Anger Foot (2024)

• Anger Foot Demo (via Steam): steam://install/2008340
• Steam Store Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1978590/Anger_Foot/

I had a whole thing written up on Anger Foot, but it just felt didactic at a certain point. So here's this instead: When I played through the Hotline Miami's - which are the clear inspirations that Anger Foot pulls from - I never once died in a difficult level and thought to myself, "I just can't be bothered to go again".

This was a common refrain in my Anger Foot playthrough.

Now for the drivel:

On a molecular level, way down in its DNA, Anger Foot does a lot of good things. It's art style is great, consistent, and smartly used throughout the game. It has a slimy, hooligan-punk sort of aesthetic that oozes, films, grimes, you can taste the vape juice on the air as you sprint through the apartment complexes, feel the thickness of sludge as you blast your way through the sewers.

There's some smart metagame decisions being made here with the way they change your runs with different shoes, each of which will give you a different 'ability' or, more often, changes to a how one of your core mechanics works. This this connects to the challenges of each level, of which each stage has 2 additional bonus objectives (e.g. beat a level in X seconds, beat a level with X headshots, beat a level using only your feet) and some of these challenges can only be beaten with certain shoes on.

The problems start to peek out everywhere else, unfortunately. Every path Anger Foot strays from the source material ends in a deadend. The levels are too long, too linear, too big, so when you die you feel annoyed that you have to travel so far to get back to where you are. This means that any randomness encountered feels worse instead of emergent. Enemies hit shots they didn't hit before, an explosion lands different and kills you, or doesn't kill an enemy it killed the first run. In Hotline this is all fun, random, emergent, and perhaps it only comes off that way because the levels are so concise and brief. You want to jump back in, it feeds into a "go again" mentality. But the length and layout of Anger Foot's stage design does the opposite.

And I think that is the biggest flaw here. The linear, long winding nature of the levels, means that there isn't much opportunity for expression, it means that every death is a blow to player motivation, it defeats the flow state. It took me over a week to get through a game that should have only taken a couple of evenings, because the amount of "I can't be bothered" moments I was offered up was glutonous.

At the end of the day, this is a good game and perhaps I'm only so harsh on it because I am such a big fan of the games it is inspired by. You should buy it if you want a quick, entertaining romp, that relies heavily on a strong vibe and doesn't offer much outside of the very specific track it sets the player on. My suggestion would be to check out the trailers and decide if the aesthetic is a big enough appeal and buy (or don't) based on that, as that is the game's strongest selling point.

I just finished the game and I actually had quite a lot of fun with it, and really vibed with its style. However, the existence of so many insta-killing enemies really turns the fun off for me. They are not even interesting to fight against; they are just a pattern that you need to memorize after trying once and again. Given how fast-paced and head-emptier this game tries to be at its core, I find this retrying-and-memorizing part of the game a fundamental contradiction for everything it tries to achieve.

Overall, I did enjoy it; but I also got frustrated and feel sad for the wasted potential.

I respect how cohesive are all elements of this game. The amazing art-pop-comic visual style, high bass electronic music and the irreverent tone work great with the "FPS Hotline Miami" gameplay.

But I didn't enjoyed it at all.

It plays fine, but its so easy to die it turned really frustrating even when levels are short. I also hated se juvenile humor. Definitely not for me and here's the review in spanish.

Enemy designs are great tho.

It is just a demo and somehow managed to be a better game than a lot, it is a game that is hard to ignore once put in front of you, you cannot help but wish to continue playing, it is a game that manages to capture an entire culture, encapsulate it and take you on the ride for it. For better or worst, for all attempts done by multiple people, this is what gaming should be.

It is like they made a game out of the Gabber album art and made a game around the same feeling of when listening to gabber for the first time, not only that they packaged it in a way that gabber can be easily communicated to many people on how it should feel. It is a game that compliments all of what it has to bring in a neat package, all it cares about is entertaining you, there is nothing else that matters.

Also, does this kind of game-making tell more about how something sincere and with the wish to actually entertain, strike at the hearts of a people who grow more and more tired with a bewildering attention span? Ok maybe I worded that weirdly, but like what i mean is, how can anyone even come from a game like this to something else and be like "Yeah this is a far comparison", this one uses so much of your stimulation that anything else seems inadequate, it is like it all goes down from here, and in this game industry, a lot of indie games understand the demographic of people who are more and more losing touch with their own existence and need something to distract them, but it needs to be constant conflict and gratification or else it won't work enough, everything needs to be tight and concise.

It is a series of 10 second dance moves you cannot look away from, and you get to join in the fun of doing the dance, again, it reminds me of the jumpstyle fad and how easy it was to get into considering it was probably one of the most dumb and easier dance fads to ever come, the gabber music in itself is arguebly a dumb genre that is just a minimalist concentrated punch to the face, it is all very thematic to this game.

Honestly? It is better to be dumb, quick and engaging than whatever else is not as good. That is the beauty of it, it is best to be a hyperactive mess than a hostile, unitive and obnoxious game that only cares about keeping you there by dangling something in front of you, promising if you do enough of a repetitive thing you will get something in reward, instead this is the EXTREME opposite of that, the repetitive thing is THE REWARD, and this is one of the few games out there that is doing it, anyone who grabs it can not merely let go of it, it instantly hooks you with it's aggressiveness.

Many games are just a farce towards the idea of entertainment, this game is honest, it will give you what it has to give and not kid itself that it isn't what it is. A game that truly captures the magic of gabber: Dumb, simple, harsh, and extremely entertaining when it gets you in the right mood.