This 90s-inspired low-poly fighter might be the most inventive game of the year

Thinking of old-school fighting games, the sprite-based fighters from Capcom and SNK, as found in the recent Capcom Fighting Collection 2, probably come to mind first, especially with the many re-releases on modern platforms we've had in recent years. While also played on a 2D plane, Poly Fighter, a new fighting game from Montreal-based indie developer Heartloop Games, takes its aesthetic inspirations from the early 3D fighting games.

According to creative director Osama Dorias, Poly Fighter bases its visuals on retro game Virtua Fighter 2, a good frame of reference, given it was one of the best fighting games of that era. Of course, even as groundbreaking as that game was, made using Sega's Model 2 arcade board before receiving a miraculous Saturn port, you can still notice the blockiness of the character models, which is something Poly Fighter leans in on as well.

"Our roots were always in low-poly retro because this was a love letter to fighting games, we even studied Virtua Fighter 2 to the same polygon count!" he tells me. In the first month of development, the plan had been to faithfully emulate that style, but over time, the team also wanted to ensure "broad appeal" that looks "appealing by today's standards". It's why the current build embellishes the visuals with modern lighting effects and details such as other fighters standing around in the background.

"What we realised is that when people think of Virtual Fighter 2, they actually expect this," Dorias explains, also citing other retro-inspired examples like Shovel Knight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, which emulated their 8-bit and 16-bit inspirations but also incorporated elements that went beyond what the old hardware would have been capable of. "Our memory of what a thing is not the same as what the thing was. I think this is a natural thing, where it's the feeling of nostalgia that you want to capture as much as possible. The accuracy isn't important, it's really the feeling, I guess."

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Nostalgia with a twist

What's modern about Poly Fighter is that it isn't just a fighting game but one that incorporates the structure and synergies of roguelikes, arguably the most popular genre in indie games today. The concept is that as you defeat opponents, you can steal one of their moves or perks to add to or replace your own, transforming your fighter as you progress through three acts with tougher opponents over time.

To keep that interesting, however, means having a large roster of opponents with distinct movesets that you can potentially add to your own repertoire. That's also true for fighting games in general, where expanding a roster over time has always been important in keeping the game fresh. As an indie, however, Heartloop's small team has been able to work quite fast, developing the game in Unity with UFE (Universal Fighting Engine), a toolkit for developing fighting games, already used in commercial releases such as Fantasy Strike..

"[Our team members] have worked in Unreal and a lot of proprietary engines, but Unity right now is the best engine for making an indie fighting game because of UFE," Dorias explains. "It handles a lot of the things that we normally have to create from scratch, like how hitboxes are made or basically move management. We still had to heavily modify it, and obviously, it didn't have anything built for roguelikes, but it saved us potentially a few months of dev time and allowed us to prototype quickly."

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Bags of retro character

Although a lot of time had been spent on just two fighters, at this point, Dorias says there are already 40 characters, although they are still being refined, while as a single-player only game, the meticulous kind of balancing of a competitive game isn't quite so important here. "Once we figured out what our design is after experimenting, once we understood how the moves slot in and slot out, once we knew what our art style was and our target visuals were, creating characters was fast and easy."

More importantly, the key to any fighting game series is not just that it feels good to play but that it has characters that can stand out in their own right. So while Poly Fighter does take inspiration from older fighting games, including some perhaps more niche ones, it does have its own identity too, which is that its characters are either "underground or underdogs" - that is, they're either from a crime background, or they're normal working people, which gives it a kind of gritty charm.

So one side, you've got a criminal mastermind calling himself the Art Collector, an all-female motorcycle gang led by Mama Blaze, but then you also have someone working in an ice cream store, a dock worker, a mall cop, and even an influencer, which perhaps hints that the game's setting is a little more contemporary.

Based on initial playtests and a Steam playtest back in September, there's already positive feedback from players, which puts Poly Fighter on the right track with plans to launch in early access. As Dorias says, "There are people who are just hungry for different single-player fighting game experiences, and we've got validation on that."

You can wishlist Poly Fighter on Steam and request access to its playtest.