One Finger Death Punch

One Finger Death Punch
Developer(s)	Silver Dollar Games
Publisher(s)	Silver Dollar Games Mobirix (Android, iOS)
Engine	Microsoft XNA
Platform(s)	Android iOS Microsoft Windows Xbox 360
Release date(s)	Xbox 360 WW: June 24, 2013 Microsoft Windows WW: March 3, 2014
Genre(s)	Action, beat 'em up
Mode(s)	Single-player

One Finger Death Punch is an action video game developed and produced by Silver Dollar Games. It was originally released for Xbox 360 on June 24, 2013, ^[1] and Microsoft Windows on March 3, 2014,^[2] then was ported to Android on March 25, 2015^[3] and ported to iOS on June 12, 2015.^[4] The game has two main modes; a campaign and survival mode. In the campaign, the player must navigate a map and beat all of the levels whilst the survival mode has the player fight as long as they can before dying.

Gameplay

In-game screenshot of a boss battle

One Finger Death Punch is a fighting game where players must survive rounds of enemies in the many different stages during the single player story mode and must survive as long as they can during the survival mode. During the story mode, each round has a certain amount of enemies to be killed before the player can progress onto the next round. One Finger Death Punch's control scheme is based about the left and right mouse buttons, on the PC version, players must press the appropriate button to attack the enemies on the corresponding side of their character.

There are three difficulty modes both in story mode and in survival mode; student, master and grandmaster. These difficulty levels have an effect on how many enemies there are in each stage, the speed of each round and amount of hit-points that the player has.

There are many different rounds in the story mode that each have different weapons, special requirements and unique elements of gameplay. Boss battles consist of an enemy that required a certain pattern to defeat. Pattern is displayed to the user by bars of blue and red that represent in what order should press the left and right mouse buttons. Missing a button press or pressing the incorrect mouse button will result in the boss hitting the player.

There are a few versions of the survival mode within One Finger Death Punch. Plain survival mode will place the player in an endless Mob Round with some other sections randomly occurring, such as a Light Sword section. Then there's a blind survival mode where the player cannot see the bar underneath enemies indicating how many times they must be hit and in what order, nor the indication of when they are in range. The player can only rely their reaction time and the color of the enemies, with prompts appearing only for enemies that require a special combination of button presses. There is also a third secret mode which is the plain survival mode is crossed over with Silver Dollar Games' No Luca No, where the player must push away Luca (a cat) from the center of the screen as the cat appears from the left and right side of the screen, blocking the view.

Reception

One Finger Death Punch received positive reviews from critics, praising its simple controls, large amount of content and its visual style. However, critics picked up on the game's repetitive nature. Erwan Lafleuriel from Gameblog commented on One Finger Death Punch's simple controls by saying that the game was "Easy to learn, but challenging enough to pass many levels with honours". Hooked Gamers' Matt Porter said that people "could even play One Finger Death Punch with one finger", he concluded the review commenting about the simplistic game mechanics with "The depth behind the simplistic control scheme is impressive up to a point, until it all starts to get a bit samey".

References