Buy Them's Fightin' Herds

Four years ago, the team at Mane 6 released Them's Fightin' Herds on Steam Early Access. Taken from the bones of its previous fan game, Fighting is Magic, Them's Fightin' Herds impressed people with solid fighting mechanics and features coming from a team that had never created a full-fledged game before. The team had backing from some notable people, including My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series creator Lauren Faust. Considering the small size of the development team, progress on the game has been slow and steady, but one of the big changes is a switch from Humble Games to Modus Games as its publisher, which has pushed the game to consoles.

If you haven't followed the game since its inception as a fan-made title, Them's Fightin' Herds is a fighting game where the main draw is that you're fighting as various hooved creatures in their pure animal rather than anthropomorphic forms. Fighting as dragons, goats, llamas, and other four-legged creatures is enticing, since these aren't the usual protagonists in a fighting game, rather than a novelty secret character. On the other hand, it make it difficult to read things like blocks, since not every character has an object to block attacks.

Fighting quadrupeds is new, but the fight mechanics are going to be familiar if you've played the likes of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 or Dragon Ball FighterZ. The game employs a four-button attack system, where three buttons determine the strength of the attack while the fourth performs a magic attack that's governed by a meter that slowly recharges. Special moves are accomplished with the standard Street Fighter II-style directional inputs, and you can initiate super attacks with two attack buttons in conjunction with directional movements — if you have enough meter for it.

This is a very combo-heavy game with an emphasis on juggling. You can still pull off some combos from the ground, but the most effective and flashiest stuff comes from launching an opponent in the air and keeping them there while jumping and giving chase with more attacks. There is a safeguard in the form of a juggle meter that immediately ends the combo once it fills up, so there's little chance of executing infinite combos or becoming the victim of one. That said, the frantic fighting system may not be great for button-mashers, and the game isn't afraid to punish you for it. Unless you're playing at the easiest difficulty level, expect the CPU to make you fight until you win with only a sliver of your health remaining.

As far as characters go, there's bad news and good news. The bad news is that you only have seven fighters. That's a step up from what the PC version had at Early Access, and more are on the way via the upcoming Season Pass. For those who played Fighting is Magic, it's also neat to see which characters got which moves and abilities from that effort, another sign that the team didn't throw out everything when it had to use original characters. Only having a roster in the single digits is novel in this day and age, and if you're the type to keep switching out fighters after every fight, you'll be disappointed at the sparseness.

To make up for the small roster, the team tried to make each fighter distinct in moves and play style. For example, Pom is tailor-made for calling on her sheep dog pups to act as assist fighters to cover both ground and air attacks. Shanty acts like Spider-Man in that she can cling to walls to create more acrobatic attacks. Velvet uses projectiles to control the zone, while Arizona is a standard brawler that happens to have a lasso to pull people in like Scorpion. Tianhou is more of an air-based fighter, Oleander amplifies her moves with dark magic and uses zoned attacks to charge up for big hits, and Paprika is all about randomness with items and abilities. All in all, the characters are reminiscent of Virtua Fighter in that everyone has depth, but you need to practice to see everything they have to offer.

If you plan to go online, you'll be pleased to know that Them's Fightin' Herds does just about everything you'd want from a fighting game. You can go into a regular menu-based lobby, but you can also choose to do a pixel lobby instead, where you'll be given a top-down view of a room. This is the best way to play, since you can spend time exploring the area and getting currency to buy more accessories for your avatar. You can dress the character with any accessories unlocked in the other modes, and you can choose who you want to fight simply by chatting with them. The game supports cross-platform play, so even though the population is small, it remains constant. There are players you can fight against, even if it means taking on PC players who've had years of practice under their belt. Online play is governed by GGPO rollback netcode, so the fighting has been relatively problem-free.

If you're the type to stick to offline play, you'll find the modes to be satisfactory. Training mode lets you get in all the practice needed to master the game. Offline versus fights are self-explanatory, but you will be amazed at how many color palettes there are for every fighter. Arcade mode will be an ordeal if you're playing at anything higher than the easiest difficulty level, but you are rewarded with a cute character-specific ending screen for your trouble.

Story mode will catch your attention because it is wildly different from most other fighting games. After some still picture cut scenes describing the world of Foenum and the threat of returning predators to the world, you're given control of Arizona as she journeys to uphold her title of Cham'peen of the Prairie. Instead of being done in a series of fights, you're essentially playing a top-down RPG minus the XP grind, and battles take the form of a traditional fighting game. Most fights have you taking out low-level shadow predators, but the quests have you completing simple errands and fetch quests while you traverse the world and learn more.

There are a ton of things that the mode does right. It has plenty of secret paths to get more items and funds. Boss fights are completely varied. Fights with predators may have you fighting against them in a way similar to adventure games, so you'll need to find their patterns and tells to inflict damage. Fights with named characters throw in other variables, like one with Velvet where wind pushes against you until you reach her cyclone and give her a good kick. The dialogue is wildly humorous and a bit risqué sometimes, but it adds up to something that is mostly enjoyable.

There are two big negatives for the mode. The first is the application of fighting game mechanics and physics to platforming, which doesn't really work at all. You'll find this to be evident early on, when you're asked to perform low jumps to get through a spiked ceiling. Since a low hop requires a slight press of the analog stick that doesn't always register, it'll take a ton of time to get through this short section. A similar thing happens later on, when you're asked to scale a cliffside and the fighting game mechanics become a hindrance because you need to complete specific movements to perform a high jump. It's fine in a fighting game, since doing these things aren't a hard requirement, but in a platformer, it's enough to put people off the story mode completely.

The second thing is that the story mode is incomplete. You have Arizona's storyline, which takes up four chapters, but that's it. The intention is to get all seven characters their own storyline, but work is still being done on Velvet's story. Considering the size of the team and the time taken to craft Arizona's storyline alone, it feels like it'll take years before the story will ever finish.

The presentation is excellent all around, and as far as aesthetics go, it's a cartoon fighting game done right. The soundtrack is filled with one hit after another, and the dynamism shines as the main highlight. Having the tunes shift from one fighter's style to another depending on who's winning is a nice touch that audio aficionados will appreciate, while the voice acting is very polished. Considering the inspiration for the game, it comes as no surprise that the character models are clean and animate well. The backgrounds are a little less detailed but still look nice, while the game moves at a butter-smooth 60fps with no drops.

Them's Fightin' Herds is a very enjoyable game with more than a few caveats. The fighting is fun and has plenty of depth, but the tiny roster can feel very limiting. Online play is smooth and there are a number of things to do and options to work with, but it also means that experiencing defeat at the hands of a small but skilled player population will be done without any lag. Story mode is filled with plenty of awesome ideas and humorous moments, but the platforming will drive you up the wall, even in the story's incomplete state. Hardcore fighting game fans will love it, but more casual fans will need to temper expectations.

Score: 7.5/10