Probably the best Fighting game to ever hit the PC.
Developed by Epic Games and released back in 1995, the idea behind this awesome 2D Fighting game is to bring something new, instead of simply putting two gladiators fighting to the death in an arena. One Must Fall 2097 is about competitors that fight each other in tournaments with their customized giant robots. No blood and gratuitous violence, it's true, but guaranteed entertainment.
The formula used in One Must Fall 2097 is so innovative that not even today it's easy to find something similar. Here the player has the traditional options to play the Arcade or the Versus mode, which consists in simply picking up a pilot and a bot to fight against the computer or a friend. You can choose between 10 robots, which are all quite different from each other; some have ranged attacks while others are melee brutes, so every player will find their favorite bot after trying them all.
There are only a few special moves assigned to each robot, but successfully mixing them in a combo is the real challenge. It's easy to learn the special moves because One Must Fall 2097 has only the usual keys for movement (jump, right, left and duck), the key for punches and another one for kicks. It's also possible to assign keys to jump or duck to a specific direction, so you can spare the effort in trying to hit a lot of keys simultaneously.
Before choosing the robot, it's necessary to pick up a pilot, and each one of the 10 personalities available has his/her own attributes; roughly speaking: some are fast, strong or resistant, even though a balanced combination of these qualities is also present. Naturally, combining a melee robot with a strong pilot means lots of damage against your opponent, however you must live with the fact that you'll probably either be quite slow or will receive huge amounts of damage. Note that the choice of your pilot will not influence the type of special moves of your robot; it will merely make them either faster or stronger.
Right now someone may say that there is nothing particularly special about One Must Fall 2097, when comparing it with other games of the Fighting genre. In truth, until now I kept in secret the main reason that made this game a total hit even by today's standards. Aside from the usual game modes, the player can choose the Career mode and start a single player campaign to improve the abilities of his/her pilot as well as improving robots or acquiring better ones. Choosing a pilot isn't a dramatic choice in this mode, because it consists only in a cosmetic decision to judge what avatar is the prettier one. Their abilities aren't prefixed as in the Arcade mode; you must improve them by spending your money in training sessions, so you can make him/her faster, stronger or more resistant.
If the customization of your pilot wasn't enough, in the Career mode is also possible (and necessary) to update your robots capabilities. You can improve the speed and power of your arms and legs, not to mention the damage absorption and stun resistance. Each one of these categories has several levels that vary depending on the bot of your choice. For instance, the Katana robot, which is my favorite, has high levels of arms speed, but its power isn't that much. As you can see, combining the abilities of your pilot and the capabilities of your bot is quite important to survive the tournaments in the Career mode.
In the campaign, you may choose between four tournaments. The first ones are for beginners, but the competitors' level increases as you sign your pilot in the last tournaments. The harder your enemy is, the bigger your reward will be. After earning the cash by winning a match, your manager automatically spend the necessary money to fix your bot. Naturally, if can finish off your enemy without getting hit, the reward will be entirely for you to improve your pilot skills or your robot capabilities. By losing a match you'll have to pay your opponent, and the game will automatically sell parts of your robot if you don't have the necessary cash to do so. It sounds punishing, but you can keep earning money with the easy competitors and, when you have upgraded enough your pilot and robot, you may finally stand a chance against the toughest ones. Of course, it's a good idea to set the difficulty level to the easiest one when you start the Career mode, instead of putting the hardest level right away.
During the fights you'll feel that your opponent is intelligent enough to predict some obvious moves without being a cheater. The Artificial Intelligence uses all the available robots quite nicely, even those ones that every human player in the world avoids. The great enemy AI isn't the only thing that makes this game interesting; each match is placed in five different arenas that have particular hazards, so you can use them tactically against your opponent. For instance, one of the possible arenas contains several spikes that pop-ups randomly from the dark to hit one unlucky competitor. There're arenas with electric fences, machine-gunning airplanes and even fireballs, so the gameplay slightly varies depending on which place the game generated the match.
Technically speaking, One Must Fall 2097 is quite an advanced game considering the year it was released. The graphics are as good as a 2D game could possibly be back in 1995, with nice special effects and animations; however, the best thing is obviously the design of the robots, with shining surfaces and creative models. The sound effects and music are top notch as well, and they fit perfectly when you're smashing the head of your opponent's bot.
All this great content is now free of charge, since One Must Fall 2097 became freeware back in 1999. Even better, the game runs perfectly fine under DOSBox, and you can play it either with the keyboard or with modern joysticks that wouldn't be compatible with the old MS-DOS. As you can see, One Must Fall 2097 is one of those games that will never age; so if you never tried this game before, what are you waiting for to download one of the best 2D Fighting games for the PC?