Fighting Force Collection - Streets Of Mild Frustration (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 5 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Fighting Force Collection Released: January 23rd, 2026
Developer: Core Design (original), Implicit Conversions
Publisher: Limited Run Games
Systems: PC, PS5, Switch/Switch 2 (reviewed), Xbox Series
If we had a hall of fame for PSX games known more for their demos than their full retail versions, Fighting Force would definitely have a place. It wouldn’t be among the first round of inductees, certainly not before Intelligent Qube, but it’d get in way sooner than Ninja: Shadow of Darkness. God, Ninja was a crappy time.
One of the very earliest attempts to translate the beat ‘em formula to a 3D space, Fighting Force hits as many classic beats as possible. You’ve got elevator and train stages, mooks with silly names above their health bars, a standard array of temporary weapons including smashable glass bottles (my favorite), and a campaign structure that gets less interesting once it moves from the streets to a bunch of military bases. At no point was Core Design interested in reinvention when putting this together.
Originally pitched as a Streets of Rage sequel, Fighting Force was met with middling reviews despite initially high hopes. Critics were split on whether or not its formulaic nature was a good thing. The fact it’s notably one-note didn’t help matters, at least according to the Wikipedia page that this paragraph is essentially rewriting to make my review seem more informative.
Look, it’s not a great game, mostly notable for being packed onto one of the demo discs that often came with PlayStation consoles, but I’ve always had a fondness for it. I’m a big brawler fan, and I not only played the demo a lot, I even had the full game at one point! I’m nonetheless surprised Limited Run rereleased this one, but considering they did Bubsy not too long ago, I guess nothing’s off the table.
Fighting Force Collection packages the original with a sequel I completely forgot the existence of and don’t much care for. Its twenty dollar asking price feels steep for a game I regularly download whenever I get new emulation hardware, but considering I ordered the collector’s edition of this thing like the wanton consumer whore I am, who am I to judge value?
I’d be fine with the MSRP if this collection came with bells and whistles, but Fighting Force clearly hasn’t got much archive material for Limited Run to include. Aside from a basic suite of conveniences such as rewinding and save states, the only supplementary material is a collection of old artwork. We don’t get a manual scan or even a choice of screen borders, two things I’ve come to expect from retro redos. The latter feature borders on obligatory, its omission speaking to how bare a remaster this is.
Half of the playable offering is a decent nostalgia trip through a personal classic. Fighting Force is slow and repetitive but it has a certain something that still appeals to me. I can’t tell you what that something is - I’d normally put it down to charm, but Fighting Force is distinctly charmless. In fact, its uncharismatic nature might be part of what I like about it. It’s just arena after arena of things to batter, presented in almost businesslike fashion.
“Arena” is the best way to describe any single section of the game. Stages are nothing if not economical, containing you to a single area at a time and distributing mooks in waves until it’s time to move along. Each of the four playable characters has access to combos of punches and kicks, a backwards attack, two running strikes, a useless jump, an equally useless jump attack, and a grab that can be chained into one of four distinct moves. There’s also a crowd clearance move that damages everything in range at the cost of some health.
By genre standards, Fighting Force is fairly forgiving. Enemies aren’t as aggressive as they could be and healing items are generous until the very last level. By far the trickiest thing to deal with is controlling your clumsy fighter - they’re all slow, their run animations have a long cancel time, and some moves have such dodgy hitboxes they’re a liability. Grab moves are cool but their inputs are unresponsive, and while enemies will spam their blocks or sidestep to mitigate your offense, you have distinctly zero defensive options of your own.
Contextual controls provide an additional annoyance, as the layout is distinctly overtaxed - mapping back attacks and grabs to the same button is faintly absurd. While there are preset layout changes in the game’s original menu, the remaster doesn’t offer anything that lets you fine tune them. There are enough buttons on modern controllers to unglue all the married inputs, but they go unused.
Those grabs are neat though, and every moveset in general has some fun highlights. Mace’s bitch slaps are particularly fun, while Not-Haggar has a host of entertaining attacks - he rolls like a hedgehog, pulls off several wrestling slams, and does a sweet (if inaccurate) flying double clothesline. There’s enough here that a deeper, more extensive overhaul might almost turn Fighting Force into a worthy contemporary brawler.
One of the game’s big selling points is how destructible its environments are, something it hammers home by awarding bonus points for how much shit you break. It’s primitive by today’s standards, but back then it was rather fun to make hot dog stands explode or pull a handrail off the wall for an improvised beating stick. For its time, it had a pleasing amount of interaction, and even today it tries harder than some games do to make a playpen of the environment.
Visually, it’s adorable. Character models do their best to approximate an idea of the actions being performed, whether they’re floating around near Not-Hagar’s hands or cramming giant cans of drink fully inside their own faces. Mockery aside, a number of moves do come with complex animations that deserve some genuine credit.
Fighting Force is a fairly pedestrian game on its own merits that nonetheless has enough going for it to skate by on its nostalgia. Fighting Force 2, meanwhile, stops entirely short of pedestrian.
Perhaps if this wasn’t my first time playing the sequel it could get away with some of that nostalgic skating, but the game was also considered mediocre in its day. More to the point, Fighting Force 2 is nothing like its predecessor, trading in the brawler trappings to take the shape of a straight action game with incredibly awkward Tomb Raider controls. It’s like if Metal Gear Solid had none of the stealth, story, or 95% of anything beyond bland stupidity.
You get just one character this time, and Generic Videogame Dude sleepily trudges through a series of corridors populated with more weapons than enemies to use them on. Environmental destruction is one of the few elements to carry over, but the environment itself is interminably fucking dull and you don’t break cool shit like cars or elevator interiors. Limply kicking at the same model of a computer is exactly as exciting as it sounds.
To be fair, I couldn’t bring myself to venture very far into the campaign. The web of samey hallways and vague factorial scenery was simply too unfun to navigate and utterly bereft of action. Maybe the world gets more exciting later down the line, but considering how dreary the opening gambit is, I’m not going to waste my lucrative time in search of interesting material that almost certainly won’t manifest.
Basic punches and kicks are supplemented by an arsenal wide and diverse enough to be worthy of moderate praise. In the opening section alone, you can find knives, poles, sledgehammers, axes, grenades, pistols, SMGs, and more. Sadly, melee weapons all amount to the same series of manic swings and switching between items is clunky as hell. Combat’s also let down by the aforementioned Tomb Raider controls - Generic Videogame Dude handles as if an electric scooter tried to take up kickboxing with expected results.
Buttons once again have to inefficiently multitask, with the attack button also being used to climb ledges. You’re almost guaranteed to waste bullets at some point by trying to climb while holding a gun, which I don’t think you can actually do. Once again, a more comprehensive remaster would offer tangible improvements to handling, but we’re left with clumsy nonsense instead.
Fighting Force 2 is not good at all. It’s not the main draw, it’s barely anything like the main draw, it’s barely a draw at all.
What we have here is a bare bones remaster of Fighting Force and its crummy sequel, featuring only the most obligatory of modern conveniences. The paltry options menu, meager archive material, and total lack of border imagery demonstrates little of the love shown to other Limited Run releases. Fighting Force itself still has something to offer a very niche audience, but as a member of that audience I already have a version of Fighting Force, one with more options for fine tuning and without a $19.99 MSRP.
5/10
