodies into unnatural shapes, although at least they’re often fairly easy to knock out when their bodies are more like tumbleweeds than people. Since even walking around is risky though having characters out of position can harm your chances of success and you’re not immune to the physics bugs either, like one time where my drunkard was jerked up into the air and slowly lowered down while some punks could hurl rocks at me as I could not move until I landed.
The wide-eyed face of the main character and the drunken stumbling are pretty much the only joke the game has up its sleeve as well. He’ll finish a level by doing a goofy dance that lasts way too long so you can’t start the next level until he’s done, which is an actual problem because you’re on a timer of sorts. Every now and then you need to drink or you’ll lose, and to add another nuisance, your bladder is gradually filling and you need to take a leak from time to time as well. Urination will leaves puddles that you and enemies can slip on that is funny at first, but trying to use it strategically reveals the puddle physics won’t always trigger and some of the potential amusement is lost by having it be so unreliable. Drinking and urination become meters you manage rather than tools for more humor, especially since taking a drink makes you fall down and go limp for a bit as the screen gets blurrier than its already lightly nauseating view.
A full level restart will happen should you die, meaning more time spent sloppily lunging at an ever increasing number of enemies per stage, each one requiring more to clear and healing is a bit limited. You can find hamburgers and eat those in the same way you must find more bottles of booze to keep your buzz going, but since items used and acquired are saved after death, you can always try to build up reserves if you don’t mind more time spent playing a game that barely evolves in terms of humor or gameplay. The game won’t even give you level specific PlayStation trophies after level 3 and there’s no reward for beating the game, your drunk left in an empty city with a meaningless score you can no longer add to. Most other trophies are often just for doing specific actions multiple times, save for one that is at least interesting where you must harass the police. Normally policemen are meant to be avoided and will charge towards you should they spot you to take you out with their advantage of being sober, messing with them a pointless risk but at least the trophy encourages doing something outside of the boring brawling. Thankfully, the game does at least save after every level you beat so you can eventually drag your way through the available offerings, but the joke will have more than wore thin by then, this more a game for a 10 minute edited Youtube video rather than one doing much for a regular person playing it.
THE VERDICT: Drunken Fist is a joke that goes nowhere, and it gets there while stumbling through some occasionally buggy physics. While corralling your drunken character into fighting as close to competently as possible is the challenge, it’s one that mostly drives you towards boring safe play since trying anything more involved is likely to fail and lead to a full level reset when you die for it. Most of the comedic potential is gone before you even reach level 2, and while the action is complicated by more capable enemies, that often means you will restart levels more, play things safer, and lose your patience with a game that was clearly thrown together without much care and maybe a bit of booze in the developer’s systems too.
And so, I give Drunken Fist for PlayStation 5…
An ATROCIOUS rating. Conker’s Bad Fur Day basically did the entire joke of this game in a brief drunken section right down to having weaponized urine, and what made that game amusing was it was one of many jokes it had in its arsenal. Drunken Fist could be a silly little challenge in a longer game, or maybe fist fighting could just be one of many activities you have to get through while wearing beer goggles, but the joke runs dry before you even need to down your first drink because it’s a shallow premise that didn’t need to be stretched into a full game. The combat’s deliberate flaws basically pigeon-hole you into using less interesting techniques because they’re closer to being reliable, the punishment for a death being more tedium and more chances for the physics to freak out and impede your ability to progress. Already just taking out enemies can be such a task that even having health doesn’t feel like a necessary design element since flopping around and missing are going to limit your ability to fight forward anyway, and systems like needing to drink and urinate would still add a pressure since they interrupt the action’s flow anyway. Enemies really don’t feel like they’re there to add to the joke very well, archaic caricatures of hipsters and gangsters not really eliciting a chuckle when the game doesn’t do much more than present them to you. Perhaps the funniest thing after level 1 beyond unintentional glitches is the sprightly glee businessmen show when trying to hit you with their briefcase and then fleeing, but that’s the closest to real comedy you get after the initial idea of even controlling the combat being a joke is presented to you.
Drunken Fist feels like a game that expects you to be drunk to enjoy it, because then your own inhibitions will be lowered just like its staggering hero. You won’t really care if the game isn’t good if you’re full of booze and laughing for that reason more than what the game is doing, but seeing it sober you’ll realize it’s not a game with enough going on to be very funny or interesting to play. It feels unfinished especially since the ending is abrupt and leaves you ambling through an empty city, and even the idea of a physics dependent fighter that attempts to closely read collisions is upset by the bugs that can throw things into disarray. Drunken Fist is built on one joke that overstays its welcome, and considering how short the game is even if you struggle with its nauseating controls, that only goes to show how weak the joke was to begin with.