A Nintendo 64 version was published by Crave Entertainment in 1999. Announced by Core shortly after the success of Tomb Raider, Fighting Force was highly anticipated and commercially successful but met with mixed reviews.

The Story Behind Fighting Force

The story line and character designs were done by Marc Silvestri. Eidos later cancelled this version of the game, but in February 1999 publisher Crave Entertainment purchased the rights from Eidos and put the game into its release schedule. Sega declined; according to Core, Sega explained that it had its own plans for continuing the series.

Core Design collaborated with ten coders from EA Japan in making the game. After Eidos decided against publishing this version, Sega Europe secured the publishing rights and announced a European release date of November 1997, but ultimately cancelled the release. Core Design originally pitched the game to Sega as a potential fourth entry in Sega's Streets of Rage series.

How Fighting Force Plays

Players control one of four characters as they move through urban and science fiction environments, battling waves of oncoming enemies with weapons including soda cans, knives, cars, and guns. The action starts with a police cordon around Zeng's office skyscraper, moving to such locales as a shopping mall, subway and Coast Guard base before finally ending at the top of Zeng's island headquarters. Hawk Manson and Mace Daniels are two all-around characters.

Fighting Force is a beat 'em up video game developed by Core Design and published in 1997 by Eidos Interactive for PlayStation and Windows. Zeng believed that there was an error preventing the apocalypse, so he decided to correct it by destroying the world himself. Alana McKendricks is a fast but soft-hitting teenager with an effective jump-kick.

Why Players Still Load It Up

PC Zone gave the PC version 88%, calling it "a computer game in which a lot of people get hurt in a variety of entertaining ways, with excellent 3D visuals and a surprising amount of detail." However, PC Gamer UK gave it 62%, calling it "A middle class game without fire in its belly that refuses to strive for better things." GamePro and Nintendo Power gave the Nintendo 64 average reviews while the game was still in development under Eidos, months before the company handed its development rights over to Crave. A sequel, Fighting Force 2, was released on December 13, 1999 for the PlayStation and Dreamcast. If in doubt, rent before you buy." AllGame gave the game three stars out of five, saying, "All in all, Fighting Force isn't a bad game.

Just some problems that lie in the gameplay department and some graphical glitches that keep this title from achieving the status of the games it was modeled after." In Japan, where the game was ported and published by Electronic Arts Victor under the name on 15 January 1998, Famitsu gave it a score of 25 out of 40. The original PlayStation release received mostly mixed reviews. Yet, it's just not the same huge leap forward for the Final Fight genre that we might have expected from the creators of Tomb Raider." Besides a lack of originality, some critics criticized it for repetitiveness and took issue with how the control configuration assigns multiple actions to the same button while leaving other buttons on the controller unused, saying this often results in the character performing a different action than intended and leaving them open to enemy attacks.

Fighting Force — Frequently Asked Questions