Silly Smash-like Slap City enters Early Access
Jennycidal violence
It's fascinating that for the longest time, it was just accepted wisdom that fighting games should be one on one affairs, where health points go down, and where memorization of move-lists and combos was king. Nintendo's Smash Bros wasn't the first game to do something different, of course, but it was the one that established a whole parallel genre built around the notion of numbers going up instead, fueling exponentially greater chaos.
The latest to step up for a shot at the silly party-fighter crown is Slap City, coming from Ludosity, the eclectic little outfit that gave us the likes of Ittle Dew, Card City Nights and some pointedly DOS-tinged throwbacks like Princess Remedy and MURI.
Being such a busy little studio, with titles spanning a baffling array of genres, Ludosity have built up quite a stable of character designs over the years. Most of them being cute as a button, they're a great fit for the genre. Slap City plans to take the whole lot of them (currently just five in the Early Access release) and throw them into a big dumb slap-fight, because they've already tried card-battling and that worked out pretty okay.
Right now there's not a huge amount of content to the game, hence the low price point. Ludosity have enough experience under their belt to have a full development road-map worked out, viewable on the Steam store page for the game. By the time the game fully launches in an estimated 8 months, it'll contain 8 characters, 24 stages and a full single-player campaign, but the price will have increased to $15.
Still, there's a small but respectable product even in this early state. Five playable characters, 12 fighting stages, 2 Slap Ball arenas and full online multiplayer are present and correct, along with local play, obviously. It'd be a pretty daft Smash-like if there wasn't.
Slap City is available now via Early Access for £4/$5.