Retro Gaming Australia

Fighting Force, as we’ve said time and again, was at one stage intended to be Streets of Rage 4. However Fighting Force turned out so rubbish that we thank Zombie Jesus that it wasn’t.

Fighting Force is a beat ’em up developed by Core Design that’s pretty much the poster child for why the beat ’em up died off. Dull environments, shitty character design and gameplay that’s freakishly slow.

Core Design’s Fighting Force is a classic example of how the 2D brawler didn’t really make the graceful transition to 3D that many had hoped. It’s fun at first, but the novelty quickly wears off, and you’re left with a clunky, unattractive mess.

Fighting Force is a good example of a middling game with a clever advertising campaign. The Nintendo 64 port was released almost two years after the original PlayStation release. The game was actually originally intended to be Streets of Rage 4, until Sega and Core Design ran into issues regarding porting the game to other platforms, which resulted in the completed Saturn version of the game never being released.