Bum Fights

All of us that are of drinking age have been there. What starts out as a fun time eventually hit’s that benchmark of “wow, I’m not feeling so great”, and then finally.

Greetings and salutations ladies and gents – you’re watching another Broken Controller Club review, my name is Ed and I’m your host. Remember to subscribe to get notified of future reviews and special features.

So today’s review is already out on PC and has been on consoles for just a little while, it’s called Drunken Fist and it’s about as close as you can get to actually being belligerently drunk and fighting someone without the hangover and police station mugshot that your friends, coworkers, and exes can find online and laugh at. I myself am enjoying some bourbon while doing this review because it felt fitting – let me know in the comments if you’re enjoying some fine boozes as well!

It’s a 3D brawler with the exaggerated physics that you’ll be familiar with if you’ve played games like Goat Simulator, Surgeon Simulator, probably a lot of other things with “simulator” at the end. It most closely resembles a fighter I have on the Switch called Goonya Fighter, which is basically a brawler where everybody looks and feels like they’re made out of jello. It’s actually kinda fun so don’t knock it til you try it.

Anyway, as you can guess, the game has no story to speak of. You’re a guy who’s staggeringly drunk and making his way…somewhere. I don’t know where, and let’s be honest, he probably doesn’t know where either. And he doesn’t care! From how he’s dressed and groomed, I’m assuming he’s a distinguished gentleman who spent the evening enjoying fine scotch and cigars while discussing topics with equally classy women of the highest society that only Buzz Killington from Family Guy would understand. He didn’t go home with any of them, as he believes in a proper meal and show to get acquainted with someone, and anything less is for trollops who frequent the docks. Or Instagram. Or Tik Tok. Same difference.

So the game doesn’t have any sort of overworld or list of levels – it’s pretty basic. The levels are all just city streets, parks, and storefronts at night. The levels do seem to have continuity where one ends and immediately goes into the next one, which I thought was nice, but then there’s no sense of actual progression. The game saves between levels, which is helpful because your health also carries over, so if you’re almost dead, just go ahead and save yourself some time by backing out to the main menu and reload your game. Because that’s what good game development looks like.

The city itself is totally barren, a lot like when you leave a bar at 3am and nobody else is out. So at least that part is accurate. If you’ve been smashed on Savannah’s River Street after hours it’ll look similar. The difference here is that for some reason there’s a lot of cars placed at odd angles in the streets, almost like the city has been deserted. Was it deserted because of the fear of drunks? Did a new shipment of PS5s come into Gamestop and everybody dropped what they did to go there? Who knows. Every game’s level takes place at night, and personally I would’ve loved to have seen a day-drinking level where people are out and about and you’d have to cross traffic and not pass out or pee your pants. You know…like real life. There’s not much for sound and music – it’s a pretty quiet game and all the music is pretty ambient and you’ll barely notice it’s there.

You don’t gain moves and there’s no progression because again, he’s a drunk guy. Drunk people don’t progress in anything except maybe alcohol addiction and cerhosis of the liver.

So you basically traverse each level completing whatever objectives you have ahead of you, which starts with just beating up a few people. The game very unceremoniously says the level is completed when you’re done, and then your guy does some dance that nobody has the coordination to even do sober and then you go to the next level. Each level gets more complicated, and you’ll end up beating not just jocks, but hipsters, office corporate guys, gangsters, and bikers. You’ll also have to avoid cops who apparently forgot their glasses and only see 3 feet in front of them, and you’ll also have to find things like milkshakes or ice creams hidden throughout.

Doesn’t sound all that bad except you’re basically on a time limit and you’ve got a couple meters to watch. Your biggest problem is that you have the world’s smallest bladder and seriously have to take a leak what feels like every minute or else you’ll lose health. Thankfully you can do that anywhere you want. I personally liked peeing on hipsters and jocks after beating them up. You’ll also ironically start losing health if you sober up. You can find beer bottles at a few spots throughout each level, along with the occasional cheeseburger which will replenish your whole health bar, but all of these items don’t really stick out very well and it’s easy to miss something, and I promise it’s a giant pain to backtrack and look around.

Wanna know why backtracking is a pain? Because your guy moves like he’s in quicksand made of molasses. Nudging the analog will barely get a movement out of him, and pushing that stick down to get him to run will make him fall over after a short distance. Getting knocked over by an enemy will more often than not force him in the opposite direction, and it’ll take several seconds to get him turned around to land a hit, and getting knocked over again will just do the same thing. I get that this is simulating drunkenness but this was really frustrating after awhile.

The camera is also hot garbage. It takes zero effort to get stuck on something and then the camera zooms in, and it’s really difficult to orient yourself. This’ll get you beat up by enemies and also dead from sobering up and being full of pee. There’s also mostly invisible barriers that you’ll run into when you’ve reached the end of a level, and you will fall over when you hit them, then the camera will zoom in again. This made me want to break my controller because it came without warning.

So lastly, the combat. You have a moves list you can refer to but you’ll basically end up relying on the same couple of powerful moves that’ll floor enemies in 1 hit. I used the low punch which looks like it nails them in the hip, and also the uppercut. Doing anything else is a waste of time and stamina. Everybody else is drunk so you’ll basically take turns trying to swing on each other until somebody lands a hit and gets knocked down. You don’t gain moves and there’s no progression because again, he’s a drunk guy. Drunk people don’t progress in anything except maybe alcohol addiction and cerhosis of the liver.

So at the end of the day this is a game that started out fun but kinda lost its novelty after a couple levels. At first I liked that you move slowly and the whole thing feels like a big joke about drunken behavior, but then you realize that there’s not much of an actual game here. I like jokes and everything but when I realize I dropped a few bucks on something that by all accounts just feels kinda crappy, I walk away from it dissatisfied. This is a game you’ll play for a day, delete it to free up space, and then never play it again. I’ve gotten a lot more mileage out of games for a lot less money, like Goonya Fighter that I mentioned earlier.