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Review: One Must Fall 2097 [PC] |
The PC market has for the most part always largely been considered a virtual wasteland when it comes to fighting games. The best that PC owners have typically been able to expect is a port of the odd fighting game here and there, usually as not much of an improvement or even worse than the original, despite often being relased much later than their console counterparts.
And the few original fighting games that do get designed for the PC system have often come out disasterous, to put it lightly (take FX Fighter, XenoPhage, and Rise of the Robots as prime examples). But there was one diamond of note to be found in this field of disappointment - One Must Fall 2097.
The game was developed way back in 1995 by Epic MegaGames (now famous for Unreal Tournament) during their involvement in the active shareware market of the mid-90’s. As a result, distribution of the limited but playable demo version of the game was fairly easy to find and free to download off of local bulliten boards (or the much less used internet of the time). But the full registered version could only be mail-ordered, making the title all but invisible to the majority of still modem-less computer owners of the time.
Which was a real shame, because I suspect the game could have done very well in the commercial market. But enough with the computer game industry history lesson, and on to the game itself…
To put it simply up front, One Must Fall 2097 was a miracle design of fighting game goodness. The basic concept here is giant robots duking it out Street Fighter style. Graphically, the game used 2D polygon models for it’s robots. Their detail levels were low as a result, but it allowed for some nice fluid animation, which was important in this relatively fast moving game. The arenas, alternatively, consisted of 2D drawn backgorunds, but they looked nice enough. Generally, everything in the game looked very nice and slick, but with nothing exceptional to really stare in awe at. The sound, likewise, was simple but functional. The musical score was good, but probably not something you’d want to listen to on it’s own on a music CD. It added nicely to the game and never got annoying though, which is still better than a lot of games can boast. The sound effects were also very simple, with delivered hits resulting in the clangs and thuds you’d expect big robots to make when they beat on each other. There was no speech samples at all, but they’re robots, so what are they going to say? One thing to note is that the game had varying levels of graphic detail and sound options, which although may be irrelevant today, was very appreciated at the time in ensuring even low end computers of the time could still play the game at full speed.
Although technically the game was nothing to get too excited about, the gameplay certainly was. First, there was two different modes of play that should be given an overview. The One Player and Two Player modes had a typical arcade style setup, with two players duking it out against each other or one player going through each enemy character until facing the boss. An interesting aspect here was getting to choose both a pilot and a robot (there were ten of each). The robots were what you controlled in the arena. But the pilots had different stats for speed, power, and endurance (armor), which impacted how your robot handled. Choose a pilot with a high power and you’ll do more damage. Choose one with a high speed and you’ll move quicker and jump farther. It’s largely up to your personal preference though, since amazingly there was incredible character balance in the game, and choosing any combination of pilot and robot could conceivably be used well. The other mode was tournament mode. Here you went through tournaments, upgrading and buying new robots through your earnings from winning matches. You’d have to repair damage done to your robot even after matches you won though (unless you got a perfect), so money had to be kept in stock for that as well. You could also train yourself to gain more stats like the pilots have in one player mode. All incredibly in-depth, with plenty of stuff that simply couldn’t ever be featured in an arcade release.
Other highlights included arena hazards, with stuff that you could get hit by that didn’t come from your opponent. Pre-fight quotes from both characters in the one/two player game, or from just the opponent in tournament, which doesn’t sound like a big deal but was actually pretty impressive considering how many characters there were to fight in the tournament. It also had the first ever super jumping ability, which Capcom later incorporated into many of it’s games. And the first ever inclusion of a stun bar, which was later (much later) used by Capcom in the SF3 series. Aerial special attacks, which were already used sparingly by a few games, this game used better and more extensively. A combo meter was in place, which Super Street Fighter II was the only other game to use at the time. Juggling combos were extensive, which aside from Mortal Kombat’s clumsy system were all but unheard of at the time. You also had the ability to control some projectiles to a degree, aiming them up or down and affecting their speed with the movement controls. And secret finishing moves, which basically consisted of two-part fatalities, looked just as cool as anything
from Mortal Kombat even without it’s gore factor. Every robot only had one finishing move pattern, but it was typically quite complicated and hard to do. But it racked you up tons of points in the one player game, and tons of cash in the tournaments, so they were definately worth learning to get off consistently.
There were also a lot of other secrets to this game. And I mean a LOT. This game has the most secrets I’ve ever seen in a fighting game, ever. There were whole secret menus to open up from the main menu. There were secret difficulty levels to unlock. There were secret codes to do all kinds of crazy stuff during a match (think MK3 here). And there were dozens of secret opponent characters to discover. In the tournament, you actually had to get to secret characters by doing finishing moves (which were already sort of a secret in themselves) to certain other characters. Then if you finished those secret characters off with a finishing move you could sometimes get special upgrades that actually gave you new improvements or moves you couldn’t use in the one and two player modes! But the one player arcade mode had a secret just as devious to discover, where you first had to play on the hardest secret difficulty level, do the full finishing move on a certain stage, then do another secret finishing technique to progress into an attached room. Then you got to fight some crazy secret characters of obscene power and difficulty, but that you could get insane amounts of points from defeating.
The game had so much to offer it was staggering. More options than any other fighting game I’ve ever seen, allowing you to customize most aspects to your liking. The tournament system was incredibly fun and innovative, adding a sense of advancement and meaning to the matches. And on top of that it had an extremely tight and responsive control system, good character balance, fairly impressive computer AI, and extremely fun gameplay. With it only taking up about 15 megabytes, it’s the game that’s stayed on my hard drive the longest, and I still keep coming back to play it again every once in a while these days, because it really is just that good.
- SAL
