Will Fight for Food: Super Actual Sellout: Game of the Hour
Developer: Pyrodactyl
Price: $6
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Sometimes people come up with really cool ideas and turn them into really cool games. Other times those ideas don’t really pan out. I’ll let you figure out which camp Will Fight for Food goes in. Here’s a hint, it’s definitely not the first one.
You play the role of Jared Dent, a washed up and heavily intoxicated ex-wrestler who’s back in town to redeem himself or beat everyone up. That’s the basic gist of the barebones plot this game has but you’re not here for deep stories right? You’re here for punching and kicking people who don’t agree with you! You’ll navigate through the game’s half dozen areas doing quests for various characters that can be solved through peaceful discussion or fisticuffs. Unfortunately none of these characters are interesting enough for you to even want to help them. Everyone is a pretty shitty person but the game excuses this by saying how the city is full of shitty people. Your main goal is to help everyone to the best of your ability (even if that means randomly beating them up) but you’re not really offered any good reason to want to do so.
The main hook behind the game is the option of putting on your wrestling mask at any moment and beating up anyone in the game. Not liking how a conversation is going? Talk with your fists. Didn’t like the cut of someone’s jib? Give them a cut to remember with a kick to the face. Too bad none of the fighting is actually any fun. You’ve just got a simple punch, kick, and bash attack and they all feel horrible to use. The entire game controls like some amateur Newgrounds game and you can just sit there mashing the bash attack to win every fight. The simplicity of the combat is almost annoying too considering beat ’em ups from years ago have more complex combat systems than this game. I could almost understand the combat being bad on purpose to focus on the adventure game aspect but even that part isn’t very good. Everything about Will Fight for Food is just so underdeveloped and it’s a real shame because there are a lot of super cool ideas here. You’ve got a neat gimmick of being able to fight any character in the game whenever you want, there’s an interesting conversation mechanic where you can pick the tone and body language of your replies, there’s a slight RPG mechanic with gear to equip to improve your stats, and the ending changes depending on how you interacted with all the characters in the game.
The problem here is that none of these concepts have any substance to them at all which makes the entire affair feel more like a prototype you’d use to pitch to someone. The controls just feel bad on keyboard (no controller support), the combat is atrocious, the game isn’t challenging enough for me to care about my stats so I just equipped whatever, the conversation mini-game was sometimes super vague in how your response was going to come out, and the side-quests all pretty much had you going back and forth between two characters until the quest ended. The game’s gimmick isn’t even interesting enough to make you care enough to put any thought into whether to punch everything or click the dialog window a couple more times. Either way you’re mashing a button to get it over with.
The worst part of all of this is that the jokes just aren’t funny. You’ve got a game that’s trying to land a joke with every line of dialog but ends up fumbling each attempt instead. Imagine one of Adam Sandler’s many movies that crams a jokey line once every couple of sentences. Now imagine it doing that for every single sentence and they’re the most desperate attempts at being funny ever. And I’m talking desperate like that kid in school who didn’t have a single funny bone in him yet still tossed out a constant stream of jokes hoping for one to stick. This is what the dialog is like in this game. It’s not even cheap and easy go-to humor, it’s just plain old bad humor. I guess on the bright side the game is stupidly short with it clocking in at around an hour and a half. That’s me trying to do the quests proper by the way; I’m sure if I just punched every major NPC I’d finish the game in ten or twenty minutes easily.
The Final Word
Will Fight for Food is a game that’s filled with interesting, but unrealized concepts that’s unfunny and no fun to play.
– MonsterVine Rating: 1.5 out of 5 – Terrible
