Skinny and Franko: Fists of Violence
Reviewed by Cyril Lachel on
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Three-decades after first hitting the Amiga, Franko is back with a new brawler with all the old moves. Unfortunately, Skinny and Franko: Fists of Violence is about as bad as a follow-up can be, with stiff gameplay, offensively bad writing and a mean-spirited story that is filled to the brim with game-breaking bugs and glitches. Worse yet, the levels insist on overstaying their welcome, with most of them reaching well beyond a half-hour. What should have been a sprint through Poland’s crime-ridden streets becomes a full marathon that will wear you out with its shallow and horribly repetitive action. It’s honestly hard to believe that a developer was able to screw up the beat ‘em up formula this much in 2023. Avoid at all costs.
Rating: 1%
Did you know that it takes just over two minutes to beat the first stage in Final Fight? That’s pretty much on par with both the original Double Dragon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, both of which take around two and a half minutes to beat their respective first stages. Streets of Rage 2, on the other hand, will take you around six minutes to beat stage one, which definitely puts it on the longer side. But that’s nothing when compared to Skinny and Franko: Fists of Violence, a beat ‘em up where the first stage will take you (and I’m not exaggerating) close to a half-hour to complete. Yeah, that’s a whole lot of button-mashing without a break, and it’s just the first of many, MANY problems for this awful brawler. This is my review of Skinny and Franko: Fists of Violence.
Before we can get to Skinny and Franko, we first need to talk about Franko. Specifically, the Amiga game Franko: The Crazy Revenge, which was a 1994 beat ‘em up inspired by the genre greats like Double Dragon and Final Fight. It was made by a short-lived Polish developer named World Software that ended up going out of business just two years after Franko hit store shelves.
Now, 29 years later, we’re getting a follow-up of sorts from Blue Sunset Games, another Polish company with a dubious track record. Touting that one of the creators of Franko: The Crazy Revenge is back to oversee this sequel, Blue Sunset wants you to believe that they’ve brought the franchise into the 21st century. Unfortunately, having just suffered through this boring, frustrating and ugly brawler, I’m here to say that Skinny and Franko is a game stuck in the past in the worst ways possible.
Nearly three decades after the events of The Crazy Revenge, Franko has decided to return to Poland in hopes of saving his old friend from a whole bunch of new drama. This time around he’s teamed up with Skinny, a street fighter who is ready to wreak havoc on the thugs, gangs and low-life scum that populates the back alleys of Szczecin. It’s a perfectly good set-up that nine times out of ten would lead to a fun and exciting throwback beat ‘em up. Sadly, this is that one time when everything falls apart in spectacular fashion.
Look, I think it’s clear that this is going to be an extremely negative review, so what I’m going to do is start by talking about the few things this game gets right. For one thing, it’s clear that developer Blue Sunset Games has put in a lot of work to create the violent streets at the center of Skinny and Franko. There are a lot of little touches in the backgrounds, such as spectators that you can interact with and hand-drawn enemies that show real damage as they get bruised and battered. I also like how there are dozens of weapons to pick up, including garbage cans and boxes that you can use to confuse the various gang members. The developer has turned a short and simple brawler into a surprisingly long sequel, complete with a bunch of optional locations and secrets to find.
Unfortunately, that’s the end of good things I can say about Skinny and Franko. Put simply: Fists of Violence is total trash. It’s a game that not only gets all of the fundaments wrong, but doubles and triples down on all of the worst mistakes. After nearly 40 years of seeing companies like Sega, Capcom, Technos and Konami get the formula right, it’s hard to believe that somebody would make a beat ‘em up this inept in the year 2023. If there is a less fun brawler floating around in the world, I certainly haven’t played it.
Let’s start with the most glaring problem – the length. At the start of the review I pointed out that most beat ‘em ups feature levels that are two or three minutes long. That’s not the case when it comes to Skinny and Franko. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that the first stage of this game took me 29 minutes and 20 seconds. Take a moment to let that sink in. Just one stage of this game takes a half-hour to beat, and that’s when I tried to rush through as quickly as possible. To put that in perspective, you can beat all of Double Dragon in around 25 minutes.
While that may not sound like a big problem, I assure you that it is. In order to demonstrate the issue, let’s take a look at what you have to do in stage two. Things start out straight-forward, as either Skinny or Franko (or both) slowly walk down the street beating up literally dozens of identical enemies. About twenty minutes into the stage, we fight this convenience store clerk, who looks and acts like a boss, but is definitely not a boss. You see, we still need to fight through the construction site and take on dozens more bad guys. It’s not until around ten minutes later when you’ll run into the Mechanical God, who must be a boss because he has a completely different life bar. But wait, because we’re not even close to being done with this god forsaken stage.
You see, after you defeat the Mechanical God, you will need to drive his car back through the level you just fought through until a big, burly woman smashes that car with her cement roller. Once again, this looks and feels like a boss fight (complete with a lot of cheap tactics on her part), but it’s not a boss fight. And even when you beat her, you still have to fight through the back alley, where you’ll run into the level’s actual boss. All in all, it took me around 40 minutes to beat that second stage. The same length it takes somebody to beat all of Final Fight.
The reason this is a problem is because if you die at any point during that stage, you have to go back to the very beginning. That wouldn’t be a big deal if the stage ended with the cashier boss, but there are at least three more boss-like characters to contend with before you reach anything resembling a checkpoint. In other words, when you lose to the Mechanical God, you just lost 30 minutes of progress. And knowing that there are two equally tough fights in store for you after that makes the level designs even more infuriating.
It doesn’t help that many of my restarts happened because of game-breaking bugs and glitches. It’s frustratingly common to get stuck in a car or on some part of the background, unable to move or free yourself. The only solution is to start the level over again, losing fifteen minutes. Or what about that time when my character got stuck in the middle of a kick, unable to move or take damage from the street thugs. I was frozen mid-kick, something I could not break free of, no matter what I tried. Once again, the only solution was to start that level over, which was another thirty minutes lost. These problems zapped any enthusiasm I had for the game and made me seriously contemplate quitting on more than one occasion.
There are other problems, like the sluggish play control that makes doing anything a nightmare. You can’t just walk over an item and pick it up, you have to stop on it, wait for a second and then try to pick it up. There’s a block button, but it barely works. Trying to perform a rushing elbow attack or jump kick is pointless, because they never seem to connect. It sometimes feels like just walking around is a pain. Of course, it doesn’t help that the enemies are good at breaking your combos and landing tons of cheap hits. You can replenish some of your life by drinking beer, but the game doesn’t bother telling you that, and I only found out by accident.
And then there are these bikers. These terrible, awful, no-good bikers. This is an enemy the game likes to rely on, and you’ll hate them more and more with each appearance. These guys will drive by you, constantly smacking our hero to the ground. Even when you think you’re out of range, they’ll smack you down. And then when you get back up, the second biker will smack you down. I hate these guys. I hate that it takes a pixel-perfect jump kick to knock them off their bikes, which is almost impossible to do. I hate that they only knock me down, leaving the enemies there to gang up on me. I hate that this is the game’s go-to any time they need to make things more challenging. I hate these bikers.
And the truth is, I hated every second of Skinny and Franko: Fists of Violence. It’s an ugly, mean-spirited game that actively hates everybody in it (especially the women). This is the first beat ‘em up where I felt dirty while cleaning up the crime-filled streets. I’m not sure if this is the sequel Franko fans wanted, but I do know that they deserved better. Skinny and Franko: Fists of Violence is one of the worst beat ‘em ups I’ve ever played.
Three-decades after first hitting the Amiga, Franko is back with a new brawler with all the old moves. Unfortunately, Skinny and Franko: Fists of Violence is about as bad as a follow-up can be, with stiff gameplay, offensively bad writing and a mean-spirited story that is filled to the brim with game-breaking bugs and glitches. Worse yet, the levels insist on overstaying their welcome, with most of them reaching well beyond a half-hour. What should have been a sprint through Poland’s crime-ridden streets becomes a full marathon that will wear you out with its shallow and horribly repetitive action. It’s honestly hard to believe that a developer was able to screw up the beat ‘em up formula this much in 2023. Avoid at all costs.
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