Beyond him there’s Switch, a skateboarding robot in hip-hop garb, and Sonata, a hard-hitting songstress with a boom box hammer. The game’s hero-apparent is Raptor, an all-american kid with a wooden baseball bat and a mad glint in his eye – he’s the least interesting member of the bunch. Lethal League renders its characters in a cartoony style reminiscent of Jet Set Radio, and as in that game each character comes packing attitude. With that said, they do all have pretty distinct personalities. Outside of their different special attacks and some variations in movement ability (one can double-jump and another two can cling to walls in different ways), there’s not much that sets any one character apart. And not only is this game’s eponymous league light on competitors, the ones that are there only feel nominally different from one another. As a point of comparison, DiveKick’s system makes use of only two buttons, and its development team managed to create 13 distinct characters. While I’m all for fighting games with simple mechanics, and I realize that it’s difficult to make a lot of characters feel unique in such titles, a roster this small is absolutely unacceptable. The enemy roster doesn’t even change based on your character choice – which would have only required five variants in the first place.Īnd that’s the real crux of the problem: Lethal League has only five characters. That wouldn’t be so bad if the fights were randomized, but every run through challenge mode is identical to the last, meaning you have to suffer through the same fights that you’ve already won over and over again to get back to the part that gave you trouble. You need to get through ten fights with only two lives, and you have to start over if you lose them. You’re going to need a reliable friend or three to play the game with you if you want to get much out of its multiplayer.Īs for single-player content, practice mode is a bit of a joke, and “challenge” mode is a boring slog. Online play is stable, but Lethal League’s community isn’t all that big, and it can take forever to find a match. With only four modes (online/offline versus, practice, and an arcade-style “challenge” that’s hidden in the extras menu), it doesn’t offer much in terms of variety – especially if you don’t have a friend to play with. The trouble is, Lethal League can’t match any serious fighting game – or even a silly one – on any level. A game can be less complex than its contemporaries and still match them in terms of depth. Compared to, say, Blazblue, it’s very easy to get these fundamentals down, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you hit the ball four times in a row you can use a special attack, which varies from character to character. Doing either will change the ball to your colour, and if it hits a player of a different colour, it kills them instantly. Hitting the ball allows you to send it flying off in one of three directions (either straight forward or at an angle up or down), while bunting it slows it down for a more precise swing. You can run (or jump) and either hit or bunt the ball when it comes toward you. Lethal League is built around a pretty simple set of mechanics. Unfortunately, it seems to be missing a lot of other bits. It has the heart and soul of a truly great game. Indeed, Lethal League oozes style, and exemplifies the “pick up and play” philosophy that’s allowed Smash to dominate living rooms the world over. If you’re anything like me, that probably sounds like a recipe for the greatest party game ever. and Pong, with a dash of Jet Set Radio for flavor. Every time you hit the ball it moves faster and faster (eventually breaking the sound barrier if you can keep going that long), until it becomes nigh-impossible to hit with normal human reflexes. The ball ricochets around the arena as you fight, and you’re only safe from its careening path if you were the last person to hit it. Lethal League is a fighting game based on an endearingly simple premise: you must hit a baseball into your opponent’s face while they try to do the same to you.

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