Fantasy Strike – Switch review

Written by Kerith Busby

Fantasy strike is a new fighting game that has come from the developers and publishers at Sirlin Games and also has been designed by an ex street fighter dev, I know you thinking I have played that style of game before it’s been done time and time again but this has a lot of differences to what you will be used to.

Fantasy strike has been designed to be accessible to everyone whether you be new to fighting gamer’s or a grizzled vet, they have made game where it is not reliant on overly complicated combos and counters to be able to win a match. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying it won’t offer an experienced gamer as it will, you will have to learn new timings to work the moves in you want and you will need to learn how and when to use the Yomi counter.

The health bars are easy to read as they are broken down into segments where each one is a hit box, 7 boxes you can take 7 hits so its easy to see where you stand in terms of life. The bigger more powerful slower characters tend to have higher level of health, but the small fast nibble guys tend to have lower levels as you would expect to happen. The characters are split into 4 categories which are Zoners, Grapplers, Rushdown and Wild card so depending on your preferred play style you will find someone there you can get to grips with.

So on to the game play, the game play is easy to handle with different attacks being split across 3 buttons (y, x, a), special and grapple being on the shoulders and jump being the B button. There are some very simple combos which you can look at in the menu or learn via practice mode but on the whole I found the game play very slow, I know it is supposed to be more of a tactical fight rather than just going in like a mad one but  I found from playing arcade even the AI was spamming the same move over and over a lot which got to be very annoying.

There are several game modes available in fantasy strike practice, arcade as I just stated, daily challenge, boss rush and single match for solo modes. There is local play available to play with friends and of course the online play. There are general online matches against people and no fighting game would be complete with out ranked with is done as a 3v3 battle where you are placed in almost a tournament style setting fighting against other players. I did that there was some issues with the switch and being able to keep up with the connection to fight fully but I feel other formats may avoid this issue as even sitting a couple feet from my router I was struggling to not have delays.

The game looks good and has a really nice art style to it, the characters more well and it shows that there is a lot of attention to detail in the game as the moves some of the characters just look fantastic especially the water moves from Argagarg although my favourite character has to be the grappler Rook the stone golem.

So overall I have to give the game a 6/10, it’s a decent game that will have appeal to people who are new to fighting games but I do honestly think it will struggle to hold the experienced gamer’s out there which is a shame.