Anger Foot review: A kaleidoscopic explosion of violence, excrement, and shoes

Back when I played an extended demo of Anger Foot for a preview, my biggest question was, “will this game sustain itself for longer than two hours?” This question seems like generic preview fodder, but I am not kidding when I say some parts of Anger Foot had me wanting to find any excuse I could to do anything else. After finishing the full game, I have to say I’m grateful I was able to use my save from the preview, and double grateful I was able to play the rest in one sitting while my wife and child left the house for a few hours. I feel like I was held down and force-fed a concentrated tube full of the worst instincts of crude comedy, like I was strapped to a chair Clockwork Orange style while a machine pried my eyes open and an array of TV screens showed me the entire history of Pepe the Frog memes while speakers behind me blared the entire Bloodhound Gang discography on repeat. Oh, and the walls were covered in those decals you see on trucks a lot of the kid from Calvin and Hobbes defiantly pissing.

The vibes are rancid

I’ve said it before; the vibes presented in Anger Foot are like Hotline Miami meets Meet the Feebles. It’s like if Rodney Greenblat used his powers for evil instead of good. It’s like if early 2000s skateboard culture was run by Juggalos instead of well-meaning dorks like Tony Hawk. Anger Foot has one joke, and runs that joke through every filter it can think of throughout its runtime, and thinks every time it shows a hoodie-wearing muppet sitting on the toilet is funnier than the last. If that sounds like a great time to you, more power to you. I laughed once at a gag right before the ending, when the villain reveals his plot to transform “Shit City” into “Nice City.”

Anger Foot also draws a lot of humor from using wobbly physics for everything, kind of like how a Gang Beasts or Genital Jousting does. It’s amusing, but again, Anger Foot shoves everything into its one lane of jokes, so it gets old super fast. And all the while, the whole game’s core premise is at odds with its humor anyway.

Giving sweating bullets a new meaning

Anger Foot is an incredibly “sweaty” game, the kind that gives the “git good” crowd a sugar rush of epic proportions. Like I mentioned before, this game is a lot like Hotline Miami. You barge into a space full of enemies with deliberate placement. You have to take these baddies out as quickly as possible, because as strong as you are you are just as much of a glass cannon as they are. Memorizing placement is the key to long-term success, though alternatively if you have top-shelf reactive reflexes you can brute force your way through. The thumping soundtrack grows more complex as you move forward and tear through enemies, encouraging you to never slow down.

The problem here, aside from the inevitable “skill issue” non-argument, is Anger Foot feels designed explicitly to trick and trap the player to catch them off guard and halt their progress for the lulz. Hit-scan damage ensures enemies have deadly accuracy the moment you step in their visual range (which of course extends around corners), enemies are placed in every conceivable blind spot, and your burly brute of a hero can take at most three hits (one from melee or explosive damage). Dying is a full level restart, with no checkpoints even for multi-phase boss fights. The puzzle-like level layouts that make Hotline Miami so good are not part of the equation here, to say the least.

For the most part, the difficulty isn’t a dealbreaker. Levels are super short, designed in some cases to be speedrun in 30 seconds or less. Dying in the shorter levels isn’t a big deal, and the vision can even start to shine. But the problems crop up when Anger Foot gets too cute for its own good, making levels longer and more complex, so much so that having to restart gets so demoralizing you just want to turn the game off. You can get away with this style in games like Super Meat Boy or Hotline Miami, but those games speak a more thought-out, considered language throughout. Anger Foot feels like it has no foresight in comparison.

Visible seams

It feels weird to have a game that’s so confident in its style and humor, built around blasting through as fast as possible or getting caught in exhausting retry loops depending on player skill. That said, there are difficulty settings that are meant to either slightly pull off the gas, or eliminate the challenge entirely by turning off death. I messed around with all the settings to see if there was a sweet spot, or if removing the challenge made things worse. It’s a little bit of both.

Removing death entirely certainly made getting through a breeze, and didn’t entirely ruin the flow of the game. After all, it’s still a fast-paced action gauntlet through linear levels, with bonus objectives to encourage focusing on playing different ways of optimizing speed. Difficulty settings don’t take those away, so there’s still a meta level of challenge. But giving the style and jokes room to breathe doesn’t do them any favors.

One thing I noticed that contradicted the difficulty was the different shoes and sneakers you can unlock. Each pair has its own special property, such as turning the kick into an uppercut or making enemy heads really big to facilitate headshots. Others had trickier properties, such as limiting some abilities in favor of others. The basic loop of going as fast as possible and not getting hit does not leave much room for nuance. With death turned off I actually felt like I could play around with the different sneakers. But on default settings, the space to use more than a select few basically evaporated.

Anger Foot has a laser-targeted feel to its approach, and I can certainly see a specific group of FPS sickos losing their minds over it. There are tons of challenge, built-in speedrunning, and lots of flashing colors. There’s enough toilet humor to decimate an underfunded transit station bathroom, too. But if you fall outside of those extremely specific (and smelly) parameters, potential interest in Anger Foot is going to plummet. I don’t see the humor being enough to encourage casual audiences to stick around, even with the ability to turn dying off. Personally, I’m happy to wash my hands, uh, literally.

Anger Foot is available for PC on July 11, 2024. A code was provided by the publisher for review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.