Fights In Tight Spaces
Everything’s a Roguelike deckbuilder these days, isn’t it? Even action movies. Fights In Tight Spaces is an attempt to compress the oeuvres of Statham, Woo and Greengrass into a turn-based card game. Each run consists of a string of brutal fight scenes playing out in the bathroom and subway-carriage settings suggested by the title. As Agent 11, you play cards to unleash martial acrobatics such as flying kicks, roll throws and overhead flips, the most dramatic sending the camera in tight to capture the sharply choreographed animations.
At their best, these fights recall the positional strategising of Into The Breach. Moves can send their target tumbling backwards, crashing against a piece of scenery for extra damage – or, better yet, into the path of a colleague’s attack, all of which are telegraphed a turn in advance. But, appropriate to the scale of combat represented, it all plays out on grids even smaller than that game’s eight-by-eight chessboard. These spaces really do feel tight, the placement of every sink or countertop fundamentally changing the character of the battlefield. Prison common areas are confined rat’s nests of tables that block avenues of attack; rooftops are wide-open spaces with waist-high walls at their edges, begging you to nudge enemies over them into the lethal white void bordering every level.