Anger Foot review: Two kicks forward, one kick back

You ever do that thing on a fairground ride or rollercoaster where you sort of pull your neck and face back in preparation for extreme motion? Welcome to kick-exalting FPS Anger Foot. Violence is brutal and cartoonish. Slight mistakes kill you instantly. The soundtrack slaps. There’s an easy Devolver labelmate orientation point here, but if Hotline Miami was a cocktail of chemical euphoria and gut guilt, like realising you’ve accidentally pocketed someone’s lighter at a festival, Anger Foot is doing whippits out of balloon animals then having a great time rhythmically headbutting a portaloo for a few hours. Similarly, it’s also a bit of a masochistic ordeal to put yourself through. But, man. What a buzz.

The smallest unit of condensed Anger Foot is the act of booting a door flying, braining the pipe-wielding lizard on the other side, bolting through the bereaved doorframe, turning left, then eating a bullet in the back from the pistol goon lurking off to the right. Restart. Boot door. Boot pistol goon. Hoover up his pistol - five shots, make ‘em count - boot the next door. The next layer of the beat kicks in and despite every fibre of your conscious being screaming at you to play cautiously, the bass flicks your lizard brain into override. You spray and kick wildly, strafing like a mad crab. More goons. Pistol’s dry. Lob it for a stun. Jump. Kick. Strafe. Shoot. Kick. Kick.

Kick.

May as well kick again, just to be safe. You can hold the kick key down for a never-ending chain if you want. Lurking behind a door frame and booting a procession of goons as they rampage through is a premiere strategy. It’s cowardly, of course. But if Anger Foot taught me one thing, it’s to take advantages where I can find them. It often feels like playing poker, me and the game raising each other surging stacks of cheeky bullshit. And my god, does this game wallow in cheeky bullshit. Don't ask if there's a goon behind you. There is. When you die, the room of goons start dancing. You don’t win in Anger Foot. It doesn’t kill you. You dunk on each other.

More on this soon. The question I imagine you’ll want answering about Anger Foot - the same one I had - is whether there’s enough variation on a theme here (kicking is a theme now) to justify itself as a full game, or whether you can basically get the full experience in the demo. The short answer is a resounding “yup”. Anger Foot does falter when it pushes restrictively punishing encounters that all but crush any room for improvisation, but it’s also generously committed to sticking new toys in hands and on feet, every few stages. Those stages are weaved with a dungeoneers eye for novel surprises, and populated with a regularly expanding enemy roster of hyper-bastard chess pieces, running off rulesets rather than reactions. One enemy throws live snakes at you from a bucket. Another is an armoured bear with a minigun. You’ll encounter old goons in fresh new configurations of artisan cheeky bullshit right up to the final stages, and new goons make their debut until about halfway through the final map.

There’s four of those maps in total, each run by a different gang. The pollution gang hang out in the sewers with knife-wielding tentacles that pop up from pools of painful green goop. The business gang populate a glitzy high-rise, etcetera. Emphasis on the etcetera, because the running joke here is that no-one could be arsed to come up for names for the gangs (or interesting themes, honestly.) The game takes this veneer of low effort and runs with it, while actually putting a load of effort into everything from how different the ten or so weapons feel from each other to the tiny boss icon next the health bar that grimaces when they’re taking damage. This scans, pre-ripped jeans and Punk IPA being the Devolver experience (I said this first, Nathan Brown. I have proof). I know you care, Free Lives. You can’t pretend you don’t.

You definitely care about replayability. Each stage (63) takes between one and three minutes. You get a big gold star - you big clever sausage - just for beating each one, but there are also two optional challenge objectives apiece. ‘Feet only’ is a common one, as are time limits, and wearing a specific pair of shoes. There are 23 pairs in total. You unlock one for every five stars, plus a bonus pair for each of the four bosses you boot to death.

Spoke the one-footed man: half of these shoes feel pointless.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they exist. It’s hard to complain about desert boots that activate big head mode, or a double jump. It’s harder to complain about one-time resurrection sandals, and the shocked animation for each goon when you rise from the dead for another crack is wonderful. I’m much less sold on the usefulness of trainers that unleash a “flurry of kicks” when you jump, locking you in place in the air for just enough time to get you killed three times over. Or the “throws are deadly but bullets only stun” Stilettos. I get five bullets a pistol and one throw. I’d ask why I’d ever wear these but I know why - it’s specifically for some of those challenge stars. Basically, what should have been a prezzie-opening joy each time I got a new pair felt like a coin flip on whether they’d be practical. I'm well into my thirties now. Practical shoes are how I like to party.

Even some of the more interesting ones - Slide kickers, dashers - should be instantly fun, but the default difficulty (there are easier options) is so demanding of economic movement that it discourages experimentation. Something for your second or third run, then. Anger Foot took me about 12 hours - sometimes replaying stages as I went to unlock stars - and, if you wanted a quick verdict, I do want to play more of it. I appreciate the funky shoes for their variety, I just don’t see most of them being useful for your first go around. You’re going to spend most of it feeling too backed into a corner to really let loose.

Herein lies the tension: a disempowerment ruleset wearing a fresh pair of power fantasies. Spoke the punter at the piss-bucket juggling show: I do not envy this balancing act. By goofing up the Hotline Miami formula - a game in which you played a ruthless and efficient killer, as distinct from a cartoon badbutt - Free Lives have set themselves a bit of a conundrum. The speed and intensity and sheer exhilarating busyness of these stages mean that a minute of progress feels like a marathon. As such, it is never not bodily frustrating to eat shit at any point in a stage past the first few rooms. Hotline Miami remedied this in minor and major ways. Checkpoints were one, as was the extra visibility granted by the isometric viewpoint. But I think the biggest culprit here is actually the most subtle.

It takes 3 seconds in Anger Foot between dying and the ‘restart’ key prompt to appear. Hotline Miami takes 1 second. I’ve done the brain-math, and 3 seconds is just enough time to realise you’re dead and get annoyed about it, while Hotline Miami’s single second barely registers before you’re thrown back in and having another crack without even realising it. This one feature is, far and above, Hotline Miami’s greatest trick, and Anger Foot is still clipping its toenails by the time Jacket swings the bat again. It might be a loading thing, but if it’s so the goons can dance at you: that is funny precisely once. Alright. Once for each goon. They do different dances.

Still, Anger Foot gets its most important balancing act right. Ten different weapons, doled out regularly, all distinctly powerful and useful, and that kick never becomes even close to redundant. Sure, doors are always fun to boot, and need booting besides. You can also shoot and kick at the same time, violent multitasking being a solid gold videogame promise. Those pinkies have utility, too. Booting grenades back at goons, or hoofing explosive barrels. It’s a high concept based on a joke that’s funny for about seven seconds, spun out into a game jam project that took seven days. Novelty, fundamentals that are solid besides the ones I've picked on, great level design, and some spiffy physics keeps it all fresh for a good deal more than seven hours. Also, you've heard that soundtrack, right?

I consider this a kind of grimly hilarious manifestation in the vein of an Alan Moorish act of chaotic development magick, minus the part where the art actually has anything of substance to say about literally anything. That’s fine! Substance isn't always necessary. Those doors were substantial, and you saw what happened to them, didn’t you? Sometimes what Anger Foot does offer is worse than nothing, mind. The concept for the final boss (‘unholy corpulence') is effectively “lol, fat.” You’re funnier than that, mates. I know you are because I’ve just played your game. He keeps trying to knock you into a pool of molten cheese, but this is weak sauce.

Elsewhere, the bosses make for good puzzles, and it’s never not fun to kick a helicopter to bits. And, while I moaned about the game’s tendency to demand script-following over improv, there are times where it goes all Neon White, with level chunks choreographed to send you hurtling through playable set-pieces - chunks of massively enjoyable rollercoaster-y force-fed fun, like a string of rooms and doors where you boot a dozen goons to death in seconds. Actually, most of the punchlines here involve booting goons to death, But hell, that’s what I signed up for.