Game Review: Fighting Warrior (Commodore 16 and Plus/4, Mastertronic)

Fighting Warrior is set in Egypt, and you are the Fighting Warrior, the champion of all the land (not quite and all the world though.) Your task is to rescue the princess Thaya, who has been kidnapped by the evil Pharoh, and your quest will only complete once she has been freed.  On the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 version, naturally some compromises have been made to fit the game into the memory.  However, what is sloppy is that Mastertronic duplicated the instructions from the Commodore 64 version, where the controls in this version are a little different, so if you did not realise this you would be wondering why some of the controls do not work as intended.  The game was released in January 1990, some 18 months after the last Mastertronic release for the system, so it seemed a strange decision to release it.

I Love to Fight

The game loads up and you have options for selecting keyboard or joystick with the F1 and F2 keys respectively, and then F3 to start the game.  A little annoyingly when the game goes to the title screen, it reverts to the keyboard every time, so you must select joystick and then start each time.  Remembering the last choice that you made may have been nice.  Once you start, Fighting Warrior begins the quest in the desert and you walk right to be amongst the pyramids and rocks, heading constantly right in the quest to locate the princess.  There are only three enemies in the game, warriors that look like yourself, mummies, and big cats.

Movin’ On Up

Fighting Warrior has several moves at disposal – and these are different from the Commodore 64 version. Without fire pressed, right and left walks forward and back, with down right being a low kick and up left being a backwards jump.  With the fire button pressed, there are more moves – up does a flying kick, up right does the high sword swing, right to punch and down right for the low sword swing.  You will soon work out what are the best moves to defeat each enemy, and the energy for you and your opponent is shown on screen, the enemy on the right.  If you defeat the enemy, your energy is topped up for the next one without having to do anything – no slashing of the vases here.

Mummy, Mummy, There Is A… Buggy

When you encounter the mummy as an enemy, you see one of the niggly flaws of the game.  The mummy constantly moves left and pins your character on the left-hand side, and if this happens, no move possible does any damage, with you eventually losing energy and one of your three lives.  The only move that seems to defeat it is the punch and keep landing it before the mummy gets to the left side, and you can then get past it.  Once you work that out the game does become considerably easier but it is still fiddly and an annoying gameplay flaw.  Sometimes despite you pressing the right joystick direction the punch does not always come off either, which can be a second annoyance here.

Shielding Your Direction

After defeating several enemies or when you get to the left-hand next section of the game as you walk along, you see a shield in front of you.  Here the shield by default has an arrow pointing down, and you can punch it to make it face up, and then once happy, you can jump kick the shield to move on to the next section.  Naturally, this does mean that you need to find your way, and a certain number of enemies must be defeated along the way.  I only encountered the big cat a couple of times which was a shame as this presented a different challenge to be able to get past and was more playable than that mummy character without a doubt.

Eat, Sleep, Slay, Repeat

The game does also seem considerably easier once you have worked out the moves to defeat the enemies – the mummy in particular.  It is a lot of repetition of defeating the enemies along the way with the backgrounds giving way to a temple inside and some palm trees too, before going deep into the temple where you eventually are reunited with the princess.   The fact that I was able to complete the game on my second go does make you wonder how much longevity you would have in the game, as there is only a possible high score challenge to go for after that – and does get tiresome a little quickly too.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Fighting Warrior are good – the characters are large and generally well animated, with the backdrops resembling Egypt well.  The temple graphics are particularly nice considering the memory limitations, and the scrolling is smooth, albeit with a line of black near the top of the screen that only seems to partly disappear when you get to the temple sections.  There is also no sound – none whatsoever.  The game was supposed to have two sound effects, but it appears that if you try to re-enable these, when you hit an enemy the raster timing mucks up considerably meaning the flow of the game can be spoiled, so understandable why these were not included in the end.

Final Thoughts

Fighting Warrior tries hard to be a hack and slash game and a respectable conversion from the Commodore 64 version.  Unfortunately, it falls short – not because of the graphics, but the gameplay can be a little frustrating and repetitive and finding the right move to defeat the mummy without losing all of your lives can take some time.  Once that is discovered, the game becomes so easy that you can regularly complete it without any issue, and that then means that the longevity suffers the other way.  It was a brave attempt but does prove to be somewhat of a letdown.  One for collectors only – as the original Melbourne House release is considerably easier to locate.

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