REVIEW - Anger Foot delights in its simplicity by providing a relentless and satisfying good time
Boot to the butt.
By Jonathan Garrett
03/07/24
Reviewed on Xbox Series X.
Anger Foot isn’t concerned with stretching boundaries. There’s a chaotic revelry that extends to all corners of its design; from the opening moments to deep within its focused campaign, you’ll likely find yourself taken aback by its addicting nature. A first person Hotline Miami is an understandable but cheap comparison, especially when you consider that developer Free Lives are the team behind Genital Jousting and Broforce. This is an outfit unafraid to subvert expectations.
The central premise reads like this: you’re a foot for hire making your way through hordes of goons where one hit (occasionally two) will be enough to send you back to the start of a level. There’s guns, footwear modifiers, and enemy types aplenty in this high stylised, wonderfully slapstick adventure that takes great pleasure in making you question your aging reaction speeds.
Central combat mechanics will often speak to each other, allowing you to juggle between close and ranged moves whilst also potentially satisfying challenge objective conditions to shoot for those all important stars. With them you’ll unlock a massive selection of gameplay and scenario altering footwear that grant bonus abilities or effects. Shout out to the big head mode.
This incentivises you to go back and replay past levels much like Overcooked or Moving Out, and the level restart stipulation upon death will satisfyingly activate your muscle memory when taking another crack at a particularly challenging sequence. The physics and object interactivity often lead to very GIF-able moments, and nothing beats breaching into a room and pancaking an oblivious goon.
Be warned: the soundtrack is grating. Pulsating dub step and techno club music suits the vibes, but it doesn’t ever seem to relax and ends up becoming an easy thing to toggle off. I’m also not a fan of hip firing in general, but can also completely appreciate that this is a specific choice to match this type of experience.
Anger Foot is a wonderful surprise. A lewd, silly, and hopelessly addicting shooter that leaves an unmistakable impression.
My character still looks a bit Jeremy Default, but I do have a chicken emote!
WORTH IT?
At the bottom of every game review, we ask the question: Worth it? And the answer is either “Yeah!” or “Nah”, followed by a comment that sums up how we feel. In order to provide more information, we also have “And” or “But”, which follows up our rating with further clarification, additional context for a game we love, or perhaps a redeeming quality for a game we didn’t like.
YEAH!
Anger Foot is a resounding success that basks in the glory of its own unhinged absurdity.
BUT
The soundtrack is something of an acquired taste, and you may be tempted to turn it down or off.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
