Tacky is a difficult word to define. Well on the face of it Girl Fight seems to be quite a tacky concept. Lets get some scantily clad ladies to fight each other and we’ll wrap a nice Beat ‘Em Up excuse around the whole thing. Tacky though it may seem I’m still a man so there has to be at least some appeal to it. If nothing else just a reason for some more mindless violence, a thing sorely lacking in video games. Yeah.
First booting up Girl Fight you will be presented with a menu as baron and featureless as the game itself. There is the inevitable roster of beat ‘em up classics like arcade mode and training but nothing even close to the edge of the box yet alone outside of it. I stepped sheepishly into the training arena to try to get to grips with the controls and the general principles behind Girl Fight.
Nothing is explained and before I know it I’m choosing one of the 8 characters and selecting the two PSI AMPS I want to use. Essentially during combat you build up a special meter, called PSI, and when it reaches a certain amount you can activate one of them granting you stuff like health with every strike, reducing the damage dealt by your foe and gaining more ‘PSI’. Those are the three you start with and more will can be unlocked as you progress. It’s a nifty idea and the only thing Girl Fight does that we haven’t quite seen before but it’s no game changer.
Fumbling around the training room pausing the game, finding the commands for a combo and then remembering them and trying to perform it reminds me why I so loved the ability to show combos on screen in Tekken. It’s not a complicated feature but oh my does it make a difference. Videos of characters performing the move help somewhat too and at least give you an idea of the timing. Am I pressing them as fast as possible or timing it with my character’s movements? Who knows, just figure it out. That being said with only 8 characters on offer even combined there is a very short combo list and even less variation. It wouldn’t take long at all to learn them all.
If you where to spend time on Girl Fight that is. Even if you did want to there really isn’t all that much to keep you coming back. Arcade, versus, online and training. That’s it. If you want to avoid going online and have nobody to play with then you are limited to arcade and training. Even another arcade mode cleverly dressed up so that it looks like something else would be better. Just some collectables, a level up system or side scrolling mini-game. It may not have been a great feature but it would have been something. As it stands there is a ‘plot’ which is entirely driven between fights explaining why the girls are being experimented on and pitted against each other. Whoever wins is granted freedom. Nothing clever, nothing exciting. Nothing even really appealing.
With a title like Girl Fight you would expect that at least if the appeal of the fighting is minimal there’s going to be something to look at for the blokes. And there is certainly an attempt to make the game as sexy as possible. Chest wobble is almost on par with Dead or Alive (almost). Even if that’s your thing it makes no difference because the graphics are just too bad. The textures are low quality and there really is little to no sex appeal even for the shameless among us. You know who you are.
With massively increased graphics fidelity there may have been at least something to look at in Girl Fight. But there isn’t. Poor fighting mechanics, a complete void of features and a story a child could have written join forces with the low quality visuals and generic music to create an entirely underwhelming experience. This is certainly one to avoid even if you’re just after watching ‘hot’ Girls Fight. From a developer like Kung Fu Factory with decent experience on making fighting games this is a massive disappointment.
Reviewed on PS3
