Reality Fighters Review (PS Vita)

Reality Fighters makes me look like a man. A muscle-bound man with giant saggy breasts and a really bad wig. Yup, that’s me on the left there. When you start the game, you take a photo of your face which is then grafted onto a body that you customise further. You can make your character really fat and blobby, really thin, musclebound or built like a wet noodle.

You then choose a fighting style that determines your animations and moves. Different styles use different commands. I picked a ballet dancer, which means that apparently my strongest blows require me to stretch one leg out for balance while I bend over backwards to club my opponent with the back of my head. Or something. I don’t know. The character creation is the best part of it. I’ve put a few more screenshots in our Reality Fighters Facebook album.

Clothes are unlocked as you progress through the campaign and can be bought with in-game currency. There are defence stats based on the clothes you wear but no way to actually see what stats each item conveys before purchases. I feel that this was an oversight which reveals the importance the dev team placed on these stats – none at all.

The fighting in this game just isn’t fun. I have button-mashed my way through a big chunk of the single player experience, which tells me that you don’t need a whole lot of skill to progress. You can choose from an advanced button-only mode or a supposedly simpler combination of buttons and touch screen.

Yes, it’s easier to pull off the big showy moves using the front and rear touchpad commands but once I got more than a couple of battles in, it became clear that these are the easiest for the AI to counter. Frantically stabbing at the basic attack buttons seems to be the way forward and just can’t bring myself to care about any of it.

Basically, Reality Fighters performs best when you treat it as a virtual Barbie game for a horrifying version of yourself. Take photos of your friends and laugh as your malformed visages gurn back at you in the battle intro screen. Bash through a few token battles to unlock better costumes. Use the “augmented reality” function to take screenshots of your avatars with silly backdrops, like fighting on the table in a pub (assuming you can find a brightly-lit pub), or on your keyboard. Better yet, spend your 20 quid on something more fun, like a round of drinks for your mates.

Reality Fighters is out now for the PS Vita.

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