Foul Play

While a little bit simple in terms of art, Foul Play is a polished little Final Fight style title that was really a blast to play.

Foul Play is a fantastic looking, beautifully written brawler with a great gimmick that goes much deeper than simply putting an audience in the foreground and renaming the health meter.

Regardless of whether you choose to partner up or go it alone, Foul Play is a grand ole adventure. Easy to pick up and fun to master, the combat alone would make this a worthwhile venture, but adding in the game’s theater aesthetic and unique visual style makes this an easy recommendation.

One of the best beat ’em ups/brawlers we’ve played in a good while, and the spectacular daemon beatings you’ll be handing out makes Foul Play well worth the price of admission.

Though Foul Play can become repetitive and the story would have been bettered by voice-acting, its stylized gameplay is entertaining, memorable, and conceptually well-designed for a 1200 MSP title. Its ability to juggle all of its concepts into a cohesive beat-'em-up that lasts at least full weekend is to the credit of the indie developer Mediatonic. I take my hat off, good sir.

Visual shortcomings and questionable first impressions aside, Foul Play is a cheery, bright-eyed, delightful roaming beat-em-up that, through superior, fluid and engrossing combat mechanics, has arguably swiped the crown of Beat-’em-up King right off of Castle Crashers' head.

Foul Play takes the brawler genre and twists it for the stage, adding flair with the Mood-O-Meter and a range of quaint characters.

The fighting can get a tad samey, however, which holds it back from the true spiffinginity. [Dec 2013, p.63]

Foul Play offers a special twist to the beat ‘em up-genre by adding a Rock Band-ish system. The Theatre theme is well implemented, and that makes the game immensely fun and cutesy. The audiences responses actually make you try while fighting, but it does start to get a bit repetitive an hour or so in.