Foul Play Review

It’s time to take to the stage and put on your best performance as Foul Play for Playstation 4 and PSVita hits home a performance you may want a front row seat for.

Foul Play published by Devolver Digital and created by Mediatonic is a slap up side scrolling brawler which oozes charm and creativity to spice up an often forgotten form of side scroller. Mediatonic calls it a “theatre-based beat’em up” where Victorian Demonologist, Barn Dashforth recreate his adventures on stage. If you liked streets of rage then Foul Play manages to perform to many of those strengths minus some weapon pickups.

Foul Play offers players the opportunity to play solo, co-op and even includes an online mode to tempt you further. The main campaign which can be played Solo or in Co-op is split across a series of acts which are effectively levels. Each Act plays out across Barn’s adventure pitting you against varying types of enemies. The aim of the game though is to deliver a beating to your foes that has the audience standing on their feat. To enable your tracking of this there is a performance meter in the middle of the screen. As you look onto your character beating bodies upon the stage the scene is clearly one of a stage show. You’ll like the little nuances at play as beaten enemies crawl of the stage wounded.

Keeping that meter high is no mean feat however and with the aid of a combo meter delivering precise blows and timely parries will support the both the combo meter and getting that performance meter to gold. The gameplay is pretty well paced and in between a series of fights there is little pieces of dialogue to depict the adventure on screen, I never found it engrossing though and I wouldn’t ever recommend this game for its story it’s all about the gameplay.

“The result all too often as the combo meter reverting to 0”

The gameplay is solid for the most part with the fighting fun and varied as you unlock new moves and charms which enhance the gameplay. One gripe I did have though was with the aiming. As the movement area was a stage you could go up down or left and right, all your fighting interactions are done on a horizontal axis so if you get it slightly wrong your strike will miss the enemy. The result all too often as the combo meter reverting to 0. Ok this could be me but after several hours of gameplay I started to realise there’s an issue here and the targeting is poor in many places. When scenes get busy and they will, trying to navigate the play area is almost impossible and the art of timing a parry and strike will simply get flung out the window in order to just survive.

Each Act of the game also adds in some challenges which force you to apply some thinking to how you want to play through each scene. This is a good thing as by the time you’re at Act three the combat does start to feel repetitive and there is a lot of Acts to playthrough. The challenges are ok but for the most part they centre on get a combo of X amount or kill this enemy last. They are all very achievable at first glance but mix in that honking aiming mechanic and dodgy button response and you’ll soon realise this is where the difficulty lies in the game.

“after 4 hours of playtime I was feeling like I had seen it all”

Repetition is Foul Play’s biggest enemy, after 4 hours of playtime I was feeling like I had seen it all, I had to drag myself through the rest of the game and this is never a good place to be. What really made this painful though was the in game music which although catered well to the frenetic gameplay after Act one I had heard enough and it’s boring melodic repetition just forced me to switch it off.

Foul Play does offer various Playstation perks to any would be purchaser. The game has cross buy and with that comes the ever useful Cross save functionality. It’s brilliant and I found this title really feels great on the PSVita and this is where I spent most of my time playing going to and from work. Graphically it stands up well to its silky smooth and crisp PS4 brother but it is let down by poor framerates in the busy scenes on the PSVita. This is expected and I’d rather applaud the developer for providing cross buy to PSVita than hammer them for something any knowledgeable gamer should expect when playing a PS4 game on a PSVita.

Foul Play is available now on PSN stores in both the EU and US and this review was undertaken using a copy provided by the game’s publisher.