A Nintendo 64 version was published by Crave Entertainment in 1999. The Japanese version for the PlayStation was published by Electronic Arts Victor.

The Story Behind Fighting Force

In June 2024, Limited Run Games announced that they are working with copyright owner Square Enix to release the game and its sequel in Fighting Force Collection for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Windows (via Steam). Eidos demonstrated a playable Nintendo 64 version at the 1998 E3. The Nintendo 64 version was released in North America and Europe in 1999, under the title Fighting Force 64.

Core opted to go ahead with the game as a standalone, multi-platform title, and started work on it. The collection was released on 23 January 2026. In February 2024, the released Core running demo disc (which provided a real-time demo of multiple Core Design Saturn titles), which post-dates the leaked beta, was hacked to be playable.

How Fighting Force Plays

Ben "Smasher" Jackson is a large and slow bruiser capable of lifting and throwing the engines of cars at enemies. The player can make some choices as to which territory to travel through. Alana McKendricks is a fast but soft-hitting teenager with an effective jump-kick.

Dex Zeng, a criminal mastermind with an army at his command who predicted that the world would end in the year 2000. Players choose from a selection of four characters: Hawk Manson, Mace Daniels, Alana McKendricks and Ben "Smasher" Jackson. Zeng believed that there was an error preventing the apocalypse, so he decided to correct it by destroying the world himself.

Why Players Still Load It Up

GamePro nonetheless opined, "Despite its few flaws, Fighting Force delivers the fierce fun and beat-fools-silly action that PlayStation gamers are looking for." IGN, while contradicting GamePro by actually praising the game's controls, offered a somewhat more pessimistic overall take: "With solid graphics, impeccable control, yet almost zero innovation or variety, Fighting Force is a mixed bag. The original PlayStation release received mostly mixed reviews. Critics overwhelmingly commented that the game has a satisfyingly large amount of interactive scenery to destroy or collect weapons from, but agreed that despite the transition to 3D, the gameplay was not meaningfully different from the 2D beat 'em ups of earlier console generations.

A second sequel, Fighting Force 3 was also in development for the Xbox and PlayStation 2, but was cancelled during development. A sequel, Fighting Force 2, was released on December 13, 1999 for the PlayStation and Dreamcast. GameSpot summed it up as "basically a 3D version of Capcom's classic, Final Fight, except the characters and enemies lack the personality that made Final Fight exciting." Some, however, looked on the game's lack of innovation as a virtue rather than a liability; Shawn Smith commented in Electronic Gaming Monthly, "What's cool about Fighting Force is that it plays like the old side-scrolling games of the same nature.

Fighting Force — Frequently Asked Questions