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Playing through Arcade mode of the free Unreal Engine Sonic fighting game fan game Sonic Smackdown by @ArcForged on PC!
It's a free download from https://arcforged.itch.io/sonic-smackdown !
While the base character movement feels a bit clunky maybe, and beating the single Arcade difficulty mode seemed to come down to finding characters whose heavy attacks you were comfortable spamming in long insta-chain-combo form, the result you get from doing that is remarkably spectacular for a friggin' free fan game, and the character and attack variety beats out a lot of commercial Japanese fighting games. The UI is very well put together, the 2D art is quite nice, most of the 3D animations are spot-on and the cel-shaded 3D characters very well rendered, the voice samples surprisingly good--the presentation is at an absolutely ridiculous level.
Didn't think I was going to enjoy the gameplay as I generally don't seem to gel with non-Japanese fighting games, but I ended up spending way more time than I thought I would and even if I wasn't necessarily finding finesse gameplay I would really want to dig into, I actually did have fun fireball/super/tatsu-spamming my way through with ultra-shoto Blaze, sumo slapping and driving silly with psycho goofball Big the Cat, inflicting Chao madness martial combos with Cream & Cheese, sassy pummeling as Mighty the Armadillo, and robo comboing with Gemerl. Heck, even Maestro Balan ( ; D) and his mystical bouncing fireball spam was something to see. Hm come to think of it I'm not sure how much Yuji Naka's uh company or whatever may be into fan games but uh oh well I'm sure he's cool with it too, right? = P
Rings that pop out of struck characters restore the red, recent damage portion of the health bar for either player; the pattern of the ring scatter depends on the character making the hit, with some characters having fewer rings coming their way than others.
It may not be easy to get into as the AI comes at you hard, rather relentlessly crowding in and knocking you into agonizing combos. There's a BURST button (:p) to get out of at least one combo once in a while, but the main answer to getting washed by the CPU seems to be: spam harder.
Did not make me feel physically nauseous like Sonic the Fighters so I'm pretty sure this is my favorite Sonic fighting game!
Through the devs' itch page you'll also find an alpha online-only "Ultimate" version, which I did not play past the point of seeing no single-player option on its main menu, whose HTML meta tags proclaim GGPO networking.
Developer ArcForged's itch page says they're "an indie game company located in Central Florida."
Big the Cat is from Sonic Adventure. Adelaida Graciela appears to be from one of the original IP games the developer is working on. Gemerl is from Sonic Advance 3. Mecha Sonic is from Sonic & Knuckles.
Did not support my PS4 Hori Real Arcade Pro V 2017 in any way, so I mapped the controls through Joy2Key. |
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