Hello everyone and welcome back to Kralizec Gaming.Today we are going to take a look at Spartan Fist. This first person brawler roguelite promises fun gameplay full of punches with a cool soundtrack. Whether it can deliver on this promise is the question we will try to answer today. Spartan Fist is available on Steam for 12 € and 49 cents or your regional equivalent.

With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video Review

Text Review

Disclaimer: It should be mentioned that the game has been provided for free to me by the developers.

When I first saw Spartan Fist in the shop it immediately caught my attention as it reminded me of Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, a game which I enjoyed quite a lot and actually spent way more time than I expected. So lets see whether Spartan Fist can catch my attention in the same way.

Gameplay

So we actually are starting to see more and more first person roguelites hit the market and they are really trying to be good. Last week it was City of Brass this week it is Spartan Fist. And the fist in the name is really straightforward. It means this is a game about punching stuff. And towards the game, that’s essentially all you will be doing. Punching enemies until they die.

Luckily, the devs realized that just having a punch button would be boring and decided to introduce a few different fighting styles in two different ways. The first way they did it is through various types of different fists you can equip and it’s just up to you to find out which ones you like. I personally preferred a fast fist on one hand and a slow hard hitting punch on the other. On top of that each fist has its own little system of combos that is well worth of mastering it.

The second way the devs decided to introduced fighting styles is through literal fighting styles and you got access to three of those. The base, duelist style is meant for fighting one on one, secondly you have the updraft style which is meant for being a jerk and knocking your enemies into the air and lastly you have the brawler style which is there for fighting many enemies at once.

Another system that is layered on top of all of that are the upgrade systems of which there are two. The first gets used inside of each gameplay and is called dips. These dips are literally dips for your fists that add a few different effects to them, like life-drain or the ability to punch guys further away. The second one is the way you keep improving your character between each gaming session and it’s all about buying upgrades with the money you get for punching guys.

And what sort of guys will you be punching? Well, quite a few. Starting with your basic dudes and going up to cats, rats or even pigeons in freaking mechanical suits. The game obviously went for a bit of a humorous path them it came to the enemies. But sadly, that doesn’t make them distinctive as they essentially use the same set of attacks some just have the access to a larger selection of those but once you learn all of the, they get quite easy to fight.

And even more sadly, exactly the same can be said about the bosses. No special abilities can be found on them. Their attacks are just stronger versions of the basic attacks. This I find to be a huge missed opportunity. Only the last boss has one extra mechanic but even that is somewhat lame as he just zips around and you need to wait patiently to hit him.

The last thing that will be making influencing the gameplay are the traps. And while there is a lot of them in game, there are only a few types. And once you get used to them they are pretty easy to avoid. The coolest thing about them is the fact that you can use them against your enemies as well.

So the gameplay feels okay. Not great though. I think it’s largest problem is the fact that even though there are different types of enemies they all do exactly the same thing, never really forcing you to take use a different strategy. And even worse, even all the bosses feel like that. Devs, if you are listening to this, add some variability in how the enemies fight, it is really lacking.

Graphics

Okay, that’s enough about the gameplay. Let us now take a look at the graphics. Spartan Fist use the oh so ever since Minecraft came about popular style of graphics called voxel graphics. It’s a style that can work for many games really well and does so for Spartan Fist as well.

Then there is the second part to graphics. How well they are done. And voxel graphics have a big advantage here since well, you don’t have to concern yourself with creating detailed shapes as well, everything is shaped like a cube. Just add a bit of a texture and then you’re done. On the other hand it does mean that this graphical style is almost always okay to look at. And exactly that can be said Spartan Fist’s graphics. They do their job well but you certainly won’t be amazed by them.

Music

Then there is the music. Which, actually is amazing. Though a bit repetitive. But it’s made tunes I personally really liked and felt that they fitted that quick pace of combat just perfectly. And the sound effects for everything happening? Those are decent, nothing amazing but I don’t think anybody will be complaining about those.

Performance

And last of all, lets talk about the performance. And this is actually the biggest problem. But lets start with the positive. I haven’t seen any bugs and the game ran smoothly. Except when it decided it would run at all. I experienced many, many crashes. And, that’s just not okay. This is not a super complex game where I could understand that the game crashes once or twice. This is a fairly small game which has crashed numerous times for me. Sad, just sad.

Conclusion

So… in conclusion: Spartan Fist is a decent game. Not bad, not great. Mechanically it’s even great but is held back by the fact that there is little to none enemy variety. And the fact that as of right now it crashing frequently just cements the fact that I can’t really recommend this. If you like the concept of punching through hordes of enemies in a roguelite, well, you can buy Spartan Fist. But I’d at the very least recommend waiting for a sale or for patch that fixes the crashing.

So, that’s it for today guys. Hope you like the review and if you did, please consider upvoting the review and following my blog. And comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.

Disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly from the Steam game page