A slow and sluggish reprise of the golden age of beat-em-ups.
Spiritually an update of the simple, yet hugely compelling, likes of Streets of Rage and Final Fight, Fighting Force manages to miss many of the qualities that made those sort of games great, instead settling for a fairly bare-bones button masher.
Graphically, there's nothing worth being too picky over, considering the game landed only a couple of years into the Playstation's life. The animations are nice, the characters and enemies are bold and colourful, and the sceneries do the job, at least what there is of them.
This is the game's first slip: there aren't 'levels' as much as confined endurance arenas. You'll be met with wave after wave of bad guys until a door opens and grants access to an area much the same as the last. A lot of stages don't even have that, instead taking place in a single empty area with 10 minutes' worth of fist-fodder thrown at you. You beat the stage, sit through a load screen and find that the boss fight is in the exact same place.
Speaking of which, battling with the bosses perfectly illustrates the slow, clumsy nature of the combat. Your attacks are incredibly slow and delayed (save, maybe, for Alana) and with no ability to block or dodge, you're pretty much at the mercy of the enemy's attack patterns. If they decide to become temporarily invulnerable and parry your attacks, or the triangle button wants to spin you around instead of initiating a grapple, there's little you can do except run away and try again. All this results in fighting a boss to be a matter of constantly performing hit-and-run attacks for minimal damage, which only makes the experience tedious when it should be an exciting climax to the level.
Also, there's the sound, or rather the lack of it. Whereas games like Streets of Rage were driven by their memorable thumping soundtracks, the majority of Fighting Force takes place in almost deathly silence, save for the Macho Man Randy Savage grunts of the enemy.
Back when the game was new, I'm sure I'm not the only one who was sold on the prospect of branching paths and destructible scenery. It starts off strong with a few areas full of rocket launchers, shotguns, grenades, cars to be wrecked, poles to be snatched from walls and vending machines to smash open for health. Unfortunately, this is only representative of the first level. As the game progresses, all of these elements are abandoned and the environments become barren, to the point where having a barrel to throw is a novelty. The multiple paths are a nice touch, but the difference between levels are mostly cosmetic - you can take the fight to an empty air base or an empty naval base, it's your choice.
What the earlier 2D beat-em-ups proved was that multiplayer could add spice to a game, but wasn't in any way necessary. Fighting Force is beatable with one player, but it's a quiet, lonely experience, and one that begs for a friend to share the load.
It feels important to stress that all these problems aren't a symptom of its time or the technical limitations of the Playstation. Games in 1997 had the potential for responsive controls, interesting level structure and at least some form of soundtrack, let alone a good one. Fighting Force falls short in all these areas and is only recommendable to those whose hunger to punch and kick supersedes all else.