FX Fighter represents the future of PC fighting games: the fully three-dimensional fighter. Just as Battle Arena Toshinden has done on the consoles, FX Fighter illustrates just how visually impressive a full 3-D environment can be. Even so, as with all ground-breaking technology, certain wrinkles need to be ironed out before FX Fighter can live up to its claim as the “ultimate PC fighting game.”
This is an extremely atmospheric and versatile title, allowing variation in environment, challenge, number of players, and graphic detail. The characters are diverse, both in appearance and ability, and the worlds where the battles take place are dark and surrealistic. While the characters are advertised to have forty different attacks, you rarely utilize (or need to utilize) more than about ten. In fact, if you get too ambitious, you risk sending your character spinning out of the ring and into the Great Beyond.
In order to develop the 3-D graphics and keep game speed at a respectable level, the designers kept the number of polygons as small as possible. The result is that the characters have a slightly wobbly, disjointed, almost drunken appearance. This actually helps the atmosphere, though, and makes sudden attack moves all the more exciting.
FX Fighter's final drawback is in the lack of challenge of the one-player mode.Only eight opponents are available, and, with minimal practice, you'll find a move that enables you to finish all of them with relative ease. Variable difficulty levels help, but you really need a friend to beat up on to extend the play value.
In general, FX Fighter's amazing graphics and personality see to it that this title is far and away the most inventive and interesting fighting game available for the PC today. With a bit of fine-tuning in response time and graphics, the result should be a game for the ages: FX Fighter 2.
