So after several months of silence on the blog, I decided to finally try to start a series idea I’ve had for some time now. It is called F’ing Awesome Game of the Week, or FAG of the Week for short (yeah, I know it’s clever. I’m awesome like that) Other FAG’ers and I will be posting semi-regular games worthy of mention. We’ll try to keep the games cheap or free.
The first game I’ll be covering is called Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl. Urban Brawl presents itself as a pure Sin City homage as soon as the cutscene begins. The narrative is by a man with a dark and gritty voice, with black and white comic strips with an art style similar to the original Sin City graphic novels. Hell, even the music sounds like something you’d hear in a film noir mixed with a late 90′s shooter.
When the opening cinematic finishes, the player finds himself inside a burning house and immediately can see the unique art style. As the player passes through the game he will find about a dozen melee weapons, from a fire extinguisher that freezes baddies, tazers, switch blades, and all sorts of tomfoolery. Gunplay however is usually unnecessary and even discouraged. Ammo is extremely rare, so I found myself wasting most of the ammo in the first level.
One thing I noticed was there was no popup on the screen directly telling the player the controls. Instead, there was a clever fire alarm on the wall that said “press F1 in emergency” that when pressed, would lead the player to the help menu. It’s hints like these that I wish developers would use instead of forcing both new, and experienced players to go through the exact same process to get into the game.
Urban Brawl combines the classic 90′s shooter formula with a creative narrative, unique art style, and some modern mechanics making it certainly worth the free download from action.mancubus.net
