By Nathanael Peacock
There are some days as a gamer where you want to live the life of a gallant adventurer and revel in grand stories and quests, or build a flourishing city and watch your citizens live their best life. And there are other days where you just want to kick down a door, clear the room with two well-placed shotgun blasts, kick a grenade back at another bad guy and leap out the window — Anger Foot is the game for that kind of day.
Suited and Booted
Anger Foot starts simply; you’re an avid sneaker-collector finally completing your collection of the very best shoes. When suddenly – oh no! Your most prized possessions are stolen right out of your apartment by goons in a helicopter. Thus begins your tale of justice, revenge, and kicking.
Anger Foot is a first person shooter that is more Doom (2016) than it is anything tactical. You’ll jump into a level with grungey thumping techno pounding along to the flashing lights and ticking timer in the upper left corner. It’s a constant stream of lights, sounds and explosions that push you to go faster, be better and kick harder.
Life in the aptly named Shit City is a life where crime is everything. Every person in the city belongs to one of four gangs that control the city underneath the Crime Minister. You’ll need to take out these four gangs and their leaders to get your Primo Sneakers back.
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The people that live in Shit City are wild caricatures of humans, with vibrant coloured skin, huge ears, eye and lips, and massive, long limbs. They’re part Rick and Morty, part masked wrestler, and all anger.
Between levels, you’ll sometimes have the opportunity to walk through small sections of the city and meet the many gangsters that hang out in the streets. One such section I walked up on a group of police banging on an apartment door shouting, “Hey, I don’t hear any crime going on in there!”. Amidst the smog-filled streets and shattered windows looking out over flaming dumpsters you’ll meet shopkeepers whose entire stock is stolen, and besotted alleyway Romeos who’ve tried everything to impress their Juliette – see burglary, arson and kidnapping.
Kicking Things Off With Style
As you charge through each level, every bullet you fire and kick you throw will kill an enemy on contact, and you’ll be able to shrug off a small handful of shots yourself. You pick up weapons from fallen enemies, from a simple pistol to a shotgun that sounds like God slamming a car door. However, being unarmed isn’t really a problem when your primary weapon is your left foot.
Starting out each run you’ll kick a door open, scan the room and work out if there are melee crocodiles with baseball bats running at you, or thugs with pistols, shotguns or machine pistols, or even charging enemies with huge glowing heads that explode on proximity. Then you’ll kick back oncoming grenades, jump of hide from incoming bullets and kick anyone and anyone that gets within distance. It’s an exercise in quickly scanning and assessing your targets and doing what you can in each room.
Because enemy placements and rooms are fixed (rather than randomised), as you die and respawn you’ll need to learn enemy locations and anticipate surprise attacks around corners to clear the level faster.
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Some rooms it’s safest to run through; levels are completed by getting to the end, not by killing every enemy. Though each has three possible stars for completion, one for making it out alive, and two more for sub-objectives. These objectives range from finishing the level within 30 seconds, using only your feet as weapons, and even completing without jumping on one of the many elevated levels that almost require leaping from rooftop to rooftop.
My favourite level was Rooftop Rampage – which has you on top of an apartment building, confidently leaping from one roof to another, shooting uzi-wielding baddies and booting baseball bat toting crocodiles to the blood-slick streets below. It culminates in a series of near impossible leaps, an obligatory slide down corrugated iron roofing (while shooting bad guys of course) and leaping off to a zipline that our foot-fancying hero grips with his ankles and slides into the next level.
By completing levels and collecting stars you’ll unlock a range of outlandishly upgraded sneakers, including one pair that slows time when you kick open a door – or a personal favourite of mine that gives you more ammunition when you kill an enemy with a kick.
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Some shoe and level combinations go together like socks and sandals (that’s bad). For example, the Detonators cause doors to explode after they’re kicked in, which is a fashion faux pas on the tight internal corridors of some of the earlier levels. Likewise, the Soul Suckers are designed for the run-and-gun playstyle, you take less damage from enemies, but you’ll die quickly if you stop killing. However, for a couple of levels that don’t kick off with enemies in the first five to ten seconds, you’ll be dead before seeing the first baddie.
Not All A Walk In The Park
The bones here are great, and when I first fired up Anger Foot, I charged through the first section of the city in one sitting. However, I did run into a fair share of minor issues, from frame stutters and slow down on some of the more packed and explosive rooms (this was running on a Ryzensystem with 32gb RAM and an RTX4070), to a weird audio glitch that had two back to back levels running in eerie silence.
None of these issues ruined my experience with the game, but when speed and style are at the core of the experience, anything that hampers those two pillars will give you pause. I’m certain these are things that can be fixed with a patch or two.
I was also pleased to see a decent suite of options to modify the difficulty and make the game accessible, weaker enemies, weaker bosses, weaker everything as well as an old-school god mode. There’s also aim assist and the usual visual modification like motion blur and low blood modes. The kicker here is that gaming is for everyone, and if someone wants to kick back and boot up some blood sports with a reduced difficulty – why not?
And that’s a good thing, because there are some absolutely wild difficulty spikes, levels with bullets, bombs, grenades, tentacles and snakes coming from every angle that winning was more a case of luck than strategy. While I’m certain there will be speed runners out there, I’d encourage the average punter to make liberal use of those difficulty options.
Anger Foot is a game that when you do eventually get stuck on a level — you might have caught the same grenade to the face or a baseball bat welding alligator got the jump on you — you’ll crack your neck like a badass and say “no, no. I got this” and hit restart.
It’s fast, explosive, stylish and outlandishly weird. But at the end of the day it does something very different and unique, I’m certain speed runners will have a wild time with this one, and anyone who just wants to kick back and put their feet up after a long day will find this shoe fits just fine.
Anger Foot is coming to PC via Steam on July 12th, a demo is also available featuring the first few levels.
Quest Daily scores Anger Foot:
7.5/10
• Great for what is it, simple and satisfying.
• Some inconsistent difficulty spikes make the game challenging in longer sessions.
• Some bugs and slow-down.
• Visuals and audio match the vibe perfectly.
An early copy of Anger Foot was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this review.
