Anger Foot PC review – Diving in feet first

I said it back when I played Neckbreak and I’ll say it again – Hotline Miami does not work in first-person. Good thing Anger Foot, which is very much inspired by Hotline Miami, makes some large changes to get as close as one likely could. The game is equal parts entertaining and absorbing, as I often lost myself in completing challenges to gain more stars. There are issues with the difficulty curve, plus it can be buggy and downright unreliable at times, but this is a very fun game that does a great job of letting you kick the absolute crap out of, well, everything.

Hotline Miami can’t be taken and made first-person directly due to a few reasons. Namely, a top-down game grants so much more information than a first-person one could hope to. And few things could be more important about barging into a room than knowing just what you’re getting into. In that game, the protagonist dies in a single hit, but this can be mitigated through preparation and proper usage of mechanics. In Anger Foot, it’s mostly gone entirely. Melee enemies can kill you in one hit, as can foes with shotguns. But everything else takes two or three to put you down. Not only that, you have regenerating health. It’s a caveat that makes gameplay less exhilarating, but it’s absolutely necessary, otherwise most people would find the game borderline unplayable.

Granted, you’ll still die quickly if you just run into a room. It’s best to kick a door open, aggro enemies, and then back out and wait by the wall for them to run through so you can kick them as they pass through. All enemies, save for one armoured foe and bosses, can only take a single hit from you, whether kicking or shooting. Despite the title, you’ll very regularly be shooting, but your melee attack is, naturally, incredibly useful.

There are just shy of 70 levels in Anger Foot, and each of the non-boss ones have three challenges to complete. These often require you to beat a level solely with kicks or to finish in a certain amount of time. On occasion, challenges will require you to do something kind of out there, but most of the time it’s just familiar stuff. Collecting stars from these challenges unlocks new shoes, but you can unlock almost all of these a little more than halfway through the game. I 100%ed the first two areas (there are five total) and maybe a quarter of a way through the third area saw me with nothing left to unlock via challenges. From that point on, I felt less incentivised to do them. Eventually I settled on making sure to get at least two of the three stars from each level instead of all three.

Granted, as the game goes on, I found some of the challenges to be kind of unfair, as if they were barely tested. Luck can play a big part in completing many of them, which felt wonky to me. But luck can play a big part in just beating some levels. From enemy behaviour to Anger Foot‘s physics, so much is just random. Maybe you’ll kick a door at an enemy and then go to shoot them, only to find that a small piece of the broken door blocked your shot. Or that an enemy’s arm moved around a corner before they even saw you and shot you immediately. Just because you’ve got the mechanics down doesn’t mean the game won’t screw you over.

One intensely aggravating challenge tasks you with completing a level without any of a specific object getting broken. However, enemies in one room shoot these objects to pieces with zero involvement from you. The only way around this I found was to stand in a specific spot and shoot a specific enemy in the leg while they’re barely visible, or to just wait until you unlock a specific sneaker at the end of the game. Many of the challenges have something like this. Some levels have pacifist runs as challenges, where you need to not kill any enemies. With that being said, there are enemies that will die if you simply go through a door. It can just feel blatantly unfair at times.

That’s not to say that the general gameplay in Anger Foot isn’t a blast. When there aren’t any issues, figuring out how to get through levels is extremely fun and I mostly enjoyed learning the levels to complete challenges. There’s a good variety of enemies and the areas feel quite different from one another. Even more typical ones such as apartments and sewers have enough personality for the most part. A later area is mostly dungeons, though, which I found considerably more drab than everything else.

Anger Foot has melee enemies and ranged ones. The most basic melee enemy is incredibly non-threatening, whereas all the ranged enemies are mostly fairly dangerous. Later ranged foes won’t run up on you, though, which requires a change in strategy. Luckily, the level design mostly keeps this from becoming too much to handle. For the most part, the game isn’t all that difficult, but there’s a huge difficulty spike at the end of the first area that made me think that things were about to get hellacious. Throughout the rest of the game, though, I found myself going, “oh, that’s it?” upon finishing a level. Many of them are simply short and kind of easy. Then again, a few here and there are long and infuriating, leading to an uneven difficulty curve.

Guns include a pistol, dual revolvers, shotgun, submachine gun, assault rifle, crossbow, gatling gun and flamespitter. Each one has a set amount of ammo when picked up and needs to be tossed aside for another once you’re out of ammo. I like having to carefully pay attention to how many rounds I’ve got remaining. You can also stun enemies by throwing guns at them. Oftentimes, exact enemy locations are randomised, so paying careful attention is imperative.

Then again, there are the sneakers. You unlock a new pair of sneakers for every five stars you get, plus a new extra-special sneaker upon beating each boss. What’s odd is that the very first boss you beat unlocks the Chargers – a pair of sneakers so overpowered that they often trivialise encounters. These let you charge up kicks and basically dash kick your way through levels. In effect, you can pretty much instantly kill opponents across a room or area. It’s strange to me that these are given away so early, as they’re kind of broken. Sometimes the charge animation gets stuck and you move slowly until you get out of it, so they’re also literally broken at times.

One aspect that irks me is that many speedrun and jump-free challenges just rely on spamming the Chargers. Instead of having to be good at the game, you just mash a button and you complete the challenge. This is another thing that makes the game feel sloppier to me. Anger Foot‘s boss battles are all extremely easy, though, so you don’t even tend to need the Chargers to trivialise them. Still, they’re incredibly fun to use, as are the timestopper shoes that let you enter slow motion right after kicking a door, which actually lets you run straight into a room and blast enemies without worrying about eating pavement upon doing so.

I have to mention that this game is surprisingly badly optimised. Every time I boot the game, it takes at least a couple of minutes before I can even do anything. It often locks up my programs until it’s done. Same applies to the first boot of every first level I play. Sometimes I shut the game and the program just hangs and I have to manually close it. On top of that, there are severe framerate issues at times, with big drops in certain areas, despite the game running on Unity and not seeming like it should be all that demanding. This aspect definitely needs a lot of work.

I’m very fond of Anger Foot despite all the issues that afflict it. It’s damn funny too, with lots of moments where I just sat and cackled. I’ll never forget kicking a stall door open, only to find no toilet inside. Kicking the next stall door revealed four occupied toilets (yes, one of the game’s enemies is regularly found sitting on the John.) How strange. The script is full of pointed satire in general, which I found heavily entertaining. It’s just a fun game all around, even if if there’s too much jank and sloppiness for it to be as great as it could have been.

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