Fight Club

Added January 23rd, 2005 by Dakota Grabowski

Introduction:

“Mischief. Mayhem. Soap.” That’s the tagline when the movie based on the same name debuted in 1999, which was based on the 1996 book. The movie didn’t amount to critical success in the box office, but it’s the rental sales and dvds that have created a cult hit. Overseas it did better than America, so I guess you could say that America was quite slow catching on to the rage that was Fight Club. For those who don’t know too much about Fight Club, to participate and join the Fight Club you have to follow the rules. The most important rule could be the first rule. Rule number one states, “You do not talk about Fight Club.” If rule number one wasn’t to the point, check out rule number two which is “you do not talk about Fight Club.” Whatever the case is, I won’t be joining the Fight Club anytime soon, so I am permitted to talk about Fight Club and it is rather disappointing.

Gameplay:

Created by Genuine Games, this is their first attempt at a video game. Most developers would love to get their hand on a license such as Fight Club that has a great following. It was inevitable that Fight Club would be a hit or a miss and would not fall in the middle. It may be too little too late as it has been five years since the movie’s release and the game falls flat right off the bat. The game lacks any depth or complexity to attract the hardcore fighting fans. For a game to hide behind such a remarkable license from a cult hit, it’s a shame that there’s no saving grace at all in this title.

All fighting games have a story mode right? Well, Fight Club’s story mode is embarrassing and down right laughable. You control your character as he tries to join the Fight Club by fighting the nobodies that are underlings of Jack and Tyler. If you don’t know, Jack and Tyler are the honchos from the movies (played by Ed Norton & Brad Pitt) and they aren’t represented faithfully at all. The story mode never touches on anything covered throughout the movie, so it’s a shameless spin-off at its best trying to create its own story. You can fly through the story mode with about ten to fifteen minutes of playing and it will be over before you know it. If that wasn’t enough, Fred Durst is an unlockable character upon completing the story mode. Great, another cliché added to this game, when it didn’t need anymore than it had already.

The actual fighters in the game fall into a few categories. You have the brawlers, which are your straight up fighters similar to your back alley street thugs. The martial artists, who use tactics with accuracy and precision with hands and their feet, are also included. Lastly the grapplers, the typical wrestling morons, are the last to be included in the game which lacks diversity in its fighters. It doesn’t matter which class you pick, as all of them have similar moves and control the same way. There’s nothing here that is complex at all, so fighting fans who love to outthink their opponents will be upset right from the moment they start playing this game. This could have been something special, but it turns out to be nothing more than a button smasher.

Graphics:

If any category surpasses another, it would be the graphics. They aren’t ugly, but it’s the stiff animations that bring this down from good looking to average. You might as well be fighting with stick figures or even ‘Rock ‘Em Sock Em’ Robots because you are using roughly the most rigid fighters ever. The character models do look nice and even some effects have their own moments, but nothing amounts to anything successful.

Thrown into the game to make it even more interesting are instances where you will break your opponents’ bones and you will hear and see it breaking. The environments you’ll be fighting in were expected to be gritty and dark, and that’s what you get with the game. If you think it is in the game it is, but only diminish how great you thought it would be by like 100%.

Audio:

Fred Durst is a playable character in the game so, for more unrelated exposure, Limp Bizkit is also included in the soundtrack. Genuine Games did bring back the Dust Brothers’ songs originally from the movie so that stands up pleasantly. The voice-overs aren’t officially the all star actors from the movies, but the voice-actors sure do try hard to emulate them. Maybe a little too hard as the dialogue feels forced and overdone with trying to be too serious. You are able to customize the soundtrack with music off your Xbox hard drive but you are going to want to avoid this game at all costs, unless you want to see how bad someone could screw up a movie licensed video game.

Controls:

What’s left to be said about Fight Club? The fighters are so stiff and it’s hard to control them to do anything that’s original with moves. Almost all of them move the same way and they seem to be clumsy all the time. The developers even tried to take away full control of your character with a poor Training mode that doesn’t help out at all with learning your moves and combos. Even if I did want to continue to play this, it seems like they went to all ends to tie up the loose knots to make sure this wasn’t playable at all.

Replay:

There is download content already available, such as music and an additional fighter, but it’s not enough to show off to your friends. Online play is available and has some quirks to it. If you fight and are one of those types to never give up, you may end up breaking all your bones and being forced to retire. So you’ll have to make sure you submit if someone takes you to school online, but I am betting not enough players will even make it through a few matches offline before realizing that Fight Club is nothing special at all. If only they had decided to added more depth to the actual gameplay because then this game would have had more replay value to it than the meager amount of time you’ll be spending complaining about how bad it is.

Summary:

If I was David Fincher right now, I would be looking for the man or woman assigned to approve this project and making sure they never had a job again. Fight Club not only ruins what the movie set up for a cult life, but it takes away everything that may have been portrayed about how fighting actually goes down in the Fight Club. You should avoid this at all costs and forget this game ever came out.