Welcome everyone to Fighting Chance, where we like to give lesser known games a Fighting Chance at making it big! Today, we’re going to be looking at an awesome little indie game called Fight n Rage.

Fight n Rage is a classic arcade style beat ‘em up, something along the lines of Final Fight and Streets of Rage. So obviously it appeals to us because we love walking left to right and beating people up, and if we can do it together well then that’s just awesome.

And man does it make you feel awesome. When you pull off a sick combo and hit a guy so hard he explodes, you really feel it. The screen shake, the sounds, the little pause just as your final hit connects. It really sells that feeling that you’re hitting him with all you got. And you get to look good while doing it. 

Fight n Rage has a beautiful classic aesthetic with the warping around the edges and scanlines over the image to mimic an old CRT. It’s worth noting that these features can be disabled if you don’t like them. And I can understand why you would want to turn them off. Behind those scanlines there’s a lot of beautiful pixel art to behold. Each character is very detailed and their animations are super smooth. It’s not just the characters that look good. The environments you go through are beautifully realised and varied. We particularly like this one section where you’re floating on a plank through a sewer. The 2d sprites actually mix perfectly with the 3d perspective in a way that  a lot of 2.D games can’t pull off.

Just there we said something about there being a lot of variety in the stages and that’s probably the most significant thing about Fight n Rage. Variety! Fight n Rage has it in spades. The story will take you from ruined city to firefly lit swamps, to the mountains and so on. This aspect of variety even makes its way into the story and level design.

Unlike many 2D sidescrollers it isn’t just a linear affair. At several points in the game there are choices to be made that affect what bosses you fight, which paths you take and even what elements of the story you see. A perfect example is in this early stage where a girl is being held hostage. Take a step forward and she dies, resulting in a boss fight. However, hold onto a throwable knife and the girl lives, offering you an alternate route where you learn about a secret village in the forest. 

And then of course there are the endings. There are 8 different endings for each combination of playable characters. So there are 8 endings for Ricardo, 8 endings for Ricardo and Gal, 8 for Gal and Norris, etc. There are even changes to dialogue throughout the game depending on what characters you have with you.

All that would mean little if it weren’t so rewarding. Every time you beat the game you earn coins. These coins can then be spend on a wealth of unlockables. These include alternate costumes for each character, different game modes and they even allow you to purchase enemy characters you can battle in one on one fights. Fight n Rage really is the game that just keeps on giving. 

I mean, that’s why our 10 minutes “sure let’s try this out” gaming session turned into 4 hours of “let’s give it just one more go and see if we can do it without dying/unlock that new path/game mode etc.” We should also mention that one thing that makes it so replayable is that a playthrough only takes about an hour, even less after a bit of practice. So that huge amount of endings can actually be earned fairly quickly. And it doesn’t put you off going back and trying new things in level to find different paths and that.

And shit, we haven’t even talked about the music yet! Gonzalo Veraldez did a fantastic job on the soundtrack. Right from the get go you’re getting tasty metal jams blasted at you. But, you guessed it, there’s variety here too. Sometimes the soundtrack gets more atmospheric than in-your-face loud but it’s high quality all throughout the game.

And that about sums up why we love Fight n Rage. We feel it really deserves some time in the spotlight, especially considering that apart from the music, this whole thing was made by one guy. We’d love to see this game get some love so he can go on to do bigger and better things! 

Now go buy it on Steam!

And check out Gonzalo Varela’s Youtube and Bandcamp. That guy’s music is top notch!