Fight Club: The Game

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Fight Club: The Game
First rule of Fight Club is, we do not play this game and never talk about it.
Genre(s): Fighting Platform(s): PlayStation 2 Xbox Mobile phone Release: PlayStation 2, Xbox NA: November 16, 2004 EU: December 10, 2004 Mobile WW: January 26, 2005 (2D) WW: February 1, 2006 (3D) Developer(s): Genuine Games Superscape (mobile) Publisher(s): Vivendi Universal Games Country: United Kingdom Series: Fight Club

Fight Club: The Game is a 2004 fighting game based on the 1999 movie of the same name, which in turn was based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. It was developed by Genuine Games and published by Vivendi Universal Games for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and mobile phones.

Why You Should Not Talk About This Game

1. The game serves as nothing but being a cash grab of the movie from 1999 in terms of popularity, not to mention it came out only five years later
2. Terrible visuals and animations even by 2004 standards. The animations look stiff and robotic, the environments look on par with a WWF game on the PlayStation, and the characters look like plastic figures. WWE Smackdown vs Raw (2004) came out the same year and it looks miles better.
3. There are only 3 fighting styles to choose from, meaning that the characters are useless.
4. The available characters have no reason to be there like: Detective Stern and Raymond (the Asian man who Tyler held at gunpoint in the movie).
5. Poor grasp of the source material: It completely misses the point of the movie as it's not entirely about fighting as the title suggests.
6. The gameplay is generic, copying fighting mechanics from Tekken and Street Fighter.
7. The story mode is incredibly short.
8. There is a massive story error in the game: in a cutscene, a man says that Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt's character) is on a trip while the narrator of the movie (Edward Norton's character) is nearby, even though the movie reveals that he and Tyler are the same person (implying that the creators haven't even watched the film).
9. The game is incredibly easy and lacks any sort of challenge.
10. There aren't any dialogues during fighting, which makes the cutscenes before and after every fight awkward.
11. Only the opening and ending cutscenes are animated; all other cutscenes in the game are a series of still CGI-rendered images. Sounds familiar?
12. Fred Durst, the frontman of Limp Bizkit, is unlocked as a playable character if you finish the campaign. However, his inclusion as a guest character makes no sense whatsoever, what were the creators of the game trying to promote? Is he playable, because of the Fight Club shoutout from Limp Bizkit's "Living it Up"? Even WWF SmackDown! Just Bring It added him in, but made him look more decent and his moveset fits his character.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The slideshow cutscenes has a so bad it's good vibe.
2. Meat Loaf is the only actor from the film to voice his character in the game and he does a great job.
3. The music by the Dust Brothers, Korn and Limp Bizkit are nice to listen to.
4. The ending helps explain who detonated the bombs at the credit card buildings and was a good near shot for shot ending of the film.
5. The intro and ending cutscenes are nicely animated.

Reception

Upon release, Fight Club: The Game was met with negative reception. GameRankings and Metacritic gave it a score of 40.11% and 37 out of 100 for the Xbox version, and 36.84% and 36 out of 100 for the PlayStation 2 version.

The game has mostly been dismissed by fans of both the novel and movie as an attempt to milk the success of the story for commercial gain, and was universally panned by critics on its own merits. Critics say the game copies too much from other fighting games without bringing much new to the genre, and has repetitive fighting moves and poor animation. GameSpot gave the Mobile version a score of 4.4 out of ten and stated that the experience "lacks in so many ways that it's hard for it to even hold a candle to its namesake. The game is short, very easy, and the attack system is needlessly diverse. Regardless of your interest in the subject matter, Fight Club is most definitely not your kind of game. IGN gave the same version a score of 6.3 out of 10 and said that it "may only cost about four bucks to play, but I can tell you there are too many better ways to spend four bucks now. However, the same site gave its 3D version a score of 4.1 out of 10 and stated that it "just isn't a very good game. The fighting mechanics are just too shallow, and we've now seen with Brady Bunch Kung Fu and Medieval Combat, that fun brawling is indeed possible on a cellphone. Couple the dull game play with some bugs, and I cannot reasonably recommend Fight Club to anybody, no matter how much of a Space Monkey they are.

The game failed to achieve commercial success. Nevertheless, Abraham Lincoln is ranked fourth in Electronic Gaming Monthly's list of the top ten video game politicians for his appearance in Fight Club for the PlayStation 2. Game Informer placed Fight Club at number ten in a 2011 list of "Top Ten Fighting Games We'd Like to Forget".

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