Combo Devils, a recently kickstarted platform fighter from developer Punkzilla, has one of the best elevator pitches of any fighting game I’ve played in a hot minute: What if we took the core of Smash Brothers, fused it with all of the mechanics and sensibilities of a traditional modern 2D fighter, and then topped it all off with a roguelite single player mode?
As someone who grew up dumping hundreds of hours into the various iterations of Smash Brothers all throughout middle school, high school and college; spends most of his nights grinding ranked in a variety of 2D fighting games (mainly Street Fighter 6); and ranks several roguelikes among his favorite games of all time, Combo Devils, seems like a game laser-targeted specifically for my tastes. And sure enough, after spending some time learning in the lab, messing around with the single player, and battling it out online, Combo Devils has grabbed me in a way that no other platform fighter since Smash Brothers has been able to do.
Right out of the gate, let me preface this all by saying that while the core gameplay of Combo Devils feels great, this is still a game that feels early in development. There are currently only four playable characters of a planned nine, if the grayed out character slots on the character select screen are anything to go off of; there’s a big “Caution: Work in Progress” warning next to the roguelite mode in the main menu; and the training mode is missing a lot of basic functionality that you would expect a training mode to have.
So while the game clearly needs more time to cook, what’s here shows a ton of promise. The core of the fighting system is very Smash Bros.-esque. Each character has light attacks, strong attacks, and special moves of the up, down, forward, and neutral variety. The first interesting twist on the formula is that your shield is directional, and must be pointed in the direction of the enemy’s attack. So if the enemy jumps in, you need to tilt your shield upwards. If they move behind you, you must move your shield to block your backside. So you can do cool things like jumping in on an opponent that you’re expecting is going to block their front, air dash through, and surprise them with a crossup on their backside.
Another traditional fighting game staple that has been infused to mesh with the platform fighter mold includes a gatling style of combo logic. So if you’re just picking up a character and you don’t know the unique aspects of their kit, you can generally rely on neutral lights comboing into directional lights, which can then combo into heavy attacks or special moves, as a kind of universal bread-and-butter combo for every character. What’s even more cool is that once you get your foe in the air, you also get one free air dash cancel, which lets you cancel the recovery of an aerial move and dash in a direction to continue the combo and potentially tag on just a bit more damage to try and secure a kill. It’s a fighting system that feels very well thought out and leads to some really flashy and fun to execute combos.
On top of that, there’s also a super meter to manage, just like what you’d find in most 2D fighters these days. You can spend one bar of the meter on EX special moves, which enhance your specials in a variety of ways, whether that’s by simply increasing their knockback and damage, making them faster, or adding new properties to them all together. If you manage to build up three bars, you can execute super moves with traditional fighting game motion inputs to cap off your combos with some extra flair and KO power.
As far as the characters go, there’s a great variety of playstyles in the four available characters, and perhaps best of all, none of them really feel derivative of any existing character in the platform fighter space. My personal favorite is Shai, who tickles my nostalgia bone with the parallels between him and Kid Vid from the ‘90s Burger King Kids Club. He’s a gamer delivery boy who fights with a skateboard, power glove, and beyblade top. He can even do a Gears of War-style active reload for his neutral special to load it faster.
Another standout is Jingo, a ninja dog with blistering fast speed, excellent projectiles, and a super cool special move that allows him to plant a butterfly on his opponents, which he can then teleport to immediately to continue or even start a combo.
As for the roguelite mode, while I can appreciate Punkzilla taking a swing at a non-conventional single-player mode, this felt like a miss – at least at this stage of its development. Roguelites are fun because every run feels distinct, forcing you to adapt to whatever the game throws at you, oftentimes forcing you to make the best out of a bad situation, or not squander a good run when luck is in your favor. But here, every run feels exactly the same.
You choose a character and fight through several rooms of generic enemies that just kinda of wander around, flash white, and then do some sort of attack that you must either block or just get out of the way of. Over the course of the mode you’ll gain power-ups, increase your stats, and fight bosses, but nothing ever happened that really changed up my approach to each room or made it more fun to play.
There’s obviously that aforementioned “Work in Progress” warning for the roguelite piece of this, so it’s certainly possible for Punkzilla to turn it around. Nevertheless, it’s not the selling point of Combo Devils. That would be the online play, and fortunately, the online experience thus far has been excellent. Its rollback netcode has held up extremely well throughout my playtime, even making things like Shai’s active reload, which demands pinpoint precision timing, virtually identical to the experience of playing offline.
All in all, Combo Devils is shaping up to be an excellent fusion of platform and 2D fighting, with a smart melding of mechanics, fun characters, great online play, flashy and satisfying combos, and an aesthetically pleasing art style. There’s clearly still a lot of work to be done, but if Punkzilla can polish up what’s here and fill out the rest of the game with the same level of quality as what’s in this demo, then Combo Devils could very well be a major player in the platform fighting genre.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit
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