Drunken Fist review

As a drunken idiot, after a binge drinking session at the bar, you decide to head home to get some rest and wear off this buzz. But like any good drunk, on your way, you decide to pick a fight with anyone in your path; jocks, punks; what have h. Punch, kick and piss your way through 7 levels and a diversity of drunken opponents.

Drunken Fist is a 3D physics beat’em up where you walk around the dark streets of your city and take on any other drunk or rebel kid standing your way. In order to beat up everyone in your path, you’ll be able to drunkenly punch and kick your enemies. For whatever reason, fighting makes you want to take a piss. You can urinate by pressing the down button on the d-pad. You can use it so your enemies slip on it. Be careful, because you can slip on it as well.

While the game will encourage you to urinate to alleviate the pressure, you have to time your bathroom break between battles because urinating doesn’t make you invincible leaving you open for hits; meaning if enemies are nearby, they can slumber over to you and deal damage while your pee meter empties.

The game’s biggest problem is the controls. Setting aside the fact that your character is “drunk”, the developers went with tank controls akin to PlayStation 1 Resident Evil games; meaning you have to turn around with the joystick and then press upwards to move in the direction you’re looking it. People complain that it remains the main fault of Resident Evil 4, a game that is still worshipped today; and then you have this game, Drunken Fist, a new release with archaic controls. Backwards development.

Another issue, again, caused by the drunken premise is detection issues. Obviously, to mimic drunks fighting (I wonder if the devs got drunk and beat up each other), not every punch or kick will land. But the thing is, when playing a beat ’em up, you want your hits to land and cause damage and get the thrill of building up a combo… something that you definitely won’t find here. If you want to replicate a drunken fight, load up GTA V, get drunk and punch NPCs. It’ll definitely be a much better experience.

Drunken Fist has a unique style; while a bit reminiscent of Minecraft-y characters, I couldn’t help but be reminded of 4D Sports Boxing on my 386 PC way back when with blocky characters. While the backdrops are dark (it is at night after all), the rest of the surroundings are bright and colorful. But the game does suffer from screen tearing and weird pixel pop-ups here and there.

Drunken Fist is definitely the worst game I’ve played in 2020. Due to the drunken state of your character, tank-like controls feel half-ass responsive and completely make a potentially playable game unnecessarily frustrating. Some detection issues along with tedious pacing make for a regrettable experience. Considering the quantity of better beat’em ups, this is an easy pass.