Anger Foot Analysis – AnaitGames

South African studio Free Lives has gradually become one of those that intuitively interests me, almost regardless of the type of game they offer. Since its debut with Broforce ten years ago, its very free approach to video game development (always with the help of Devolver Digital; the coincidence is so natural that it is frightening) has taken us from the ultra-violence of virtual reality with The Gorn to the whistle-blowing historical sports of Cricket Through the Ages; at first glance, you might assume that each of them comes from a father and a mother, but I think there are points of connection, clear enough that if you look a little closer, you can see similar feelings in Genital Duel, a comic vision of sexuality, and Terra Nil, a strategy game that tries to think about the role of humanity in the environment.

It may be a red thread that can only be found if you look for it, but I think it’s not hard to find traces of the same design philosophy in Wrath of the Nogtheir new game: an ultra-violent arcade game where you navigate a series of crazy levels by interacting with them, kicking them, using pins to open doors, activate switches, deflect grenades, and throw almost anything in front of you into the air.

The story that does exist tells us about Anger Foot, another inhabitant of the decadent City of Crap. Crime is rampant in Crap City: so much so that the vast majority of its inhabitants belong to one of four gangs that share the city’s criminal pie. On one side, there is the Violence Gang, the Luddites of crime, focused on the most primitive and purest expression of criminality: physical violence with clubs or firearms. Then we have the Polluter Gang, serial polluters who thrive in the lowest, stinkiest depths of Crap City; that is, the sewers and septic tanks. The Business Gang controls the most sophisticated form of violence ever invented by mankind: business; the Debauchery Gang, the most important thing: carnal pleasures. Anger Foot, for his part, loves sneakers; he collects them and he loves his collection. One day, he finds out that the very limited edition sneakers he wants are in the hands of the Violence Gang; With a clean strike, Anger Foote fights his way through the gang’s thugs and retrieves his sneakers, but soon after they finally place them on the hanging rack he’s set up in his apartment, Goo Cop, Craptown’s chief of police (and, apparently, one of its top criminals), rips out the entire wall and takes his most prized sneakers, including the ones he’s just stolen with his own feet. There begins his brutal odyssey of revenge, violence, and sneakers, which leads him to confront four gangs in a conspiracy that extends to the Minister of Crime himself, the closest thing to a government official in Craptown.

From here, Anger Foot is an incredibly simple and straightforward game: as simple and straightforward as the kicks you use to dismantle all the doors in the game. Each level has one goal: to reach the end alive. In the middle, you navigate through mazes layouts of each level, breaking down doors and destroying enemies that appear, and whose only obsession is to finish you off as quickly as possible. The kicks are, of course, the main thing, and this melee attack is an important part of the elegance and genius of Anger Foot: the levels, as I say, are cheerful labyrinths, full of corridors connected to each other by always-closed doors that are waiting to be thrown open; kicks cause the doors to fly forward, killing any enemy that gets in their way. This is one of the many possibilities the game uses to make its physics system work, which is as simple as it is fun. Enemies die in a single hit, and the kicks are so imprecise that a single hit can cause an explosive and unpredictable domino effect, ending not only with one or more corpses lying on the ground, but with half the stage rolling; As explosions become more frequent, the consequences of a single shot can become increasingly unpredictable, and therefore more comical (there is, mind you, an achievement that is achieved by fussing so much that the game drops below 20 frames per second; perhaps the most beautiful achievement ever created).

As they say, a man does not live by kicks alone: ​​you can also use the firearms with which your enemies attack you, if you pull them out of their hands, having first turned them into a weapon. ragdolls punch. I admit that I was a little unnerved by the presence that the weapons gain as you progress in the game, already from the first world; the absurd task of doing everything with your feet is ingrained in my head because in the demo that was playable at Next Fest in 2022, the game actually “rewarded” you (with a small stamp on the level select screen, nothing more) to complete each level without using firearms, but in the levels of the final version, it seems that the game wants to prevent you from getting stuck more than necessary, imposing on itself, as I said, an absurd challenge. Each level has three objectives that give you three stars, and every five stars you get a new type of shoe; we talked about it then. You always get the first star for completing the level, but the other two vary from one to the other: some are obtained over time, others are for clearing the entire level of enemies; others, the more specific ones, ask you to complete more specific tasks, such as crushing cockroaches, cooking headshots or finish without jumping. In general, these “side missions” serve to approach levels from different angles that you might not otherwise consider, and to reward certain ways of playing (the fastest, the most aggressive) without necessarily punishing others; Anger Foot requires speed, requires aggression, and in most cases the faster and more aggressive you play the better, so trying to unlock stars on levels you already know is a good way to become more proficient in the art of foot delivery.

And finally, the sneakers. The sneakers are a good example of the genius that sets Anger Foot apart; not that it’s blinding, but that it’s more visible than anything else. Each shoe is also a cosmetic ( leather for your leg: what you’ll see when you land one of your phenomenal kicks) and something like something in between turn on the power and gimmick; Not only are they pretty, but they also change the game by adding new mechanics or changing the way some things behave: they can make your shots even better. uppercutsthrowing the person who received them upward, or doors that you knock down with the caress of your sneakers become a bomb that explodes on impact with whatever is in front of it, turning the game into an out-of-control explosion fest. Some levels save a star for those who complete them barefoot (again, a subtle way to encourage you to complete the “Basic Challenge,” the purest version of Anger Foot when Free Lives thinks you’re doing well on a level), but otherwise you can complete any level with any footwear; in some cases, interesting synergies form that help you get some stars more easily, as happens in one of the early levels where one of the goals is to get a certain number of stars. headshots: A slipper that makes enemies stubborn is a grateful aid.

But the best thing about sneakers is not their effect on the body. gameplay nor the amazing craftsmanship cartoon Not only is this at the core of every model, but there is a sense of humor that oozes from every seam. If you haven’t noticed yet, Anger Foot is a very funny game. It seems like every element that makes it up wants to be fun and funny with equal zeal and rigor; the level design, which a priori It seems to want you to think that you’re about to explore a stylized but more or less believable environment (city streets, apartment buildings), but within minutes it becomes maddeningly labyrinthine before your head can even process it; just when you’re fully immersed in the game, during one of the intermissions in which you can chat with other residents of Shit City, you pass by a building under construction, where you meet a group of troublemakers who seem to be directing the work: They’ve lost, they tell you, the architect’s plans, so they’re throwing rooms everywhere. On another occasion, when you’ve already completed eight or ten levels and are kicking everything clean, you find a gang member in a room, drinking wine, surrounded by wads of bills; she confesses that she’s not into crime, but into selling doors.

The shoes themselves, the combinations of their models and their effects in the game have the same humor as the Holy Sandals, the leather sandals that allow you to be reborn after death once, like Christ. The dialogue, the props in the levels, the posters on all the walls, the Broforce machine that you find in the stairwell, abandoned and collecting dust; it’s a demanding, tough game, strict in its controls and strict in its design, which at times feels closer to the arcades of yesteryear (or to games like Neon White or Hotline Miami, one of the obvious references to Anger Foot, as it turns out). The title – Hotline Amsterdam – of one of the songs on the impressive soundtrack, which many shooter the current ones, with whom he actually shares less than it might seem. Here it is about appearing, dying and trying again, in a circle, letting yourself get carried away by the game, playing, moving your head to the rhythm of the music. The layer of caustic and vulgar humor that covers the whole of Anger Foot enhances the immersion: Certainly It makes sense in a world where crime is as central as raising and catching Pokémon in Kanto, and it makes sense to operate everywhere. How else?

Over the course of several dozen levels, Anger Foot develops his ideas and hands over a piece of gum (the one with the “shooter “punches”, you might say), which surprisingly withstands stretching; As is often the case with these eccentric and specific ideas, I suspect that this is not because they are particularly elastic, but because Free Lives copes with them well. My advice is to take it easy, rather than devour it with the greed that may come over you (especially at the beginning, and especially if you manage to get into the game’s sense of humor: I instantly fell in love with it) in order to minimize the fatigue that may occur, feel after thirty, forty, fifty levels, kicking and shooting, even if at a certain point you know so much kung fu that you are handing out soles and bullets, returning grenades and drinking shots, almost without realizing it. ; In compensation, Free Lives can boast of having created a real dose of dirty jokes, wordplay and absurd humour, in which one can still see flashes of sincerity and sensitivity, perhaps the thread I spoke of earlier runs through all the studio’s games from the first to the last, and which confirms the feeling that it is worth paying attention to what these people have to offer, especially when they manage to combine goose with craft in gameplay like the one you see in the best moments Wrath of the Nog.

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