Blazing Strike Review (Switch)

A totally original pixel art fighting game in 2024 is certainly a welcome surprise. What’s more of a surprise, though, is discovering that Mark Minkyu Chung touts himself as a solo game developer. Known by his developer handle Rarebreed, we hopped to Blazing Strike’s credits roll to corroborate the seemingly impossible. And, sure enough, he appears to have done pretty much everything himself, from programming to art direction, rollback netcode implementation, and sound. Where he’s had help, he’s still the lead credit of two individuals for things like animation, character, and environment design. To that end, it appears Blazing Strike’s vast majority is indeed the effort of one man - a head-spinning feat considering the comprehensive nature of the end product.

A love letter to the fighting game hardcore, there’s plenty of SNK about Blazing Strike, with incredibly tall, superbly rendered sprites, tons of animation frames, and a scaling effect that zooms in and out based on the proximity of the combatants. Indeed, the game’s graphical style is arguably its most polished asset, and bears some visual kinship to Rage of the Dragons. The spritework appears genuine, as if it was crafted on old-school tools, and boasts a near-CPS3 quality (that being the hardware that fuelled Street Fighter III and Red Earth). The colour palette positively beams, with attractive blending, and, although samey at times, the backgrounds are truly top-notch, featuring a range of sci-fi cityscapes and in-theme prison courtyards.

The game offers a set of staple options: Story Mode, Arcade Mode, and online multiplayer with rollback netcode functionality. And, while the Story Mode has had a ton of work put into it, it’s teeth-gnashingly boring to sit through. Fighting games generally don’t fare well with JRPG-length interim exchanges and reams of banal text, yet that’s the angle here.

For the most part, it’s presented well, thanks to some fantastic art presented as comic book panels - but to get to it you need to skip through masses of dialogue between character portrait bookends that lose your interest 60 seconds in. The back story is about climate change ravaging the world and an impending catastrophe. When you finally get to kick some ass it's all too long lettered to remember the circumstances of the plotting anyway. Many Story Mode fights are only a single round, too, forcing you to use certain characters for specific bust-ups that tie the narrative together. If you’re one of those people who thinks Hideo Kojima writes interesting, meaningful dialogue, you might sit through it once just for the hell of it, but there’s not much point in a twice-over.

Thankfully Arcade Mode is straight to the point. Here you get a couple of pre-fight soundbites and a typical end-of-bout put-down. There are 14 characters, all boldly unique and ploughed with plenty of great ideas, including a weapon-wielding scrap merchant, a Ninja who internally guards her dead husband's soul, and a disgraced military commander who can transform into a demonic entity. It’s clear your typical Ryu, Ken, Zangief, and Chun-li weren’t the intended baseline here, with character variation more on par with Guilty Gear.

That said, the play style is far less complex than an Arc System game, and all the more encouraging for it. You have four attack buttons for punches and kicks, split between light and hard attacks. These allow you to form basic attack combos fairly easily, and you can dip into the command list at any time from the pause menu. Blows feel solid, and the jumping arcs are naturally weighted. Each character has a super bar, allowing them to perform a dazzling special attack, and some have unique properties like Pink’s bomb capsules.

What the system hinges on, however, is the Rush Gauge. By holding the shoulder button, you can speed up your character, reducing a gauge at the top of the screen that, when empty, refills in about six seconds. While in Rush Mode, your character has additional offensive and defensive properties; and it can be used in short bursts to dodge away from attacks, or roar in for the kill. There’s a touch of Mark of the Wolves about it, but it’s far easier to engage and understand, and it feels good to glue a devastating string together.

As an example, you can jump in with a deep light kick, land two standing jabs, and then engage the Rush to start tagging on extra beats, before crowning your work with a Super. For novices, threading the Rush and timing it to link attacks isn’t easy, and each character’s move-set is diverse enough that dedicated time will need to be spent in Training Mode. But the sensory reward for nailing a chain is thrilling. Cleverly, if the Rush gauge expires and you don’t depress the button, your character will hit a dizzy state, requiring some stick-waggling to recover them.

There are slight aspects of Blazing Strike that give away the reality of a one-man show. In Arcade Mode, for example, there are stage obstacles that interfere with play, like desert whirlwinds sucking you toward them or crane hooks dropping from above to knock you out of your flow. These aren’t game killers but we also couldn’t find any option to turn them off, and some can be a little annoying. One of the worst offenders is the prison stage, where, if you hit the edge of the screen, inmates grab you in a temporary hold, leaving you open to a beat down. We can’t imagine in versus matches that the fighting game community will warm to this idea. Small aspects of the background art, like certain onlooking characters, range from truly excellent to slightly underfed, and the music ranges from superb to rather perfunctory.

While there is room for improvement and balance tweaking in a future sequel or upgrade, for now the majority of people will enjoy Blazing Strike for being the original, deep, and well-crafted fighting game that it is.