Fight Forever
Fight forever is a pretty standard stat grinding game with ambitions to be something more.
You play as an up-and-coming fighter who dreams of greatness. Gameplay consists of choosing training (or social) options between fights, then clicking the fight button and seeing if you’ve won or not. As you win fights, you advance up the rankings.
I wanted very badly to like this game–I used to box, and have a lot of love for the sport. Boxing is incredibly satisfying because of the interplay between physical ability, technique, style, strategy, and reading your opponent. There’s always something new to learn, and even a short sparring session is an intimate experience where you’re both trying to outwit and wear each other down in service of landing a clean hit.
Unfortunately, Fight Forever doesn’t really capture any of that. It’s more of a training game than a fighting game–you spend most of your time selecting from an overwhelming array of training options, and fights are two lines of text. It feels like there should be more to it, and maybe some of the social options you unlock later are worth it, but after about a half hour of repetitively clicking through links, I wasn’t interested in exploring further.
There might be more depth here than I’m willing to credit–you seem to have a lot of different stats that increase or decrease based on training, but they game doesn’t tell you what they do, or even display them. I wasn’t confident they’d have enough impact to try to figure out any underlying systems.
Of note: The game says it’s a “white paper” for a larger fighting MMO, with 3d action and complex career management. It makes a lot more sense given that context–if all of the options were fleshed out, and the stats played into a fighting game instead of just being crunched behind the scenes, this game would be rad. I hope it gets made, but, right now, Fight Forever is hard to love.