Punch, kick karate man

Booting it up now, that context still matters. You choose from Hawk Manson, Mace Daniels, Alana McKendricks, or Ben ‘Smasher’ Johnson, each with their own stats and fighting styles, and tear through seven levels spread across 22 stages, punching, kicking, and improvising with whatever comes to hand. Pipes, guns, grenades, rocket launchers; if it’s lying around, it’s going to be used as a blunt instrument. There are dozens of moves per character, minor destructible environments, and that distinctly late-’90s sense that excess was a feature rather than a flaw, even when the engine is clearly struggling to keep up.

Is it basic? Absolutely. But it’s also honest fun. The combat has weight, co-op still brings a smile, and I found myself enjoying it most once I stopped looking for depth and just accepted the rhythm of moving forward, breaking things, and occasionally getting knocked flat by something I didn’t see coming. It’s not clever or original, and it doesn’t really try to be, which, oddly, makes it easier to accept and enjoy.

Visually, both games are unmistakably PS1-era, and I mean that in the best possible way. The polygon wobble, texture warping, and rough edges are all here, and there’s a moment a few minutes in where your eyes finally stop fighting the image and your brain just shrugs and goes along with it. Retro doesn’t mean only pixel art; these early 3D games have their own aesthetic, and this collection embraces it rather than sanding it down.

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Retro game improvements

Developer Implicit Conversions has sensibly added a range of visual settings into the mix, including CRT scanline filters, CRT patterns, and upscaling presentation tweaks that let you soften the harshest edges or lean fully into the nostalgia, depending on your tolerance. I settled somewhere in the middle, toggling options on and off until reality and nostalgic memory caught up. More importantly, the games now run smoothly. Frame rates no longer feel like a technical endurance test, which alone makes these versions far more playable than memory might suggest (I remember Fighting Force 2 being horrible).

The quality-of-life additions are where this collection really earns its keep. New control schemes help both games feel less alien on a modern controller, though muscle memory dies hard (sorry). I lost count of how many times I grabbed the wrong weapon because the pickup prompt flickers just long enough to register, but not long enough to react. Save states and a rewind feature are lifesavers.

Where things falter is Fighting Force 2. Even back in 1999, it felt like a misstep, and time hasn’t been especially kind to it. I remember a group of us gathered around a TV, uncontrollably laughing at how bad it was. The sequel pivots away from brawling into a third-person action game that owes more to Syphon Filter than Sega’s arcade heritage, and essentially runs on Tomb Raider 2’s controls setup. You play as Hawk Manson, infiltrating research facilities to uncover cloning experiments run by the Knackmiche Corporation, sneaking and shooting through environments that were clearly aiming for cinematic flair but ended up straight-to-DVD.

A laughably bad sequel

On paper, it sounds like growth. In practice, it’s awkward. I wanted to like the change in direction more than I actually did, which is probably the most honest thing I can say about it. The combat lacks the immediacy of the original, the level design feels restrictive, and the game never quite settles on what it wants to be. There are over 20 weapons, hand-to-hand combos, and destructible elements, but none of them click in the same way as the original Die Hard Arcade wannabe.

That contrast defines the collection. Fighting Force is crude but joyful. Fighting Force 2 is earnest but clumsy. Playing them back-to-back makes the split impossible to ignore, even if part of me kept wishing the sequel would eventually relax and let itself be fun.

Neither game was outstanding in the late ’90s, even as guilty pleasures. This was the era of Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, and a whole trilogy of Tomb Raider games redefining expectations. Against that backdrop, the Fighting Force duo always felt slightly behind the curve – scrappy, willing, but never quite able to keep pace.

(Image credit: Core Design / Implicit Conversions / Limited Run Games)

As a retro package, though, it’s arguably more welcome now than it was then. That’s because this collection understands what it is. It doesn’t try to reinvent these games or oversell their importance. It simply preserves them with care, smooths out the roughest edges, and lets memory do the rest. I didn’t come away newly impressed so much as oddly content, which may be the best outcome a release like this can realistically aim for.