Action Fist (5.5Mb)
Action Fist by Beau Blyth is a decidedly good free 2D side-scrolling action platformer with a distinct retro feel about it. It’s about one boy’s (or one girl’s) quest to defeat the robot army that has stolen their favorite scarf, dog and girl/boyfriend. Naturally it’s a matter of honor to reclaim your scarf! And if you get the dog and girl/boyfriend back, well that’s good too. Like many games of yore, there are infrequent (and often cheesy) cutscenes during play. Not surprisingly you want your possessions back! How ever can you manage without your scarf? You are armed with a gun though, so you don’t actually use fists to play, despite the game title. But you are out to play with a vengeance, against some formidable foes!
It has sufficient differences to titles like MegaMan and games of similar ilk, to make it very well worth playing in its own right! Guns can be upgraded to fire different color bullets, which increase damage to color-coded enemies making it far from being just a novelty! There are four normal difficulty modes, with two extra difficulty modes that are initially locked for hardened gamers to earn and use. The game is far from easy especially at harder levels, and each (difficult) boss fight requires a different strategy.
This approach works very well and can range from tackling electricity-shooter armored tanks to having to down extremely violent giant guinea pigs with an aggressive and decidedly malevolent mantra about them! As in many ‘like’ action platform games it may take many attempts to learn and exploit boss patterns of movement and fire. There’s a vehicle level too to add to the variety of gameplay.
There is often a high level of your own and enemy bullets onscreen making dodging enemy fire fun, to say the least! There’s a Double jump and Rally jump (bouncing alternately up walls like in Kruunu HERE) and the alternate characters have different mechanics, giving additional replay value. There are secret areas as well where you can diverge from the main path and move through a different level. Old wooden boxes are very useful for obtaining medikits, power-ups and many other interesting/useful things. Once again you have unlimited ammo and restart a level if you use up one too many lives!
If you’ve a gaming partner handy, there is a 2-player co-op mode available, which though not adding much to the actual gameplay, does add a further dimension to playing the game. You can customize keys to use, or use a joystick. Default keys are ‘arrow’ keys and ‘X’ key to select in menu; and 'arrow' keys to move ingame, 'Z' key to jump (hold for double jump), 'X' key to shoot and 'C' key to change weapon once you have obtained extra weapons.
A great deal of care and attention has gone into making Action Fist one of the best looking and best sounding freeware games around. You can play the music back through your PC music player too, or make your own mix/remix of tracks eg using Audacity. You can Google "Action Fist playthrough" YouTube if you wish to view walkthroughs.
The game has been tested in Win 7 (32-bit), Vista and XP. You can change between windowed mode and Full-screen via the menu or by using the F4 key.
The graphics and music are suitably excellent and this is one - really great 2D action game to add to your collection! Awesome!
Download and Video HERE
Game author’s website HERE with some other free games by this author
