Fatal Theory: zombie carnage in 2D

Playing Fatal Theory reminded me of playing arcade games as a teenager. Basic 2D, but engaging, graphics, and lots of bashing stuff that only gets better as you master combination moves.

Fatal Theory was made by local company 2HitStudio run by brothers Matt and Adam Carr: As always it’s just great to see such creativity coming not just out of Australia but out of Sydney and surrounds. Fatal Theory is available here for $4.99.

Now I have to admit that even when I was a teenager, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I didn’t particularly enjoy this game style. So I outsourced the review to a younger generation and this report was filed by Declan P our Senior Junior Gaming Critic:

Fatal Theory is a super fun game with loads of action, and zombies. Nick is a gamer, who, when struck with the zombie apocalypse, instantly grabs his survival kit and heads on out to hit things. Along the way he picks up new weapons, money and the second main character, a talking sword.

Though the story-line of this game is hilarious, and interesting enough that you want to stay with it, the game becomes very hard, very quickly. I played through the fourth boss many times, and still couldn’t get past it. Judging by the map of levels, I was only about a quarter of the way through the game. That’s a shame because, as I said, I wanted to follow on with the story-line which it is quite interesting, and creates a bit of humour in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Nick, the main character, has a brash and arrogant personality, often not listening to his wise companion, his talking sword. Yes, the sword is the wise one.

The game is pixelart, and the graphics are mostly exactly what you would expect of a pixelart game; except, perhaps, a little more detailed than most. The game has an excellent backing track, and great sound effects for when you are murdering zombies, humans and machines.

The controls can be confusing at first. They are based on controller buttons which have letters, but the letters don’t match the keyboard letters – you press ‘z’ for ‘a’ for example. Once your fingers are in the right place it doesn’t matter, but it feels like an unnecessary complication.

There is a weird bug that when you win a battle against a boss the screen flashes up saying “winner winner winner”, but that also happens when you lose. It’s just confusing. Another problem is when you choose an ally: the AI can be flaky. For example, the sad ghost helped a lot in some cases, but in others, it just pushed enemies off the screen, so I couldn’t hit them, this led to some boring waiting time.

Overall, Fatal Theory is fun and amusing. It did scale too quickly to hold my attention for as long as I’d hoped though. It is an excellent game, so in the end I give it a 3.5/5.

We played a review copy of the game kindly provided by 2HitStudio.