Fighting game history is surely filled with plenty of throwaway fighting games created with minimal effort to maybe make a quick buck. Hell, the plethora of Street Fighter clones cranked out just in the early to mid 1990’s validates that statement alone, and so you’d think yet another such title made some 30 years later wouldn’t make for a very interesting inspection… hear us out.
We admit the 2020 title “Urban Street Fighter” flew under our radar entirely, but a recent video from Hollowshy gives us a closer look at it and all we can say is “wow, that is impressively bad.” So much so that it is indeed worth sharing.
First off, the reviews on Steam for the five dollar game are actually mixed, (there are five, by the way) but on closer inspection the two that see it as laudable are both tongue in cheek critiques that talk about Urban Street Fighter as though it were a life changing experience.
It very well may be the case that developer Pix Arts wasn’t looking to make a game that would compete with modern fighting games or even begin to approach modern standards for the genre, as Urban Street Fighter feels more like an experiment or an exercise that was never intended to feel like a complete experience.
As Hollowshy takes us through the bare bones menus that lack even a main title screen, we begin to see the many areas of USF quality assurance forgot to inspect.
The moment we reach the character select screen is when things really start becoming apparent as the eight available characters not only look about half completed, their themes and concepts carry nothing in the way of rhyme or reason.
Soccer Boy, for instance, is a soccer player who looks just like the characters from the Nintendo 64’s FIFA 98′. Mechanim Bot (whose name text is gets partially covered by the character thumbnails when you select him from the player one side) looks like a manikin or a half complete crash test dummy.
You’d think you could predict certain fighting styles based on some of these characters, (Boxer seems like an easy one to pin down) but you absolutely cannot.
It’s a lot better to see this all in action as Hollowshy explains, so we’ll let him do the rest of the talking.
Anyone want to first to five my Robot Kyle?