Game Review: Fighting Warrior (Commodore 64, 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.  You are armed with nothing more than a sword and must make your way across the desert in search of the temple, battling demigods, demons, and magical devices.  Two of the zones are based in the desert and another is the temple itself, and you need to reach the ends of those zones and have defeated several enemies to succeed.

I Love to Fight

The game loads up and starts off a demonstration of the game, which shows you Fighting Warrior battling against enemies across the desert.  Straight away you can see that the characters are large and have several frames of animation, and both have their swords ready for battle, with shots to the head, middle and the leg being able to be performed.  This carries on as long as you wish until you press the RUN/STOP key.  From there, you have a simple title screen with the option of F1 for joystick, F3 for keyboard or F7 to start the game.  Once you start, Fighting Warrior begins the quest in the desert close to a pyramid, where you must start your first bout against an enemy to progress.

Sword of Omens, Give Me Sight Beyond Sight

Fighting Warrior has several moves at disposal – the non-aggressive moves are performed without the fire button, which is to move left and right, jump and duck.  With the fire button pressed for aggressive mode, up is an upper strike, right is a mid strike and down is a low strike.  It is worth noting that the mid strike and its animation is not the best, and looks somewhat clumsy and awkward, whereas the high strike with its overhead slashing motion of the sword does seem quite satisfying when you land that on an enemy.  Each hit either way causes a reduction of energy, and lose all your energy and it is one of your five lives gone.  Reducing the opponent’s energy to zero means it collapses to the ground and then vanishes, and is vanquished.

Smashing the Vase

Once you have defeated an enemy, a vase appears on screen.  You need to use the low strike to hit the vase correctly, and from the right distance.  This is often not quite precise to carry out, and you do lose energy for each time that you miss the vase and attempt to hit it within the time it stays on screen. If you strike the vase, one of several things can happen: your energy is topped up to full, which is useful, or you lose energy.  You can also be forced to fight one of the gods straight away, or bring a doorway to another zone, or, and best of all, remove the invisibility spell from the princess, meaning she will be visible once within sight so she can be rescued.  What happens with each vase is supposedly in some form of sequence, and master that and you will know which ones to hit and when.

Into the Temple Zone

If you do manage to open a doorway that leads to the temple, the interior of the temple shows with different enemies, and some of those are more difficult to hit if they are animals – as any high attacks may usually miss.  You can still use the other moves to hit, but that does then become an issue of being repetitive also, with the limited moves available.  You can of course choose to try and walk along and scroll further along the backdrop, which sometimes is not a bad move to reach the end of the temple or desert, and time your moves in between rather than just slug it out endlessly, and a case of working out which move may be best to take on at that point.

Eat, Sleep, Slay, Repeat

What Fighting Warrior does lack in its available moves can also hinder the gameplay too.  With a considerable number of hits to destroy each enemy, it can take time to progress a little of the way, especially if the vase that you hit happens to unleash one of the winged monsters, who use their large wings as a shield.  The endless hack and slash does get a tad too repetitive at times and even attempting to run at them and keep scrolling the level can also get a bit dull and tedious.  Maybe some elements of breaking down fences or barriers with your sword to progress may have helped, but it does get a little too repetitive.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Fighting Warrior are good – the characters are large and generally well animated, with the backdrops resembling Egypt well, from the pyramids and sand in the background to the temple inside with some nice decoration.  It can seem a little purple at times with some of the characters and that did seem an odd colour choice, but is at least clear.  The sound has some usual white noise sword slashes and clangs, along with a mystical Egyptian sounding theme from Adrian Pertout, which maybe is a little too short and can get a bit dull and repetitive over time, but nonetheless does convey the right atmosphere.

Final Thoughts

Fighting Warrior is clearly trying to be the sword fighting equivalent of Way of the Exploding Fist, but unfortunately it falls in a few key elements.  At first you will enjoy fighting the enemies and progressing through, but the pin point accuracy needed to destroy the vase and open its contents can lead to frustration at times.  After a while there seems to be little point in a strategy in taking on most enemies, it just becomes a hack and slash fest, normally with the upper strike or the lower strike, to try and destroy them.  And then rinse and repeat, a lot.  The interest does sadly wane after a while, even if you do manage to get further to locate the princess.  If more moves and more strategy had been available and gameplay elements tweaked, this would have fared a lot better than it does.

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