F.I.S.T. Forged in Shadow Torch is a great looking game. I think it’s important to say that from the outset because I’m going to bury this game in a lot of ways, but the graphics definitely impressed me. I played it on PS5 and while it’s not the most technically impressive title on the system its stylistic fusion of neo noir and robot styles mixed with some impressive animation and textures make it a standout title, visually. Some of the base areas, caves, and sewers can be a little bland but whenever the game takes you to a place settled by the game’s sentient races (known as furtizens in this game) the level of detail and cohesive visual design is top notch.

F.I.S.T. also controls reasonably well. This is a 2.5D Metroidvania platformer with an emphasis on melee combat. The protagonist Rayton feels pretty good to pilot through the game’s vast labyrinth of a map. All the standard jumps, dashes, double jumps and such are here, and they all work fine, but where the game sets itself apart is in the giant mechanical hand (the titular F.I.S.T.) that is carried by Rayton in a harness. Rayton uses this hand for combat and the game gives you a surprisingly complex move set complete with purchasable upgrades for your combos and a special move meter that recharges with normal hits and allows you to finish combos with a devastating uppercut or slam. Things get even more complex when you add the two additional weapons Rayton can find, each with its own moveset, and the various gadgets Rayton can get, such as carrot juice (which restores his health) or a homing missile he can fire at enemies. Every weapon also has unique environmental uses, with the fist being used to punch open certain doors and carry objects and the other weapons having similar abilities. It’s a very complex game but, with a couple exceptions I’ll get into, it controls surprisingly intuitively.

I’d also like to take this time when I’m praising the game to note the soundtrack. It’s inconsistent, with some of the tunes being short simple loops that can get annoying pretty quickly, but it contains some compositions that are both fantastic and very unusual in games. The jazz music when you’re in the Joffrey Street town area of the game is flat out great, and there are some other compositions I really enjoyed. The fact that the music made such a strong impression even though there were a fair number of tunes that I didn’t really like just shows how good the good stuff is.

Unfortunately for everything good about F.I.S.T. there are things that undercut or countermand it, leaving a game that is frustratingly inconsistent. The bones of a really good game are here, but the flesh wrapped around those bones is flabby and diseased. This is a game that does a number of things pretty well but is absolutely incapable of focusing on those things and routinely puts the emphasis on what the game does worst, undercutting everything good about it.

Now let’s begin the burial.

F.I.S.T. has a lot of flaws, but by far the biggest is the story. You can say that a story doesn’t matter that much in a Metroidvania, and generally you’d be right, but F.I.S.T. is an extremely talky game and has by far the worst writing and storytelling I can remember in a game released in the past 20 years. This may be at least in part due to the localization, which manages to be both grammatically pretty good and in many ways atrocious, but considering how bad the plot itself is, it can’t just be chalked up to that. Whoever wrote this tripe should not be writing video games. They shouldn’t be writing anything. I wouldn’t trust them with a grocery list. If they were a friend of mine I’d steal all their pens and keyboards so they couldn’t write at all. If they were a student in an English class I was teaching I’d strongly suggest they pursue mathematics or drawing or anything that doesn’t rely on putting words together in a manner that’s either pleasing or logical. The game manages to deliver every common sin in video game writing, from paper thin characterizations and irrational plots to long and boring exposition just the stupidest lore imaginable.

The basic structure of F.I.S.T.’s story is painfully generic. Beyond the furry-friendly anthropomorphic animal aesthetic we get a tired old story of an oppressed city where the furtizen residents live under the metallic fist of the robotic Iron Dogs who defeated them in a war some time ago. Rayton is an old veteran whose power armor was destroyed in the battle, leaving him with just the disembodied hand. Will there be reunifications with old companions, shocking betrayals, a mysterious sexy cat girl who guards an ancient secret and a fat old bear inventor who serves as comic relief? You already know the answer. Will all of this boring story take way too longer to get through? Absolutely. But F.I.S.T. goes beyond that with its own, specific, and somewhat unique foibles. F.I.S.T. loves to do this thing where characters just endlessly repeat the same stupid in game name over and over until it loses all meaning and you are tempted to hit the Playstation button and shut down the game instead of just hitting “X” to skip through piles of the most inane dialog.

“I think you should go to the Western Range.”

“The Western Range is where the resistance went after it was defeated by the Iron Dogs.”

“Now the resistance is in the Western Range so if you want to meet their leaders you must go there.”

“Once I am in the Western Range I will track down the leaders of the resistance.”

“That is why you must go to the Western Range.”

“But how will I get to the Western Range?”

“There is a cable car that can take you to the Western Range?”

“There’s a cable car that can get me to the Western Range?”

“Yes. The rat gang is guarding the route to the Western Range.”

“Will you let me through so I can reach the Western Range?”

Every conversation is like this and it’s maddening. It’s impossible to care about any of these characters or the world or anything at all when the writing is so bad and there is just so much of it. The voice acting itself is more of a mixed bag and mostly unobjectionable except for this one character named Pippin who is the whiniest little twerp I have ever heard and instantly made me want to kill him. Considering just how much story this game has it’s a serious issue how awful it all is.

But F.I.S.T. doesn’t just stub its toe (finger?) in that one area. The game has a host of other problems. I mentioned that the game mostly controls well, and that’s true, except that the jumping and dashing are a little imprecise. They’re not awful as these things go, but you don’t have the kind of pinpoint control you do in the best that the genre has to offer. The controls work well enough for combat and for basic platforming scenarios as long as you don’t have to do intricate and complex chains of jumps and dashes under time pressure.

The game routinely forces you to make intricate and complex chains of jumps and dashes under time pressure.

Whether this takes the form of infiltrating booby trapped sewers where you need to dash past spinning spike plates with miniscule timing windows or a “boss fight” where you need to make your way through a complicated chase sequence that requires numerous pinpoint precise jumps and use of the dash move at a rhythm that’s slightly off from its recharge speed (requiring you to run forward, dash, then pause for a split second while it recharges before you run forward and dash again) it’s incredibly frustrating to wrestle with controls that have mostly served you pretty well but aren’t up to what you’re asked to do in this particular situation.

Of course that’s not the only bad sequence in the game. This is a long game for a Metroidvania and it includes just about every annoying gameplay wrinkle you can think of. A lengthy stealth sequence where you’re stripped of your weapons and it’s just a kind of lousy platformer for twenty minutes? Check. A whole level where you have to carry batteries around, meaning you can’t attack or even use most of your platforming abilities for long stretches but are under constant attacks from enemies, and even if you put down the battery to fight it doesn’t matter because they are all like dry bones or red skeletons and can only be temporarily disabled? You betcha. Multiple long underwater sequences with substandard swimming controls and an infuriating combat mechanic where you can only attack in the direction you’re facing but changing direction is painfully slow, meaning you’ll constantly be attacking just off from where the enemy is now or in entirely the wrong direction? Of course. It’s like the designers have played a ton of mostly good games with bad sections and taken away the lesson that all games must have their fair share of bad parts.

If F.I.S.T. were just a bad story and good parts sprinkled with some annoying bits it would still be a pretty good game. But it has other problems that persist throughout the experience. For one thing there’s the combat. I mentioned that the control system is intuitive and fun, and it is. But there are persistent issues. The interrupt, knockback, and knock down effects are all weird and inconsistent. Certain attacks will knock some enemies down but not others and it’s not always visually obvious who will be affected and who won’t. The game’s moves are also clearly designed primarily for one on one combat, but outside of boss battles, which have their own issues, this is very unusual in F.I.S.T. So you’re left with a combo system where you often find yourself hammering out a combo against an enemy only to eat a counterattack because he wasn’t stunned by what looked to be big, heavy, hits that stun other enemies, or you’ll be trying to go through a combo string on one guy and eat a hit from one of the gunners on the other side of the screen or one of the drones flitting about. Or just another enemy standing behind the one you’re attacking who is also hit by your attacks but not stunned by them for…reasons. If you like games where you smash out combos that enemies tank and counterattack but your combos are routinely interrupted by fast moving projectiles, teleporting bad guys, or counterattacks from guys who are tanking your hits with a smile then you will love this game. Much of the game’s combo system is actually pretty counterproductive in many situations because what you actually have to do is move quickly and use hit and run tactics. This is a common complaint for modern games but that doesn’t make it less substantial.

There are also camera problems. In a 2D metroidvania. For one thing the camera pan speed is slower than the maximum movement speed in the game, especially when you’re falling. That means that if Rayton falls you can actually move off the screen and lose track of your character, which is bad. There’s also the matter of the game being divided into “rooms” and the camera not panning past a doorway until you’re through it. This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that enemies get knocked between rooms and can still attack from off screen. This has you facing scenarios where, for example, you use a charge punch to knock the shield out an enemy’s hands but also knock his buddy across the room and through a doorway. You then kill the shieldless enemy and then follow the other guy through a door, only to find that as soon as you enter the new room you eat a strike from the other enemy who was off screen charging his attack. Even if you don’t knock an enemy into a new room there are numerous situations where you move between rooms only to be immediately attacks or hit by a hazard. If you happen to be moving vertically at the time you get to enjoy the game’s mechanic where taking a hit knocks Rayton all the way down to the ground without any control from the player, so have fun falling down several screens, frequently past a bunch of hazards you’ve just jumped over and will have to jump over again (you do get a generous invulnerability window after hits, which is nice, though some hazards weirdly damage you and cause you to vanish/respawn at a prior location, presumably as a means to keep you from abusing this mechanic.)

The game has inconsistent checkpointing. Most bosses will have a health recharge station/autosave point right in front of them, but there are a few who you have to trek to repeatedly if you die. In general the game is mostly generous with checkpoints except when it isn’t, which is about 20% of the time, but that 20% is very annoying, requiring significant replay of often frustrating sections. Similarly annoying is the fast travel system or should I say systems. There are two of them. One is called “teleporter” but is actually more like a pneumatic tube where you get into robotic sphere and roll to your destination. The other is just a system of vehicles involving a subway track run, appropriately, by rats and some mine carts and such. Getting back into town or back to a prior area to explore some of the locked rooms opened by new abilities is always just a little bit more of a pain than it feels worth to do, especially since many of those doors just hide small amounts of plentifully available currency or sometimes even booby traps, like a chest that reveals an optional “ninja frog” boss who absolutely wrecked me the first few times I tried him and provided very low return after being defeated.

The final major issue the game has is that a lot of things just ‘feel’ a little bit off for lack of a better term. For example, the game has a fair number of enemies who have big horizontal attacks that you need to jump to avoid. Most of the time this is just a normal jump to avoid, but there are a few enemies where you might have to double jump or jump dash to get above the attack. There’s nothing wrong with that conceptually, but it goes against your muscle memory from the other parts of the game, and often it won’t read super clear visually, where it looks like a single jump should get you clear but you just get nicked on the toe if you don’t hit the double jump or jump dash. This kind of thing happens a lot, and it’s made more frustrating by how much health many of the bosses have. Boss battles in F.I.S.T tend towards being marathons, and often require a lot of very precise movement to stay alive and small windows to attack back. Or at least they are until about halfway through the game when you unlock a skill that drops a small dome of electricity on the ground that does enormous damage over time and can whittle away huge chunks of health bar if you can trap an enemy in it. This is by far the most effective means to kill basically anything, and turns boss battles and many encounters against tough enemies into a simple matter of hammering the square button to build up special attack meter and then waiting for the boss to do an attack that he pauses in place after before dropping an electro field on him and draining his health. This is the best strategy from about halfway through the game through the end boss, and it’s a testament to unbalanced game design.

There’s good stuff in F.I.S.T. and there were periods where it was a really enjoyable Metroidvania, full of reasonable challenges and fun, engaging combat. Then I’d reach some ridiculous series of traps that asked the impossible from me, or a frustrating boss, or have to trek back to town or to another area, backtracking for at least several minutes and often more, and I’d want to just stop playing. I didn’t stop playing; I finished it, but I wish I’d bailed early. This game needed more polish and an editor. It got neither. Instead it got a sexy cat lady with a pneumatic figure.

I can see some people liking F.I.S.T. If you just want something that looks really good, it does. If you’re a Metroidvania freak it’s a Metroidvania, with lots of secrets and hidden bosses and the like. You might gel with its melee system and enjoy how impactful the hits feel via the Dualsense (very!) and not mind the flaws. You might have a sexual fetish related to furries that makes the story tolerable to you (though the story is intolerable for reasons unrelated to it being very much a game for furries.) I’m not here to judge. As for me I saw the potential and there were times when I was having fun, but all too often rather than feeling like a badass rabbit veteran with a mighty fist of justice I felt like the game was a bully grabbing my hand and smashing it into my own face as it jeered “why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?”