Mighty Fight Federation is a 3D arena brawler, developed by Komi Games Inc. and publisher Forthright Entertainment. It was launched on February 7th, 2020, and can be found on PC, Mac, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch. For the purposes of my review, I played the PC Steam port.
Mighty Fight Federation makes itself immediately clear to be a Smash Bros. clone, and not a very original or polished one at that. The music, original stages, and original characters are incredibly bland, forgettable, and are not compelling in the slightest capacity. Like Smash, Mighty Fight Federation does feature some fighters from other existing franchises. The first is Yooka and Laylee, from the 3D platformer Yooka-Laylee. The other is Toejam and Earl from the 1991 Genesis game. They are two very different franchises and fighters, but they seem much more creative and original than the rest of the game’s roster. Even the art direction and narrative are pretty uninspired. The 3D models and art at best look like they are from the PlayStation 3 era. There was little to no polish or flavor added to the animations and character models: no pretty particle effects or epic fighting animations and the stages are mostly static with a few moving parts. Quite honestly, the models are very rough, coming out polygonal and jagged looking. The character and fighting animations are both simple yet unnatural. The female character Originelle is probably the best example of the problems I have with the art. Her face in-game looks uncanny, unexpressive, and every movement she performs is choppy and janky. The 2D art in the game, on the other hand, is well done and charming. The characters and colors look way more vibrant and expressive. Sadly, the 2D art is only for character intros, endings, and for the character select screen.
The gameplay and mechanics don’t fare much better than the game’s presentation. There are no difficulty settings for CPUs or any of the solo player content. The AI and CPUs are abysmal, for a few reasons. They are very easy to beat, glitchy, and you can win every fight simply by running out the game timer. I beat the entire story mode without ever losing a life, and I am terrible at fighting games. I can’t imagine actual skilled players finding any challenge without competing head-to-head online. Again, compared to Smash, this version is inferior in every way imaginable. You can change the AI in Smash CPUs, and in this game, the AI doesn’t even function half of the time. Almost every AI I fought glitched out or infinite looped in some way throughout the fight. The terrible AI is the main killer to any single-player experience with this game.
Mighty Fight Federation fails spectacularly in yet another way: almost all of its game modes and content can be completed within a day and is incredibly uninteresting. The arcade mode serves as a makeshift story mode, with your chosen character having to fight through about 10 rounds of fighters with a boss at the end. I was able to beat this in under an hour with Yooka-Laylee, and never felt challenged. You can’t even challenge a harder version of the story mode; there isn’t any interesting context given to the fights and there is no story here. The other mode is mission mode. Each character has five missions you can complete. All these missions do is ask you to execute a specific combo with your character on a CPU that doesn’t move or fight back. Once you do the combo the mission ends, and that’s it. What is even more frustrating is that the whole challenge of the mode comes from them not telling you how to do the combo so it’s just endless trial and error.
Overall, Mighty Fight Federation offers at best a simple online 3D brawler experience. The solo experience is non-existent and lacks any kind of difficulty due to the unintelligent AI. The rest of the content can be completed in a few hours, and all that is left is the online or local fighting. Granted this is the obvious focus of the game, but even this mode feels flat. The presentation, visuals, music, and story leave nothing to get the player invested. Even the fighting at the center of the game isn’t visually striking in any way, it’s often janky, glitchy, and doesn’t feel like a fluid fighting game experience. It’s a clone of Smash, and not even a good one. If you are looking for a fun fighting experience besides Smash, there are numerous ones that offer far more than what you can get here.
Score: 4/10
Reviewed on Steam