Anger Foot

Sometimes it isn’t about saving your loved ones or the world. It’s about kicking children and feeding popcorn to your loved ones with your feet. 10/10

its become one of my favorite games. Its has jokes - good gameplay - simple story - challenges- shoes that has powerups - map design is good - bosses too i give that game 10 toes out of 10.

While a larger portion of the review might feel like complaining, it is largely because it is very hard to quantify the positives of how good it feels as a shooter when you're not doing weirdly designed challenges that stress the game's mechanics past the limit. It is a very fun shooter in a subjective "feels good" way, but most my nitpicks go into objective flaws with the unlock/challenge design. I've seen a lot of complaints about the game's poor performance, those threads still getting new replies to this day, but I personally have not had any performance issues, in fact the joke achievement that has you force the FPS under 20 by repeatedly kicking vending machines to spawn hundreds of items to force the physics engine handle a chain reaction took me 13 straight minutes of kicking, and even then the dip below 20 was brief. The world and the humor style of the writing are very reminiscent of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, the blend of gangsta hood vibes mixed with Newgrounds tier humor, replace the magical girl aspect with sneaker superpowers. S*** City may as well be Datten City from PS&G, if that's to your liking, I would also recommend checking out Bad B*tch Blasters, which I also made a review for. You get story cutscenes and around every 8 or so levels you get an interlude level where the NPCs are non hostile and you can talk to the locals and faff about and enjoy the world building. Anger Foot getting mostly all thumbs up in that department, I only wish the Girlfriend who is generally also set up as a badass, would appear in those interludes, investigating the case. The first major flaw is the interconnected mess of shoe unlocks, 3 challenge stars per level structure, and level progression and shoe unlocks being completely linear but some of the challenge stars feel like a "come back when you have the thing, it is literally impossible" The game is structured in you going through 5 zones with somewhere around 20 levels each in a linear fashion, doing optional challenges to get stars, and unlock shoes for every 5 stars and a boss shoe for every area boss. You have no shop like agency to spend stars on the shoes, nor you have any Megaman like options to take on levels in whatever order that get easier or harder based on what shoe powers you get. And yet some of the challenge stars need to come back with different powers to do. And not in a soft restriction kind of way where you can go by pure skill anyway. Another issue with the star system is that aside the first star always being for just beating the level, there is 0 consistency on what the stars are meant to be, some are just basic checks if you have the right shoe, sometimes that can have serious gameplay ramifications, others are speedrun challenges, some are different challenges like pacifist or no kicking/jumping/shooting, some are genuine feats like piercing 4 enemies with 1 bolt or kicking 10 goons in a single kick. But then there's weird ones asking you to do themed basic tasks like the game's achievements do. There's also a few levels where the 2 other stars may as well be the same thing, the game has 2 clear time stars, Speedrun and Hyper Hyper, Hyper Hyper meant more for devs accounting for ridiculous level skips abusing energy drinks or some shoe powers, but some levels have both, what's the point of a speedrun star where you try to do it fairly, when you also have to try and do some cheesy skip and get it that way too. Another level being where the 2 stars are Beat level Barefoot and with Fly Whisperers(being a very ineffective meme item, may as well be beat the level Barefoot) The main day to day movement, shooting and a lot of their related mechanics feel very fluid, quick and smooth, the enemies have their weapon tied to their visual design, Making for easy quick threat assessment in the style of Doom. But a lot of the friction comes from the specific challenges that ask you to subvert the game's systems where it really feels obvious the game wasn't optimized for that. Like Pacifist runs of a level, while the game is generous enough to not count enemies getting friendly fired or getting blown up by the environment, it feels very arbitrary in which levels you kicking a door, and the flying door killing an enemy counts or not, in a lot of levels it doesn't, but in some it does, in fact, the level The Firepit is specifically designed around that it does, making you go through a side path that's a maze of doors not used in normal gameplay to not count as a kill. Another issue for pacifist runs is narrow corridors with 2 enemies with large hitboxes designed for being easier to be shot at, it starts to feel very RNG of if the enemy AI decides to line up in an impossible to pass manner, because the shooting target hitbox is the same as the physical space hitbox. Similar issue with needing to push the RNG of enemy AI to the limit in a challenge where you have to get explosion kills in a map with no explosive weapons, no shoes and no explosive terrain where you have to manipulate the grenade throwers when their design was very intentional at being prone to self destructing, with how easily the grenades misfire to any physics interaction. Another issue I feel is the devs not accounting for some aspect of shoe interactions in some levels, particularly secondary effects of shoes, Holy Sandals primarily give you a revive, but the unmentioned effect gives you waterwalking, Thrusters are primarily a double jump, but the enemies you kick also catch fire, proving a hazard. While the waterwalking trivializes some of the speedruns, there's a level with a single flamethrower that asks you to ignite 50 goons, but Thrusters' ignition effect gets completely overlooked, even if the first kick counting as a kill is fine, the enemies that catch fire from touching the corpse do not count either. The game has some really well designed challenges that twist the levels, like no jumping challenges in platforming levels where you use the coyote time of the moon gravity shoes and inertia, while the zero-g comes up in shootouts too where you get a cloud of corpses and debris floating up and blocking line of sight. Or the ones that give every weapon shotgun's recoil and bullet spread, which gets kind of silly on high fire rate weapons on precarious terrain. While most of the game is a phenomenal fast paced door kicking corridor shooter, it also has bosses. All of them mostly share the gimmick of having 3-4 phases that you have to restart on dying, but have no challenge stars. Boss 1 and boss 3 I feel like fit in with the pace of the game, they have no functional invincibility phases and your damage output is dependent on how much you want to get up close and personal. But Boss 2 and Boss 4 are complete slogs with them being invincible going through their attack patterns until they do an attack that you can use to damage them back, or their weak spot opens up, rinse and repeat. Boss 4 had an awful random vehicle section with you in a speedboat with a overheating machinegun, in a very cramped arena. After boss 4 you get 1 car driving level, but unlike getting a speedboat in a kiddy pool, you actually storm through the streets with it, so I'd say its passable, even if a bit jank. The devs were confident enough to give challenge stars for it. The soundtrack is a hardcore gabber with lots of thumps and kicks, though I feel like feels a bit repetitive because it didn't have a supporting artist to provide variety and space out the songs. It really needed a few hip hop or rap songs, to be used on the bosses or in the chill loiter around the city bits, or even the credits roll. There's a lot of genres it could have reached to vary things up while fitting the vibe of the world, and I feel like it was really lacking a good proper vocal song to punctuate the highs of the game. Its around 8 hours to just clear, and somewhere in the 35-40 hour range for full completionism.