The awkward second album, football’s second season syndrome or for Americans: the sophomore slump. Different names, same problem: a failure to maintain or exceed the efforts of your first attempt. For football fans, see Sheffield United this season. When you’ve already achieved your goal once, can you motivate yourself to go again?

Taiwanese team Digital Crafter’s first game was the ultimate meme-fuel: Fight of Gods. While it was certainly no masterpiece, for a low-budget first effort there was enough comedy, heart and effort to cover the cracks in the 2D fighting if it couldn’t entirely make up for it.

Yu’ve made a novelty fighter, it went viral and even got a physical release. So, what next? Some developers may continue to support their game wth DLC (Team Cherry, Hollow Knight). Others might want a clean slate and to move onto an entirely new game or even a whole new genre (Supergiant Games). Even if you decide to go with a sequel, the one thing you cannot do is rest on your laurels and expect to just repeat the trick. The novelty is gone.

Had Fight of Animals just been the same again with a silly new roster that would have been disappointing enough. What ends up really stinking though is that this is an active backward step in so many ways. Instead of smoothing the the rough edges of Fight of Gods, Digital Crafter decided to start cutting even more corners!

Let’s begin with the roster. With the whole of the animal kingdom to choose from, we end up with a 12-fighter strong roster containing 4 dogs, 2 cats and 2 foxes. Why? They’re all wacky, anthropomorphized characters: Kung Fu Dachshund, Power Hook Dog etc. so why is the animal choice so limited? Instead of using the developers’ obvious imagination to come up with fun, appropriate characters, it seems the direction was just, “make it weird, but also make it a dog”.

Stages: there are just 5; around half the number compared to their previous game. Worse, one of the five stages is shamelessly ripped from Fight of Gods. Santa’s stage, complete with the music is here and the other four are utterly uninspired. Characters have 3 skins available: default, Christmas (presumably to justify the Christmas stage), and one unique comedy skin: e.g. slender cat as slender man, mighty beluga as a sushi chef.

Gone is any attempt at this being a proper fighter, Fight of Gods didn’t get the combo system right, it was a poor imitation of Street Fighter but at least it recognized the need to try. Gone are any unique combos. Gone are all grabs. Gone are passive specials. In their place, is an assist mode which auto-combos from one button press. Where Fight of Gods was a game that became a meme, Fight of Animals forgets the game altogether.

Last time, there was a single slide before the first battle in arcade mode and another single slide after the unique boss named Boss. A ridiculous lack of effort which you could only make worse by not even doing that much. This time, arcade mode puts you through 8 or so random battles from the standard roster taking around 20 minutes, cue roll credits.

With a budget, first-time indie game you can make up for a low budget with clear vision and heart. When the follow-up then takes the heart away, there’s very little left. Ultimately, my friends and I felt like we were laughing with Fight of Gods. One can only laugh at this travesty of a follow-up.