Free Lives, the developers behind games like Broforce and Genital Jousting, are back with Anger Foot, a shooter that mixes the “blink and you’re dead” challenge of Hotline Miami with the corrupted Sesame Street vibes of Meet the Feebles. This is a game set in a world of degenerate muppet people who’ve built a society on genres of crime, and as the strongest degenerate muppet person you’re on a quest to kick the bejeezus out of everyone else. And collect sneakers.
Anger Foot’s vibes are not subtle. Stylistically, it’s like crude skateboard art come to life, like if Rodney Greenblat liked to draw vomit and murder instead of flowers, rainbows and Parappa the Rapper. The game’s setting is literally called Shit City, and it’s run by themed gangs who each participate in a specific kind of vice. As the hero, you’ve just completed a prestigious sneaker collection (after completing it by kicking a bunch of dudes to death in a rancid apartment building), the key pieces of which have been stolen. So you have to get them back, by kicking a bunch of dudes to death in various, rancid apartment buildings.
I spent time with a demo build of Anger Foot, which contains the first two “worlds” of the game. Each level is a lightning fast challenge that tests your reflexes, accuracy, and spatial awareness in ways I didn’t quite expect. If you watch a trailer it almost looks like one of those chaotic, wobbly physics-based games made to make streamers happy. But Anger Foot is actually super difficult and, on the default settings, doesn’t leave you much room for error. One hit from a goon or no more than three stray bullets will have you restarting a level from the beginning. But if you’re doing well you can cruise through stages like a lightning bolt traveling through a garbage dump.
Obviously, Anger Foot puts a lot into its crude sense of humor. It has a loud visual style, and the game is full of characters doing bizarre things like robbing their own parents, pissing into pools from two stories up and blowing up toilets while covered in comical censorship mosaics. Massive flies are buzzing around everything and, well, Shit City is often literal. It’s silly, but the gameplay isn’t goofing around nearly as much. Because of the low margin of error and fast pace, I often didn’t feel like there was time to revel in the degeneracy much. Sometimes levels started in spaces you could calmly walk around in and talk to people though, to break up the tension a bit.
After brute forcing my way through the first world, I did discover difficulty choices in the settings menu. You can toggle a few things, such as making enemies less accurate or turning off death entirely. So if you just want to indulge in the atmosphere that’s actually an option, just not one that presented itself upon starting a new game. But I appreciated the crash course in humility, even if the set of levels leading up to the first boss made me want to kick some doors down in real life.
Aside from the challenge of making it through each stage, there are also optional goals for every level. Goals can be timing-based, or reward you for things like not jumping or never using guns. Some of these seemed super daunting (how can some of these levels be finished in fewer than ten seconds?) but each star you earn goes towards unlocking new pairs of sneakers. These had surprisingly impactful effects, such as adding ammo for landing kicks or even changing the kick animation and properties entirely (while adding extra damage for boss fights on top). Seeing the surface of that variable had me thinking high level play for Anger Foot will be awesome to watch.
While I only played the first couple hours via this early demo, it’s easy to see what Anger Foot is going for. If you’re up for a challenge that is constantly changing the rules but always following a strict core gameplay loop, and don’t mind a bunch of edgy humor screaming in your peripherals the whole time, this is where you want to be. I am curious to see if Anger Foot can hold up with the difficulty settings turned down, or if the less casual players more interested in the vibes will lose interest.
Anger Foot is planned to come to PC sometime in 2024. A code for a demo was provided by the publisher for preview purposes.
-
Shacknews
replyLucas White posted a new article, Anger Foot is an intense twitch shooter full of deranged muppets and sneakers
