Reality Fighters

As one of the earliest games trying to show off the augmented reality capabilities of the NGP, Reality Fighters has the potential to allow players to live out their fighting fantasies. In theory, you can create fighters who look just like you and your friends (or enemies) and make them fight in real-world environments. If my brief first look at the game was anything to go off of, though, it still has a lot of work to go.

The core hook of Reality Fighters is that you can use the front-facing camera on the NGP to scan in your face, creating a fighter who looks like you, and the back-facing camera to place created fighters in the environment you’re standing in. For example, my fighter – who, I should point out, didn’t look all that much like me at all – was fighting on top of a table at the preview event.

Unfortunately, as the fight went on, both my combatant and the pre-made characters that he was facing off against slowly slid further and further down, forcing me to move the NGP into an awkward angle to view them. By the end of the fight, they were battling it out on the bottom of my pants leg, requiring me to hunch over the NGP uncomfortably. The final version of the game will include an AR card that will help keep the fighters on a single surface at least, but right now there’s no way to stop the fighters from moving out of your NGP’s view outside of switching to practice mode.

The fighting itself, sadly, isn’t anything to get excited about. For newly created characters, you choose from 16 different fighting styles ranging from obvious choices like boxer and shaolin to off-the-wall styles such as ballet and zombie. While this determines your fighter’s stance and various combos, the gameplay is simplified and requires little more than button-mashing to win.

To further push character creation, Reality Fighters will contain several hundred costume pieces and weapons for decorating your characters. More importantly, this opens the game up for new costume sets (or even new fighting styles) by way of DLC. Players will also have the option of posting screenshots and data from the game on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites.

As it currently stands, Reality Fighters seems like the kind of game that would appeal to casual gamers and people who are entirely new to fighting games more than the hardcore audience that’s likely to be buying the NGP near launch. Hopefully we’ll see more soon to find out if it shapes up a bit more.