Gamble Fight Plus is an adult-oriented 3D Fighting game that has us take on the role of a new fighter as she raises through the ranks. Starting off, we begin with only a pair of boxing gloves in an easy and low stake fight to become accustomed to how the title plays. You have one button for long ranged attacks and another for short swings. We can also dash around the arena and have two forms of blocks, each being better suited for either low or high attacks.
That’s pretty much all there is to the control scheme, aside from activating your special ability by holding both attack buttons and pressing block when your Recast meter fills up. What really opens up the gameplay possibilities is that each of the ten available weapons has their own moveset, abilities, and quirks. While you may start off with some boxing gloves, you’ll soon enough be able to equip a Gatling gun and rain down lead on your silly opponent that brought a sword.
The game has no blood, damage is represented by how torn your clothes are, until you or your foe are entirely nude. You have both an HP and a Spirit bar. Once you lose all your HP, you’ll be knocked out, your spirit meter will drain, and then you’ll get up again after a few seconds. That makes the spirit meter the most crucial meter to keep track of, as once it drains, you are down for the count. You’ll still get a bit of currency for participating in the fight, but actually winning it will double your earnings.
Money is used to unlock costumes, hairstyles, different weapons, and more. All of it will affect your stats, even things you’d expect to be purely visual such as changing your hair. The store doesn’t unlock until you have won a couple of matches, at which point you’ll have enough to buy some of the lower tier items. There are no Arcade or ladder matches. Instead you’ll pick the tier you want to fight in on a 1V1 battle. Each tier is represented by the amount of money you will be paid, and the more that is, the more challenging the opponent. At least in theory, what it ultimately does is just choose which weapon they have.
Since you’ll always want the highest payout due to everything being so pricey, that means you will always be facing a foe wielding the same weapon, which as you can imagine gets dull fast. There is also a Team Battle mode for 2v2 fights. The payout on it is really quite poor, and worse still is that the Spirit meter is shared between yourself and the AI, making them more of a liability. Strangely enough, that mode does feature some different stages like a beach and wide open fields, instead of the single drab arena. It’s a real shame we can’t pick them in the regular mode as to vary things up a bit.
Its other modes include Free Battle and Gamble. Free Battle is kind of like a training mode in where you can select what weapon your foe has. It will always be a two vs two match, and there is no currency payout. This is also a mode you can plug in another controller for multiplayer. Gamble has you wage some of your currency on a fighter, and then two CPU fighters duke it out. You will be shown their equipment beforehand to make an educated guess on who would win, though the outcome is still based on luck. This mode is useful for raking up large amounts of cash as you can bet quite a bit for a single fight. The matches are really long however, making it a lengthy process of merely staring at the screen.
Gameplay has two significant issues. The first is that the camera is sub-par. That causes dashing to become a real detriment that may even make you motion sick as it tends to wobble like crazy. You’ll spend a lot of time frantically mashing the attack button and wondering what is even going on as your opponent is constantly out of your view. It becomes more notable when you raise the difficulty in the options menu since that causes your foes to be more mobile. By far the worst issue is the random invincibility periods that the AI receives.
Hit an opponent enough, and she will get a lengthy period of invincibility in where your attacks pass right through her, leaving you wide open for a counterattack. It seems to appear without rhythm or reason. Sometimes you can build up a nice string of combos, while on other occasions you can only get a few hits in. Worse still is that it lasts a good amount of time to wear off, all the while you will still be attacked by her and simply have to wait it through. It halts the gameplay in its tracks and becomes even more infuriating given that some of the AI’s attacks can one shot you.
I can see why they added it, to keep the player from merely stun locking the AI into oblivion by button mashing, though it is handled extremely poorly. Aside from being able to one shot you, this invincibility is exclusive to them. Take getting up after losing all your health for example. The AI will get a nice window of invincibility as she gets up and gets a couple of shots in. You, on the other hand, will get bum rushed before you can even stand up. This feature completely destroys the usability of the slower weapons like spears, since swinging that thing only to find it phase right through the enemy is a death sentence. Gatling guns also get it pretty bad since your opponent can block all your shots and you can only hit her a couple of times before the invincibility effect comes into play.
Even after all that, I wouldn’t call this game challenging. It just becomes a real chore to play. Two simple fixes would go a long way. First would be not to make your attacks phase right through her, have it connect and bump off her, yet do no damage. Secondly, drop her invincibility as soon as the AI attacks, instead of a time-based system. The rest of the gameplay is decent enough and can be quite fun, especially as a lewd party game.
Its music is nothing to write home about, while the sound effects aren’t either, but will blow out your eardrums if you keep it at the default slider setting. The graphics are decent, and some particle effects are nicely done, though the game’s resolution caps out at 1080p, causing it to be slightly blurry for those with higher res monitors. One of the selling points of the game is customization, and it is unfortunately very bare-bones. There are only a couple of things to swap out, and you can’t even change your hair color. Overall, Gamble Fight Plus has some good points and may one day be a nice pickup and play title. As it is now, I would not recommend it unless you really want a fighting game with anime nudity, of which there are not many on Steam currently unless you count mods into the equation.
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