by Brandon CrawIf you’re like me, fighting games can be challenging to get into. The gameplay always looks so thrilling, but the time consuming process of learning how to play your character, along with the frustration of fighting against tough opponents, can leave you feeling disheartened as you lose match after match. Thankfully, the developers of Shot One Fighters seek to remedy the problems that plague this genre. By removing some of the more tedious tasks in playing a fighting game, this game’s ease of entry makes the genre more accessible than ever.
Shot One Fighters is a 2.5D roguelite fighting game with a run-based structure. Think of it as Slay the Spire but as a fighting game. You choose a fighter, select a route, then fight an enemy. Each win rewards you with a choice between different moves to add to your starter moveset. This encourages you to build out and hand craft your play style by choosing the combos that best suit your strategy. During every run, new combos combined with stat-boosting artifacts can shape your character into a unique fighter.
What I appreciated the most about Shot One Fighters is the ease in which it teaches you how to play your character. Since you start each run with a limited moveset and expand upon it as you progress, you become familiar with the starting combos and get to slowly add to the move pool without feeling overwhelmed. This alone fixes a barrier of entry into fighting games as the large pool of moves is typically my main deterring factor from investing time into learning a character. I do not want to waste time in the lab, I just want to pick up the game and play.
The developers have also incorporated several quality of life features that are present in other fighting games to make gameplay slightly easier. Don’t like having to memorize all of the ridiculous button inputs combined with thumbstick rotations in order to pull off a devastating combo? Well in Shot One Fighters, you can simply turn on single-button combos so just pressing that one button will do the work for you. This gentler approach might be exactly what I need to get into fighting games.
Shot One Fighters does not have a release date at the moment, but it does have our attention. For more Shot One Fighters and SGF, keep it locked to SmashPad.