Something about fighting games has always managed to stir up the passions of fans. It seems like you can't enter an arcade without hearing two people in a shouting match over what game is best. When the One Must Fall hit the scene it managed to gain a very vocal fanbase by being one of the few fighting games on PC that wasn't completely horrible. Something was lost, though, in the switch from 2D to 3D. One Must Fall Battlegrounds does not live up to expectations and will go down in history as another reason why you should get a console if you want to play fighting games.
The game sets you up as a robot pilot playing through different tournaments in the far future. You choose your pilot from a laughable group of misfits, which one you pick will determine how strong, defensive, and quick you are. After that you choose your robot from, you guessed it, a laughable group of misfits. Your robot selection determines your move list. One thing that stands out about One Must Fall Battlegrounds is the lack of combos. You have special moves, but you rarely have the long chain of pre-formed moves that you find in most console fighters. The reason for this appears to be to encourage juggling, the practice of hitting an opponent into the air and using jabs and kicks to both damage them and keep them in the air so they cannot block or retaliate. While a well-performed juggle takes skill, One Must Fall Battlegrounds lacks the visual punch to make them impressive.
While the robots, goofy as they are, are designed well and have nice reflective surfaces, the animation entirely ruins them. The first major problem is that these are supposed to be giant robots, a fact you won't pick up on unless you pay attention to the portraits between rounds. There's nothing in the arenas to give you any indication of scale, which removes all the coolness of giant robot fighting right off the bat. The second is the animation. For all the jabs and kicks, none of them have any oomph at all. You rather get the impression that your robot is fighting underwater and the other robot just happens to fall down while you're swimming towards him. The special moves have a rather cliché set of particle effects and again there's no real impression of impact or damage at all. It's difficult to get into a game where there's no pay off during the match and all you get after the match are some portraits saying a few sentences to each other.
The visual package is not the only problem. Even when using the fastest pilot available the controls feel sluggish and unresponsive. This can lead to a situation where you end up spending more time trying to ram your opponent into arena hazards than trying to execute delicate juggles. The audio presentation is lacking as well. The soundtrack is a collection of painfully generic and repetitive electronic music. The sounds in combat are a bunch of high-pitch clangs that are definitely not appropriate for giant robots, they sounds more like small pipes lightly hitting one another. Then there's the multiplayer.
16-person multiplayer over the Internet is supposed to be the big draw of One Must Fall Battlegrounds, and it shows. There are several different modes to play, from full out melees to team games. However, multiplayer can't make a bad game good. Take the irritations and frustrations from above, add in lag and uncooperative players, and you do not have a recipe for a good time. This is assuming you can even find a game worth joining, there are not many people playing this game online.
One Must Fall Battlegrounds simply is not a good game. From visual problems, persistent bugs, irritating sound, and simply uninteresting gameplay, it has nothing to really offer to anyone but the most hardcore fan of the series. If you're a fighting game fan you are better off saving your money.
