Mighty Fight Federation is a 3D fighter, kind of like Smash Bros but in 3D. However, the developers behind this game want it to be more of a competitive fighter rather than just a fun party game. Sounds like something right up my street. It’s been a long time since I got stuck into a good fighter. Let’s see what MFF has to offer.

The first thing that drew me to this game actually was the music. The soundtrack is full absolute bangers and it’s no surprise given the people who worked on it. Tee Lopes of Sonic Mania fame, James Landino who worked on RWBY and No Straight Roads, Vince DiCola who composed for Rocky IV and Manami Matsumae who made music for Shovel Knight and Mega Man. It’s a star studded cast and they shine on Mighty Fight Federation’s soundtrack. There isn’t a bad song on the list.

But we all know a good soundtrack isn’t enough to make a game worth playing. The gameplay is what’s most important and I hate to say it but Mighty Fight Federation is such a disappointing game to play. So you have a varied cast of characters to choose from, with some crossovers like Yooka Laylee and Toejam & Earl in there too.

The character designs are decent but nothing special and some attempts have been made to make them all feel varied. They do each have different special moves, though their basic combos are all pretty much identical. MFF tries to pull off Smash Brothers style simplicity by having all characters use the same inputs for special moves, but it just doesn’t work here.

One of the main reasons is balance. This game is wildly unbalanced, which is hilarious given how the developers are trying to push it as the next big competitve fighter. (They even have a page on their site titled “Esports” telling you all about how deep the combat system is.) To expand more on this balance issue, some of the characters are absolutely useless. Stingray can throw grenades but they’re slow and tiny so they miss more often than not. Whereas Hyperion has a ridiculously easy to pull of combo that can stun lock and deal pretty good damage. This gets even worse when you consider the “Hype” attacks, once per life special moves that should turn the tide of battle.

Toejam & Earl have this target that you can aim at your opponents to launch a huge explosive. Unfortunately it’s slow enough that you can literally just walk away from it and even if they launch it when you’re in it, you have time to escape. Meanwhile you’ve got Originelle with her instantly activated Hype attack with massive range that takes out half your opponent’s HP in one go! There is no way in hell this could be considered a competitive fighter.

At the very least it could’ve been a decently fun party game but it just isn’t. I played this with a few friends and we had a terrible time. None of the characters are fun to play, the hitboxes are all over the place and there’s barely any content in the game. The only modes you have are Arcade, Versus and Online Play. No special modes or anything and there’s nothing to even unlock except 2 skins for each character.

And let me tell you, it isn’t much better in single player. I played through the arcade mode and if you had told me this game was still in early development I’d easily believe you. Every single fight is the same. It’s just basic battles in the most boring stages. It doesn’t matter how you dress them up, they’re all just squares or rectangles of various sizes. Sure in some stages you can destroy a wall or the floor to mix it up but you just move from one bland square to another.

I have a theory about why only a few stages have detailed environments. The AI is absolutely braindead. On multiple occasions I won matches by simply not doing anything. It’s very easy to get the AI stuck on a piece of the environment and then they just don’t know what to do. Even when there’s nothing in the way the AI are idiots. I played a 4 player free for all where the CPU players just fought each other and totally ignored me. I pressed one button at the end and won the match without taking a hit.

I even tried playing on the hardest difficulty and nothing changed. There isn’t even a difficulty curve. The final boss if just Hyperion but slightly bigger and with more i-frames, and I still beat him with a basic 2 hit combo!

I guess I should talk about the characters actually. They’re kind of boring. They’re all one-note jokes but without anything funny. Stingray is a military vet out to save his pet turtle. His joke is that he uses sayings based on animals but says “stingray” instead of the animal, like when he says “A stingray never forgets.” Then there’s Hyperion who’s a god who sets up a fighting tournament for fun, I guess. Oh and Originelle. Her joke is that she’s a satire of mid-2000s amateur deviantArt OCs. She even says “Do not steal” when she does her special move. Funny, except the joke makes no sense and that backstory has nothing to do with her being in the fighting tournament.

There’s one character I liked. Killbot 3000. His whole backstory is that he’s a killer robot but his creator made him so the one thing he can’t do is kill. He cannot do the one thing he tries hardest to do. Killbot 3000 may well be a cry for help from the developers. This game isn’t finished and it is the furthest thing from being a competitive fighter. Sure there are more crossover characters coming in the future like Miriam from Bloodstained but all the cool characters in the world don’t take away from the fact this game is a janky mess that lacks any mechanical depth.

If you want to try it anyway it’s available here on Steam, as well as on PS4, PS5 and Switch. It’s currently aboud £25, almost half the price it was before it left early access.