Bounty Battle (2020) [PC]

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

-Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

I’ve got a lot of opinions about indie games. I suspect most people who play games do. On the one hand, you’ve got folks who see them as the answer to a dry, dull AAA-focused games industry. On the other, you’ve got people who see the indie designation too often used as a means of avoiding accountability and professionalism. I think I probably lean a little in the latter camp myself. I’m sure indies will be fine. They’ve got a near-universal support group in the games media, after all, and a little criticism here and there could be worse. Sometimes, though, it’s good to offer more than just a little criticism. One of those times is right now, since we’re going to talk about Bounty Battle.

That’s because, honestly, Bounty Battle might be the most significant example in recent memory of how ridiculous delineating beteen the AAA and indie sides of the games industry has become. It’s a simple fighting game that hopes to sell itself on its vast collection of licensed characters. We’re not talking about the wellspring of innovation that the indie space is supposed to represent; this is Smash-Except-We-Have-Indie-Game-Characters. That’s it, and really it’s closer to the much-maligned-in-no-small-part-because-it-was-kind-of-a-ripoff PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, which is kind of ironic if you think about it.

Indie All-Stars

I wouldn’t, though, because that would represent more thought put into Bounty Battle than the developers spared. What we’ve got here is just about the most cynical example of the indie sphere that’s ever been released. Assembling this cast of characters likely took no small amount of time, money and effort, especially the effort required to not immediately include the omnipresent Shovel Knight, but apparently there wasn’t anything left to make a game. The result, then, is a fighter that struggles to contend with Newgrounds’ takes on Smash, to say nothing of the real deal (or even PlayStation All-Stars.) It’s buggy, it’s lacking in content and featues, it’s simply not fun to play, and, most of all, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone involved in the creation of this game thought it was in a release-ready state. The most obvious conclusion, then, is that they’ve got all these characters lined up and, well, that’s why people are buying it so they might as well just push the button…right?

Let’s start with the good: there’s 30 characters from various indie games to check out. Some are from well-known and beloved titles like Axiom Verge, Guacamelee, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, and Darkest Dungeon, while others are a bit more obscure. Blocks That Matter was a thing that existed back in the day, for instance, and Flinthook was a fantastic roguey platformy game that more people should probably take the time to play. The cast is wide, varied and impressive; again, it’s clear that this is where the team was focused to the detriment of everything else.

Roster Obscurity

As is often the case with Smash-alikes, I tend to find myself drawn to the lesser-known representatives. I’d like to point out a couple personal favorites. First, you’ve got the Shieldmaiden, who hails from Eitr, a bit of vaporware from 2015 that’s never actually been anywhere close to release. Second, there’s a character from what appears to be a hack-and-slash game called Doko Roko that was greenlit on Steam in 2015 (remember that?), raised a delicious $40,000 on Kickstarter the same year, announced a release in 2017 and later in 2019, and currently hangs in pseudo-beta limbo. I’m only being a little sarcastic calling these my favorites, since while vaporware and crowdfunding up tens of thousands of dollars then not actually releasing a game are a couple defining traits of the indie world these days, Bounty Battle will likely be the only time these characters see the light of day and that’s a little sad.

Speaking of sad, let’s talk about the bad part of Bounty Battle: all those characters are incredibly floaty, bobbling about like leaves on the wind, and their attacks are piddling swipes that still manage to lock opponents into hitstun. There’s no impact associated with anything. If you’ve played a Flash fighter from the early 2000s or so, you’ve got an idea of how this feels in practice. Further, while there’s plenty of characters, their movesets are anemic at best. Just as an example, Nuclear Throne was a game packed with unique and interesting weapons and gadgets, so of course the hero Fish wields a peashooter, a generic laser and…that’s about it, really.

Turns out that Fish is still in pretty good shape, since ranged combat is brutally effective in Bounty Battle. Combos in fighting games, at their heart, are just a means of extending the enemy’s hitstun to allow you to chain further attacks together, and in a game where everything has about the same amount of hitstun you can dominate by blasting away for days. There’s no blocking in Bounty Battle and your evasive options are limited, so attempts to deal with ranged characters using a melee fighter are doomed to hopelessness.

Online Multiplayer?

Not a lot of that matters, though, since Bounty Battle launched without online multiplayer! Yes, in 2020, the premier indie crossover fighting game doesn’t have online play and no concrete plans to add it. That means no matchmaking, so you’re stuck playing against the horrific AI or whoever you can rope into joining you. Seems like a great way to lose friends, so I can’t recommend it, much like I can’t recommend releasing a fighting game with no online multiplayer during a global pandemic where people have been encouraged to stay away from one another. At least you can play against the AI, right? Yeah, turns out you can easily clear the game by stunlocking it in the corner with light attacks.

Look, I don’t want to be too hard on Bounty Battle…except I kind of do. It’s 2020. Indie games have been a mainstream thing for over a decade now. There’s only so far that “this is our first game” or “our team was small” or “we had a tiny budget” can take you. Can’t produce something great on your own? Find help, split the money. Don’t have enough money? Well, that’s certainly not for a lack of options.

Super Smash Buggers

It’s very difficult to believe that anyone from Dark Screen Games loaded up the buggy, half-finished release version of Bounty Battle and thought to themselves “yeah, this is it, this is the game we wanted to make, this was a solid use of $40,000 of crowdfunded money, this what people are going to pay $20 for and they’re going to love it.” It wouldn’t have taken a single crowdfunded cent to sit a friend or family member in front of this game so they could say that something was terribly wrong.

That, in the end, is where the problem really lies. Bounty Battle doesn’t feel like anybody really cared about it beyond cramming in as many guest characters as possible. It doesn’t feel like a game that anyone’s going to love to play. It’s not something I want to sell my friends on because I know we can connect on Parsec, get into voice chat and laugh it up for hours. As it stands, Bounty Battle feels a bit like a soulless cash-grab, banking on other games’ popularity to make a quick buck.

It’s a little ironic that we’ve been told for years now that it was the big AAA publishers who did that.

 Visuals: 4/10

While all of the characters are recognizable and the original characters are decent-looking for what they are (a valkyrie, a D&D-style Beholder and so on) they all flail about like puppets on strings. Further, as they take damage they become glitchy and weird, which is an interesting effect that makes it difficult to see where your character is and what they’re doing. Meanwhile, Bounty Battle’s stages and UI design are lazy at best. It’s clear that most of the devs’ attention was paid to making sure that each character looked accurate to their respective game, likely for contractual reasons in order to use those characters in Bounty Battle.

 Audio: 4/10

Well, the sound’s decent for what it is. Characters are announced by a garbled voice when you select them, which, given the obscure nature of the characters and Bounty Battle’s tendency to refer to them by their home game rather than their name, means that it might take some research to determine who exactly you’re playing. Imagine if Smash Bros. referred to Link as The Legend of Zelda in all cases but when you select him on the character-select screen and you’ve got the idea.

 Gameplay: 2/10

It’s not great! We mostly went over this above, but Bounty Battle feels like a Flash game from the early 2000s. Characters movement is awkward, attacks lack any sort of impact, there’s very little variety of combat tactics and it’s difficult to tell what exactly is happening in any given part of a battle. While it’s possible to collect Bounty Points and use them for summons, even that’s not especially relevant or useful, so the feature is largely ignored or used solely as an afterthought. It’s difficult to imagine that developers who were obviously inspired by Smash managed to miss the mark to this extent, but here we are.

 Replayability: 2/10

This kind of game thrives on the replayability offered by its cast. While there’s a wide and varied cast of characters, they all tend to play in a somewhat similar fashion. It’s a strong contrast with both Smash Bros. and Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale, where characters introduced elements from their own games and felt unique to control. Here, you’ve got Shooty Guys, Melee Guys and that’s about it. There’s slight deviations for certain characters, such as the Shieldmaiden’s focus on defense, but the game’s too janky to make much out of them. You’ll have the best luck sticking with mashing from far away or up close, per your character’s preference.

 Challenge: 2/10

If you choose a ranged character and mash away you’ll probably defeat the AI effortlessly. They’ve got no idea how to deal with bullet spam and will typically just lay down and die. Melee characters might have some more trouble given the goofy nature of the game’s physics and hit detection, but with a little practice you still won’t have more trouble. This wouldn’t be a big deal in a game with modern multiplayer options so you wouldn’t have to play against the AI, but…

 Multiplayer: 1/10

…those options don’t exist! You’ve got local play and that’s about it. $40,000 doesn’t buy you the use of the free GGPO license, I suppose, so you’re grabbing friends to play locally and possibly losing them in the process once you realize what you’ve roped them into. Parsec and Steam Remote Play Together are also options, but that still means finding people to play with.

 Uniqueness: 1/10

I mean…it’s Super Smash Bros. with indie game characters. I don’t know that “unique” is the term I’d go for here. There’s some slight changes such as the use of a health bar system rather than simply punting enemies off the stage for kills, but generally speaking it’s an effort to cash in on a popular property by using characters from other popular properties.

 My personal grade: 1/10

It’s 2020. We’ve got plenty of problems going on around the world to deal with, but regardless of all that, I can still say with confidence that the games industry as a whole – and make no mistake, indie games are very much a part of the games industry and have been for years now – is beyond this. The developers of Bounty Battle accepted an interest-free, accountability-free loan of $40,000 from Fig.co that they’re under no obligation to ever pay back. They used this money to produce one of the worst games I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing, then tried to sell it on the back of other, more popular properties.

This is the kind of crowdfunding nightmare that we were assured wasn’t going to come up back when the fad was big in the early 2010s, often with threats of censure for those who were too vocally skeptical. Since the model came into vogue, we’ve seen games on Bounty Battle’s exceedingly low level produced time and time again. That we have yet another example isn’t surprising, given the allure of tens of thousands of dollars in funding showing up sight unseen for developers willing to ask nicely. As always, however, we can hope that lessons are learned and future crowdfunded games are handled with a little more dignity.

Personally, I think my wallet’s going to remain closed.

Thank you to Dark Screen Games for supplying us with a copy of their game for this critique.

Aggregated Score: 2.1

Cory G. believes the pen is mightier than the sword…well, depending on how sharp the pen and sword are. A child of the ’90s and a prolific writer, he strews his work about like Legos made of words, just waiting for your brain to step on them. He enjoys a devilish challenge, so when it comes to talking about some of the more difficult games out there, you might just run into the Infernal Accountant Mage. Some advice: hold on to your soul around this guy, and don’t sign anything. Read more at popzara.com.