« Review: Divekick »

It's fascinating to see that a move in fighting games evolved to having a game specifically to have players exclusively perform the attack. If you can ignore the constant inappropriate humor and sometimes forced depth, Divekick uses its namesake to provide a simple and fun experience that players of all skill levels can enjoy.

The game is structured with dive kicks as the main attacking move. To fully embrace this concept, the game is designed to only utilize two buttons: a jump and a dive kick. The goal is to simply hit your opponent with your dive kick once to win the round. This focus allows players of all levels to basically think about their positioning in game. They don't have to worry about venturing into things such as learning combos and blocking as the depth is structured differently in Divekick.

Divekick features a meter system which can be used for multiple properties. If filled up, your character will be temporarily buffed with higher jumps and faster dive kicks. You can use a portion of your meter for air or ground specials which can shift the momentum in the match. Having meter is precious and getting kicked in the head will leave you stunned with your existing meter drained; This adds an appropriate layer of strategy.

Each character in the game is unique from each other. Characters in the game have their own style of jumps and dive kicks, with some influenced by existing fighting game characters. Markman and Kung Pao have horizontal-style kicks, which work to punish an opponent's whiffed dive kicks. Mr. N and Redacted's dive kicks are much more vertical oriented. This diversity does help expand the approachable game design. There are shortcomings though that makes the main playing objective of spacing and positioning unnecessarily obtuse.

Markman's horizontal divekick can counter vertical divekicks. Although Uncle Sensei has a vertical divekick, he can use meter to shift to a horizontal one while in midaSome moves from characters seem to be designed to bypass, or at least malign, the necessary gameplay structure and flow. The Baz can perform a lightning attack that appears after a minor delay. While it's neat that the character is made to confuse players, it deviates from dive kicks at all. While S-Kill plays relatively normally, his ground special move is a parry followed by a counter dive kick. Smart players can exploit some of these actions to their advantage. While there is no wrong in using them, they feel badly designed, forced and disrespectful to the basic formula.

Aspects of the gameplay bleed into to the overall presentation. The universe, audio and graphics are wrapped around with referential and stereotypical dressing. Much like the dive kick itself, the game tries to be self-aware with their jokes. The problem in this case is that the humor is lacking. While it is funny to hear some non sequitur sayings from Kick parodying Will Smith or Dr. Shoals being a decent caricature of Dr. Doom, a majority of the humor conveyed visually or audibly feels unnecessarily inappropriate. For those aware of the fighting game memes and jokes will feel uncomfortable with how they are executed here.

With the crude humor and sometimes unusual gameplay decisions aside, the basic game is enjoyable with friends through local versus and the online mode. Using the GGPO netcode for online play, players are given flexibility when playing against others for an optimal experience. Playing with people below 100ms works really well with minimal rollbacks while anything above is still manageable. GGPO does comes some minor quirks in Divekick such as camera glitches and other rollback concerns.

If you are looking for a full experience, you will not find it with Divekick. The game is limited by the actual game with miniscule extra content. Ignoring the bad single player mode, Divekick was designed for direct multiplayer completion.

At its core, Divekick works as a simple game that players of all levels can have fun in both the personal and online realms. They can enjoy learning how to win without grinding through common fighting game training traits. While some of the gameplay concepts betray the design, the humor being horrid most of the time and the borderline barebones content, there is worth in playing Divekick just against people.

The Mixup: Addenum by Honzo Gonzo

Jefailey uses a dropkick which can be charged. S-Kill's special ground special is a parry.Divekick is a premise that went too far. Instead of consolidating and polishing the game, Iron Galaxy started to shove things in the game that probably didn't need to be there. I have a big problem with most of the characters designed late in the games development, S-Kill being the most jarring personally. They take what was a game about spacing and angles and warped it into crazy stuff constantly happening on screen.

While I am not a fan of the GGPO netcode because of how characters can teleport, it is alright. Anything under 100 ms the game is very playable with matches under 50ms feeling like offline. Stuff abover 100ms is bad but you can choose not to play with connections that exhibit that.

It was cool to play this on Steam and more developers and publishers should bring their fighters there as well. This version however has some weird controller issues like not being able to use my mouse to navigate the menus but that's really a small annoyance. It's also annoying when I fight an opponent where their microphone rebounds causing me to hear it at an abnormal volume.

I just wish Divekick was kept within the original design philosophy. When you advertise that your game is "a fighting game deconstructed into its purest form" you should keep it pure. Drifting away from the belief is the equivalent of giving Seth an airdash for no reason besides "its cool."

Divekick is available now on PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita and PC through Steam.