Even six years after the movie's release, the Fight Club license is still strong enough to carry a game, if that game is even remotely compelling or entertaining. Unfortunately, everything that Fight Club (for Mobile) does counteracts the strength of its great license, and what you're left with is a short, easy, and poorly translated game. The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not play Fight Club.
The plot, if it can even be called that, loosely follows that of the movie, from the first night that the narrator meets Tyler Durden to the time when Project Mayhem is set into full effect. If, for some reason, you've managed to escape watching the movie up until this point, it's important to note that major plot spoilers are revealed in a very short amount of time, and that you should watch the movie before even attempting to play this game. Assuming that you've already done this, you'll notice that the game's ending cuts off before the movie's ending, and it's in a manner that seems to leave possibility for a sequel based entirely on Project Mayhem. The second rule of Fight Club is that you do not make a sequel to Fight Club.
The story helps to drive the gameplay along. You begin learning how to fight against Tyler, but then you develop more skills as you fight various other people along the way. Although you can toggle between roaming and fighting "modes," it's difficult to explore when there is an enemy opponent walking toward you, but there's little environment to roam around anyway. The only point to roaming is to find hidden soap pickups in trash cans that rejuvenate your health and reveal witticisms from Tyler Durden. Although many of the famous quotes from the movie are in this game, they are so arbitrarily placed that they seem more contrived than interesting. This is true for the generated confrontations as well, which include the famous fight of the narrator against Angel Face, as well as a fight against Bob Paulson. These fights are not much different than the fights against the generic Fight Club members, except that the opponent you're fighting is dressed a little differently and often there are a few lines of dialogue before or after the fight.
The graphics are among the most confusing aspects of the game. During the moments of dialogue, you can see Tyler and the narrator dressed in their outfits from the movie: a brown leather jacket and a suit, respectively. Yet in the gameplay, your avatar is always shirtless, even though it is apparent that you're meant to be the narrator/Durden character. As you land punches in the game, your persona meter fills up, and when it's full, you turn into Tyler Durden (unless you're fighting him, of course), which makes you deal a little more damage. However, it's really quite perplexing, because you fade in and out of that character so quickly. Otherwise, the character graphics are good enough so that it is clear that when you come across people from the movie that you're supposed to recognize them. The environment barely changes, though, and it is minimalistic at best. The sound is also basic. There are no sound bites from the movie, just a slew of generic punching noises and a theme song that sounds like "Rock Beat 1" on an electric keyboard.
The gameplay is varied in some respects, in that there are a few moves you learn throughout, such as the head-butt, uppercut, and charge. However, you'll find that it's less important to intersperse a variety of attacks and blocks than it is to simply continually charge at an enemy and jump on him when he's on the ground. If you do this, you'll beat the game in a fairly short time, especially considering that there are only five levels to get through.
Overall, this experience lacks in so many ways that it's hard for it to even hold a candle to its namesake. The game is short, very easy, and the attack system is needlessly diverse. Regardless of your interest in the subject matter, Fight Club is most definitely not your kind of game.
