by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Indie Pogo
  
• Developers- Lowe Brothers
  
• Publishers-  Lowe Brothers 
  
• PC
  

The first thing you learn when you start getting serious about fighting games is DON’T JUMP. Jumping is an aggressive move that makes you vulnerable, and should be used when you’re ready to go in or desperately need to get away. Despite that, most players are gonna end up turning every fighting game into an air brawl, where fighters feel like they’re on pogo sticks half the time. So I guess Indie Pogo saw that figured, why not make a fighting game where every character is perpetually jumping. In doing that it creates a fighter that moves the competition for territory from the horizontal plane into the vertical one. It’s a curious creative decision, and whether or not it pays off is a complicated question to answer.

From the go you’ll notice that Indie Pogo wears its inspirations openly. It’s a platform fighter through and through, and its debt to Smash Bros is clear in the menus, trophy system and combat. It carries the same celebratory vibes as well, representing a wide range of indie titles with its roster and arenas.

Each of these games has been depicted with clear love and care, with the art bringing together disparate styles of game while keeping them true the source material. Everything down to the death animations feel like they could be from an alternative version of each game. On top of that there’s a pleasant squash and stretch applied to each character that gives them a charming bounciness.  

The sounds of each game are instantly recognizable, whether that’s the chiptunes of VVVVVV or the voice clips and effects of characters from Freedom Planet or Downwell. Likewise the stages carry the same detail, with hazard that reflect the worlds of each game, even sometimes incorporating mechanics from the source. For example, Runbow’s stage removes colored platforms from play as the background color changes, and INK’s stage starts in darkness, with colored ink emitted from players filling in the stage as they move around.

Between these celebratory moments, Indie Pogo is a mixed bag. The core concept is sound enough. It uses a familiar lives system, with a set amount of HP per life. The perpetual jumping gives each character a gravity bound trajectory that results inevitably results in them being put into a vulnerable position. Fights require a balanced use of attacks, double jumps, and air dodges, each with only a few uses before they need to be recharged by landing.

Double jumps are the easiest way to gain the height advantage needed to stomp an opponent, but are easily beat out by several attacks, and dodges prevent you from performing more actions, but give you invincibility while active and cover the most distance. Attacks can be performed in neutral, downward and upward directions to inflict damage and change your trajectory, or charged to keep yourself grounded temporarily and attack above. Each of these are a major tool for setting up combos.

The main aim, however, is to stomp opponents by dropping on their heads. Not only can this stun them and allow for a follow up, but it will also replenish attacks, dodges, and double jumps, as well as build points towards a super if several stomps are chained before landing. These need to be cashed in by touching the floor, adding a factor of risk and reward.

The combat system forces you to continually think about how you use the space and turns each move into a sort of currency. At its best it turns each jump into a mind game, with each player betting their options in a gambit to stay airborne and gain height advantage on the other. There’s plenty of chances to create big set ups, and getting a clean hit or stomp can lead into an opportunity for a long combo, cashing into a super for big damage.

This is unfortunately also where Indie Pogo begins to falter. As impressive as it is to see each character so well represented, sometimes it leads to the feeling of imbalance on the roster. Certain characters are more maneuverable than others, and while the more specialized characters are interesting, they’re less useful than the more direct ones. Penelope, for instance, might have cubes she can lay about to sap health and reflect shots off of, but it’s hard to argue she’s more effective than Velocispider, who can simply gun down everyone above him. The imbalance is also reflected in the Supers, with some feeling so situational as to be useless.

The combo system exasperates these divides. For a game so constantly airborne, Indie Pogo has a surprising emphasis on grounded situations. Getting stomped will send you earthbound, and from there you’ll have several options to perform upon waking up. Doing nothing will delay your wake up, but keep you vulnerable to a repeat stop, jumping will bounce you skyward again with short a invincibility period, and performing a “parkour move” will send you rolling along the ground in another direction. This ground game has its own set of mind games, and learning your options is definitely a key skill of Indie Pogo. At the same time there’s plenty of situations that seriously limit your options for waking up, and it’s easy to find yourself continually being stomped, to the point of losing a life even, while your opponent builds up points towards their Super.

The vertical focus of the attacks creates other problems. The reliance on gravity to find your target sets up plenty of opportunities to be attacked right before you stomp an opponent. As a rule you generally want to attack from above, but sometimes you’ll be clipped on the side, or have attacks counteract your downward attacks. It makes it difficult to tell which attacks have priority and exactly where the hitboxes are. Add that onto four player matches among stage hazards and Indie Pogo quickly becomes chaotic in frustrating ways.

Frustration is the leading emotion in Indie Pogo’s single player offerings as well. Aside from difficult–and uninformative–challenge stages, the single player is limited to an arcade mode that moves through a set rotation of characters and stages, ending with a boss. The chaos here feels particularly unwelcome, since it’s easy to find yourself fighting off teams of multiple enemies, with dwindling health and limited lives. And you’ll likely find yourself grinding out the singleplayer since it’ll be your primary source of coins, which are required to unlock characters and stages in versus mode. Arcade mode is seriously stingy on rewarding these coins, unless you somehow manage to perform at whatever it considers a high rank.

Of course if you fail you’ll have to pay coins to continue, and you likely will, since the odds are so often stacked against you. Aside from continuous combos or simple chaos, my biggest frustration was the final boss. The boss follows none of the rules you’re bound by. He moves freely throughout the air on a jetpack, follows several attack patterns, and also has about 3 times as much health and does enough damage to take you out in about 4 hits. Eventually I memorized his patterns well enough to get through it, but it’s a massive artificial difficulty spike and represented every part of cheap-ass final boss design in fighting games. It was almost enough to make me give up on arcade mode entirely.

In fact, versus mode also pays out coins, and at a more generous rate. The only thing that kept me coming back to arcade mode is the sheer lack of variety available to you at the start. Most of the characters are locked, and only three stages are available. It’s an absurdly slim selection, and cuts deep into Indie Pogo’s viability as a local competitive game.

Worse still is the way you unlock content. You need to visit a shop to spend your coins, but you’ll never see the full selection. The shop is populated with random items, and you’ll need to either restart the game or pay coins to refresh what items are on display. It might have characters, it might have stages, or it could just have alternate colors for the characters you already have. Even worse, the shop is wrecked–or in its own parlance, #REKT–by the inclusion of meme emoticons for online play. Think troll faces and the aforementioned hashtag for examples. I guess that’s just following the indie tradition of having embarrassing humor that subtracts from the game and makes it that much harder to recommend.

Indie Pogo surprised me. I went into it skeptical, unsure if the perpetual jumping would be anything more than a gimmick. It worked better than I imagined, and behind it was a platform fighter with real technical depth and long term appeal. At the same time, Indie Pogo misfires in so many small ways that it does a lot to offset the charm of its combat and presentation. I found myself the most aggravated I’ve been at a fighter in a long time. Which is saying something, since I’m not someone who’s always patient with the genre.

Indie Pogo demands a lot of time upfront, and without a clear promise that it would pay off, it isn’t a demand I’m willing to give into. I was charmed by it, aggravated by it, and ultimately found it to be a labor of love that doesn’t do enough to let me into its inner circle. For now it’s going to be a fighter I put aside, and maybe one day it’ll rebound back into my life.