Fight Club
- September 01, 2004 00:00 AM PST
We know you're not supposed to talk about Fight Club, but it's just too good to ignore!
Leave it to the literary scholars, film critics, and pop philosophers to debate the merits of reinventing Chuck Palahniuk�s parable of schizophrenia, modern anxiety, and the perils of Ikea as a Tekken clone -- leave it to GamePro.com to discuss its merits as a game!We recently got a chance to get our hands on Vivendi Universal Games� video-game adaptation of what a lot of people would consider a totally inadaptable movie/novel. The result is a really solid, easy-to-get-into fighter that will likely find its audience in the mainstream more than in the hardcore set.
The control scheme is pretty streamlined and simple -- the characters have a weak punch, strong punch, weak kick, and strong kick, and grapples that are accomplished by hitting the two weak buttons or strong buttons at the same time. The game�s 14 different characters are all based on three different styles of fighting -- punch-heavy brawling, kick-heavy martial arts, and throw-heavy grapping.
While every character has his own moves in addition to the �basic� combos and attacks that come with each style, that means you only really need to solidly learn three types of play before you can really get into the game. The fighting feels very solid and fun, and beating people down to the breaking point so you can snap their bones (complete with X-Ray vision of skeletal system) can be extremely satisfying.
There are well over a dozen areas to fight in, and every dank area you�d want to avoid at night (bathrooms, subways, parking lots) is represented. Similar to DOA3, each area has multiple different sections into which the fight can break if you smash through the right wall or roll off the right edge.
Even though main Fight Clubbers Tyler and Jack aren�t based on Brad Pitt or Edward Norton, the character models look great, even if a lot of them look fairly similar due to the game�s realistic nature. Fans of DOA3 will probably be disappointed by the total lack of female characters, but hey, heterosexual males aren�t the only ones playing video games these days. There are a few whacked-out characters: Old-time rocker Meatloaf�s character �Bob� is especially disturbing, and not just because he looks just like old-time rocker Meatloaf. If you saw the movie, you certainly remember his �special features.� Unlockable characters include The Great Emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln, who�s quite good with the fisticuffs.
The single-player game tells the story of a new character (you get to name him) who wanders into the Fight Club uninvited one day -- your goal, of course, is to make your way up the ranks to fight Tyler Durden. But the main hook of Fight Club is that you�re able to fight online -- we got a chance to try it on Xbox Live, and it plays just like a 2-player match offline, without any lag. The early version would occasionally glitch out for a moment, and suddenly warp characters to a different part of the screen, but the game�s still incomplete and these are the kinds of little issues the developer is still addressing.
While a lot of critics would have predicted such an undertaking to be a blueprint for disaster, Fight Club is turning out to be a pleasant surprise -- an easy-to-learn (but certainly not shallow) fighting game with good looks, a solid feel, and more casual appeal. Look for it to hit shelves for PS2 and Xbox by the end of this year.
