A Game Where You Can Punch Anyone, Anytime

Should I care about Will Fight For Food? Yes and no. Conceptually, it’s pretty cool. You can punch anybody whenever, even if they’re important to the story. But the combat isn’t great, and the concept quickly breaks down.

What’s it about? Here’s the game’s description, via its Steam page:

“Jared Casey Dent was a wrestler in a down-and-out bloodstained middle American town. He lost his own tournament in disgrace and vanished into the night… Wage war for the soul of Jared Dent, wanderer and troubled fellow, and choose his destiny over the course of one wild nonlinear night — or ignore all of that stuff and beat up approximately an entire town.”

Fun premise! You can talk with anyone and everyone or hammer your first into anyone’s face until they can’t be told apart from everyone. Either way, the game goes on.

Watch me play a bit of it here:

Why is (or isn’t it) cool? As I said, the basic setup is pretty interesting, and the writing isn’t half-bad either. The combat, however, is more than half-bad, a tiny handful of kicks and punches that whiff flimsy hitboxes or strike bodies that feel like cardboard boxes. Also, the game likes to make fun of common video game tropes, only to engage in said tropes seconds later. It’s the most infuriating form of parody, the kind that forces you to ask, “OK, why didn’t you just fix that instead of cracking a cheap joke about it?” Oh, and that “punch anybody” thing? Yeah, the game quickly finds loopholes to avoid creating real consequences for your less, er, wholesome actions.

Oof, sounds like a few cool ideas beaten bloody by poor execution. Yeah, pretty much. Then again, as is usually the case with Steam Snapshots, these are only my quick and dirty first impressions. Could be that it gets much better further in. Can’t say playing it for around an hour (total) compelled me to play more, though.

Should I buy it (even though there are a million-billion other Steam games I could spend my money on)? I’m gonna say no for now. That makes me a bit sad to say, given that the game’s brand of unabashed weirdness (a disgraced pro wrestler beating up tv superheroes, high school geeks in power armour, and everything in between) definitely resonates with me. What I played was sometimes funny, but not particularly fun. Pass.