One of my all-time favourite memes is the caffeinated skeleton in a rocking chair, screaming intensely while going fast. Playing Anger Foot is a lot like experiencing that meme for yourself – going fast, hair streaming in the wind, panicking as the world blitzes past you, and roving enemies whip guns in your face. It’s horrifying, and exhilarating, and incredibly moreish.
The linking narrative of Anger Foot is simple: you are a shoe collector living in a city of crime and disrepute. When your prized shoes are stolen by a criminal syndicate, you kick off on a mission to take down the goons of six evil gangs, and clean up Shit City for good. Armed with an incredibly strong kicking foot, and the guns of your fallen enemies, you’ll rampage through levels, dispatching enemies and rescuing your shoes.
I can’t say I’ve ever played an FPS where the “F” stands for foot, but developer Free Lives revels in that sense of novelty. The game’s combat is its star attraction, with levels ruled by meaty kicks and a need to put your best foot forward (and through enemy heads). While you can tackle runs as you like, your very angry foot is your most helpful companion, particularly as ammo runs out quickly, and goons tend to surprise you around corners.
There is great satisfaction in perfecting runs through each level, balancing low health with your all-powerful kicks, and your slightly less powerful bullets. You may enter a stage, kick a door off its hinges, squish the enemy behind that door, then turn right, kick a head, and use a recovered gun to clip a distant enemy. Then, take a breath, and approach the next room, where hordes of enemies may be waiting to catch you unaware.
The further you travel, the more challenge you’ll find in enemy types. You start off with a simple mix of melee fighters and gunners, and then you’re dealing with a cavalcade of other threats: snakes with a lower down hit box, enemies with rapid fire machine guns, bombers, enemies with hooks, and so on. You need to be ever-smarter to outwit them, and conquer stages.
And you will need to level up fast. Anger Foot is a very difficult game beyond its early chapters. The challenge arrives as enemies get trickier. Sometimes, you’ll smash through doors and finding yourself facing a wave of 5+ melee fighters, all of which require a kick to put down. Sometimes, you spend several minutes running through a rooftop stage, only to encounter three machine gunners lying in wait. A single bullet will put you down immediately, and you’ll need to start the whole process again.
Read: Terra Nil review – Down to Earth
For shorter chapters, this isn’t really an issue – even if there is frustration (and plenty of comedy) in watching the game’s enemies drop everything at the end of a run, and start gyrating over your dead body. You can simply pick up your run again, knowing where enemies are hidden. You’ll quickly gain a map in your head, and be able to enter at Terminator efficiency: walk forward, smash door, turn left and kick goon, go around the corner, shoot far goon, smash door, continue. The game wants you to keep running and kicking, and perfecting your movement for high scores and greater enemy takedowns.
When levels become much longer in later stages, that’s where the headaches begin. So many times in Anger Foot, I completed a near perfect run, only to be cut down by a cheap trick – as a bomber ran at me, or a dozen snakes descended on my position. There’s always a path forward, and you’ll learn lessons in defeat, but there are levels where you’ll feel like banging your head against the wall, or screaming to the sky.
Where I found the most pleasure in Anger Foot was in jumping into its kinder modes. When you struggle with a particular level – you can’t quite manage a full run, or the high-score time limits seem ridiculously impossible – you can activate reduced difficulty in the game. There’s a mode with reduced damage, one with weaker enemies, and a lovely one subtitled Never Die.
Activating these modes is not an act of weakness. Life is too short to stress about whether playing on easy is good or correct – it’s video games. They should be fun. And on Never Die mode, I was able to better see the intricacies of Anger Foot‘s design. I could appreciate its labyrinthine levels and enemy types. I could marvel at its hard-hitting combat, and how the game makes kicking feel so powerful, and rewarding.
It was the smaller things that stuck out to me while kicking my invincible way across the Earth. The way enemies crumple and bend beneath my feet, little easter eggs in crevices of levels, and pop art styling that hides a neat anti-capitalist narrative focused on the deadly sins of the system (greed, pollution, and so on).
Anger Foot is a biting game in that regard. A no-frills, action-heavy combat sim that is mostly about kicking in heads, but also a little bit about the grime of modern society. It’s stylish and frantic, and incredibly challenging – and it’s also got a walloping good sense of fun, and optional challenges for those looking to speedrun their way through its many hallways.
Those looking to conquer its many stages will have a tough mountain to climb, but its novel quirks make that foot-stomping journey all the more satisfying. Whether using assist tools or blasting through on your own merit, Anger Foot is an explosive blast.
Four stars: ★★★★
Anger Foot
Platform(s): PC
Developer: Free Lives
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Release Date: 11 July 2024
A PC code for Anger Foot was provided and played on an Asus ROG Ally for the purposes of this review. GamesHub reviews are rated on a five-point scale.
