Anger Foot Review

Time trials have seen something of a resurgence in modern game design—Hyper Demon, Neon White, and Mullet Madjack just to name a few. I’m sure there’s some bleak academic link one could draw between the attention economy and the need to get as much gameplay injected into a person’s eyeballs as fast as possible, but I don’t really care about that. Sometimes, people realise that it’s just cool to do something stylish against the threat of a ticking clock.

Anger Foot, the latest first-person shooter from Broforce developer Free Lives, realises this too.

You play Anger Foot, a balaclava-wearing man-frog with the mankiest feet you’ve ever seen. The rival gangs of Shit City have stolen your best kicks, and you’re out to—fittingly—kick them in the face and get them back. You’re not coming here for the story though: it’s mostly about the vibes, and they are immaculate. You’ll tear your way through slums and sewers all the way up to corporate megatowers, with set-dressing and character design straight out of 90s Nickelodeon cartoons, refracted through a grunge-punk lens. It’s messy and it’s gross and it’s great.

Each level tasks you with kicking in doors and blasting enemies with an assortment of weapons as you race to the exit. Speed is key, as coming in under par time will bag you extra stars to unlock more sneakers, with each pair sporting a unique ability or gameplay modifier. Each level also has a bonus objective (like making it through a run without killing any enemies or using a specific pair of shoes), adding a bit more replayability to the whole experience.

This isn’t just a straight action game though: there’s a layer of strategy too. Kicking in a door isn’t just a way of moving through a space, but also taking down enemies on the other side. Mix this with the ability to throw weapons when they’re out of ammo to stun your targets, and levels become more of a frantic puzzle box as you juggle resources and map layout with split-second decision-making. 

Unfortunately, some spikes in difficulty can feel antithetical to the game’s broader “just-get-in-there-and-fuck-shit-up” tone. Because of the first-person perspective, it’s impossible to know what’s in the next room until you’ve kicked in the door, often leading to gun-toting enemies dropping you in a couple of shots. If you do manage to survive these moments—meaning you’ve backed off and regained your health—the game reverses course and becomes a more passive, reactive experience, rather than one about seizing initiative. On the best levels you’re blasting through them while making quick, tactical decisions. The worst stages however, start to feel like homework, as rote memorization becomes the order of the day.

But the game’s biggest enemy might be its randomness. The levels are chock-full of physics objects—explosive barrels, desks, chairs, you name it. As chaos unfolds, these objects can move about in wholly unpredictable ways, affecting how enemies approach you, or how you move about the space, blocking you or nudging your path. When I think about some of the best time trial games in the genre—the ones where you hit the restart button and go again without a moment’s thought—they’re wholly deterministic; you know what’s going to happen each time you replay the same area over and over again.

These issues sound like I’m really dunking on Anger Foot, but that’s not the case. While they can be annoying, they happen in the context of fairly small, short levels that on repeated replays only take a handful of minutes each. But they do become glaring when each level is such a shotgun blast of adrenaline and enjoyment to the face. There’s also the occasional technical hiccup, as some scenes—even ones with nothing happening in them—cause the frame rate to chunk up. While my machine blows the recommended specs for the game out of the water, I’m not wholly prepared to hang those technical woes on the devs’ shoulders, given how finicky Nvidia’s latest run of drivers have been.

Anger Foot is a game of extremes: breakneck door breaches, gleefully messy gunfights, and coke-fuelled bassy beats. Some pacing issues in the gameplay can put a hole in the experience, but much like your favourite pair of shoes, you can overlook the holes if they feel good and look cool as shit.