Albacete Warrior

You know how sometimes a musician will cover an older song and make it better, richer and more emotional? I wish the same was true for video games. I would love to see somebody else take a crack at Albacete Warrior, the debut release from first-time developer FAS3. This is a silly beat ‘em up with an extremely cool conceit that is thoroughly letdown by an inexperienced team who gets almost every element wrong. Oh how I wish somebody else could take a crack at this game, because I’m telling you, there’s something really cool hidden away inside this frustrating game. Let’s explore the good and the bad in this review of Albacete Warrior.

This is the story of Benito Waters, an unlikely ninja from Albacete, Spain, who goes on a bizarre globe-trotting adventure after his dojo is burned to the ground by thugs in sombreros and jalapeno pepper costumes. Accompanied by his chicken pap Pepito and the decapitated head of his sensei, this is a satirical ninja game where the story-teller throws pretty much everything they can think of at the wall in hopes of it sticking.

Forget the game’s random and irreverent sense of humor, because the first thing you’re going to notice is the very specific art style. You play a 2D pixel sprite that looks like it was pulled straight out of the 8-bit Ninja Gaiden games. This paper-thin hero is existing in a larger 3D world made up of bad guys and polygonal obstacles. It’s this mix of new and old that makes this game stand out, and I was won over by its potential right from the start.

At its core, this is little more than a standard beat ‘em up, not unlike Final Fight, Streets of Rage and countless other brawlers from the 1990s. We’re given a few extremely simple combos, as well as the ability to swing Pepito around kind of like a whip. Later in the game, we’ll unlock more traditional ninja moves, such as unleashing a barrage of throwing stars and a rush attack that stops the enemies in their tracks. There’s not a lot to the combat, but it gets the job done for an hour or two.

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The problem with Albacete Warrior has little to do with the actual fighting, but rather the way the rest of the game plays out. This is one of those brawlers that insists on also being a platformer, and that’s when things really start to fall apart. There’s an especially brutal bit in the second level set against a waterfall that feels nearly impossible. It’s one of those awful sections where one wrong move will send you falling down to the very start of the stage, forcing you to try the precarious jumps over and over and over until you eventually get it right.

What makes this especially frustrating is that it’s almost impossible to judge how far you’re going to jump. There are times when I’ll dismount from a wall jump and fly completely over the platform, while other times Benito will barely jump at all. It doesn’t help that there’s a second or two delay between pressing the button and jumping off of a wall, which makes timing your moves much more difficult than it should be. The gameplay veers wildly between being imprecise and feeling too loose, almost as if our hero is constantly slipping on ice.

And it’s not like these annoying platforming sections lead to something cool, because half the time they are just pointing us to another annoying boss battle. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that the boss designs are bad, but rather that their attacks are cheap and can kill Benito in a single hit. A lot of these fights end up lasting longer than they should, so it’s especially frustrating to die from a falling block you couldn’t predict mere seconds before you would have defeated the boss. While not all are as challenging as the rest, I didn’t like a single boss battle in the entire game. They are all terrible.

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Unfortunately, I also didn’t find myself laughing much. While I can certainly appreciate the absurdity of some of the scenarios, so much of the writing felt forced and obvious. There’s a lot of racial humor, weirdly-placed profanity and toothless references to hot-button topics on Twitter. Look, I’m not offended by profanity and I like edgy jokes, but this is an example of a game trying way too hard. It’s not edgy or offensive, the writing is just lame.

It’s also poorly localized. The dialog is filled with annoying typos and errors. In fact, there are so many misspellings, that I started to wonder if it was being done on purpose. A good example of this is when Benito’s sensei says “await” when he actually means “wait.” This happens every single time, so it feels like it must be a bit, but it’s never funny and isn’t tied into the rest of his dialog. There are a lot of moments like that.

In the end, the most frustrating thing about Albacete Warrior is that all the elements are here for a great game. I like the way the 2D sprites exist in this 3D world and how over-the-top the adventure eventually becomes. With the right people involved, this could have been a must-own ninja parody game. As it is, Albacete Warrior is a frustrating mess of a brawler that should be avoided at all cost.