F.I.S.T. (forged in shadow torch) is a metroidvania from Shanghai based developers TiGames.
Set in a distopian dieselpunk world filled with anthropomorphized animals, you play part of Rayton.
Rayton is a rabbit with a giant mechanical fist on his back who leads the fight for the underground resistance.
The game originally released back in September 2021 and was part of the PlayStation "China Hero Project".
In order to compare as well as review I played the game on both a higher end PC and it's latest platform release, Nintendo Switch.
I'm going to start by giving my overall conclusion then give the pros and cons that led me there, then lastly a bit of comparison between the game on most powerful and least powerful platforms.
FIST is a very average metroidvania, there are times where the game really shines and feels amazing, but then there are more times of frustration, bugs and strange choices. It's one step forward, two steps back.
Given that this game has already been out 10 months, it's pretty unforgivable that so many glaring bugs remain in the game across platforms. This smacks of laziness and a price tag of $30 for an unfinished game really stings.
First thing you'll notice about FIST are the graphics. The character design, animation, backdrops and lighting are beautiful to behold, on PC with DLSS and all bells and whistles turned up , it's gorgeous.
I spent more than a few minutes jumping up to knock hanging lamps from side to side, just to watch the illumination play across the environment. But then you notice a frame glitch in the main character as it moves from walking to running and you can't under it....ever.
Cut scenes are particularly painful, while the story is actually quite engaging, the voice acting is truly awful. Close ups of the characters shows a pretty bad attempt at textured fur, not really a good call in a game where 99% of the cast are hairy beast people.
This is especially noticable in the Switch version where the fur looks more like a bad watercolor painting than the soft pelt of an animal.
Not a problem, you can just skip the cutscenes right? ... Well ... Sometimes
Sometimes the skip button works, other times it doesn't.
The dialogue boxes are also quite buggy, a couple of occasions I had one remain on screen until I completely closed the game. At one point I had a dialogue box at the bottom of the screen and a tool tip at the top only giving me about 30% visible screen real estate.
Not a problem, you can just close the game and restart it yeah? .. well no
I couldn't for the life of me find an exit game option, instead having to alt F4 or force close the game each time.
Then there are the menus. At the start of the game it tells you "best played with gamepad". This sentiment doesn't extend to the menu system it seems, where, if your trying to navigate the options it skips every other option forcing you to have to use a keyboard to change anything.
Down to gameplay now. The controls are pretty on point and Rayton feels responsive and satisfying to play for the most part.
Combat feels good and your hits carry a good amount of weight. There is a little too much 'hang time' in the air for my liking; but this seems more in line with it's DMC inspired combo system than anything else.
Some basic metroidvania functionality is missing at the outset. Most notably a dodge. You have a dash, but can't dash through attacking enemies. You just dash to them and stop rest to accept their incoming punishment.
I found this really counter intuitive to years of metroidvania muscle memory and a bit annoying. The genre staples do unlock further in however, as do skills and combos.
The combo purchase menu is a particular pet peeve of mine. You have to access a terminal, then navigate to an icon that has a skill name, you have to click through to the next screen to see the combo input and description; however when you back out of this screen, it takes you all the way back out to the game and you have to access the terminal from scratch all over again.
There are also some very regular and weirdly inconsistent drops in frame rate too. Regardless of graphic quality settings. These seem to occur completely arbitrarily, even where there's not much happening on screen. This is very prominent in the switch version where there are a lot of sub 30fps dips. This is particularly painful to play for people used to a 60fps baseline.
So you can see from this review there are a lot of minor nitpicks that add up to a whole lot of frustration. More than anything it's frustrating to see that these very obvious flaws and bugs haven't been addressed in the 10 months the game has been out in the wild. These are all things most developers would have fixed in alpha testing.
The fact that we're at this point doesn't fill me with confidence that it's a priority or even a consideration for the devs to fix and polish their release.
The market has been saturated with metroidvanias over the last few years and if you compare FIST to many, it really doesn't hold up. Next to games like Hollow Knight or Metroid Dread it seems very lacking.
It's worth a punt when it drops below $20, but I wouldn't pay $30 until they finish it.
(Well technically I did... Twice.. but I did so you don't have to!)
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