Playing the 2024 release
Blazing Strike (on Switch).
VERDICT: JANKY. Behind this is a tiny team, mostly the work of a single person (Mark Minkyu Chung); and it's very impressive for that, but why should I care about that as a player?
Graphics are 2D
retro 16-bit style, much more fluid than anything on the SNES or Genesis, getting close to late 90s arcade by SNK or Capcom, but in places rough and inconsistent. Some background details look unfinished and made with different color & resolution constraints than other things. Playfield is widescreen, character portraits and HUD are HD.
Controls: You got four attack buttons, each giving you three variants for stand, crouch, jump (no extra variation for moving forward). Everybody can do two-hit combos with light attacks standing or crouching. Specials are simple to pull off, there are no characters with pretzel inputs or charge specials. You got a super-attack meter that fills up doing attacks (dodged or blocked attacks don't count). You got another meter for a button that lets you move fast and combo more and that meter starts full and automatically replenishes. Moving fast doing light attacks shows some extra animations, but overall the number of attacks per character is below what's typical in a mid-90s fighter. There are not many specials and most specials only have two variants, light and heavy. Some specials require you to be in the air, no special has both a ground and air variant.
IMHO they should have added extra variations for negative-edge inputs (imagine those taking from the opponent's speed meter, just an idea). I get that drawing more animation frames is a pain in the ass, but you don't even need to much of that for variation, you can just fiddle with animation speed, movement arcs, color effects.
Characters aren't flashed out much. There are no taunts or fatalities. Each character has exactly one pre-match intro and one post-fight quote.
Remarkable how janky and irritating the menus are, given how
few game options you have. You can set some screen filters, sound settings, timer, controls. There is a difficulty select, but I'm not sure whether it does anything.
There is a
training mode which lets you turn hit boxes on and off and select a few enemy behaviors, but you have to set everything before entering the training and can't chan
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