Bounty Battle

I want to like Bounty Battle. I genuinely do. Putting the Prisoner from Dead Cells, Juan Aguacate from Guacamelee, and the Penitent One from Blasphemous into the same brawler is the kind of pitch that gets a crowdfunding campaign to 131 percent of its goal. The premise practically sells itself. The execution, though, is where things fall apart fast - and I mean fast, like within the first ten minutes of loading into a match. On the mechanical level, every fighter has five core inputs: a light attack, a heavy, a throw, a special, and an ultimate that draws from an energy meter. There is also a bounty system where landing hits and scoring knockouts builds a coin pool, which you spend to summon a character-specific minion into the fight. In theory that gives each match a momentum-swinging layer. In practice the minions mill around uselessly, sometimes even breaking your own combos by knocking opponents out of range mid-string. The hitboxes are hard to read, input lag is noticeable even in local play, and the anti-spam stun mechanic - which locks you in place if you repeat the same attack too many times - punishes button mashing without providing anything tactically interesting to replace it. For a game with a move pool this shallow, a stun penalty for spam is almost comically over-engineered. Worse, every character feels roughly the same weight and speed regardless of who they are. The Dead Cells Prisoner does not play like the Dead Cells Prisoner. He plays like a generic 2D brawler avatar wearing the Prisoner's skin. The mode list is thin. You get tournament - where each character runs a fixed gauntlet of five challenges to unlock palette swaps - challenge mode, a local versus option for up to four players, a training room, and a CPU exhibition mode that exists for no clear reason since you can add bots to versus anyway. There is no online multiplayer at all. For a couch game, that is survivable. For a game with performance issues that tank the framerate when three or four characters are on screen simultaneously, it becomes a real problem. Running this on PC removes the worst of the console slowdown, but graphics options are nearly non-existent: resolution and window mode, nothing else. No frame cap controls, no resolution scaling, nothing useful if you are trying to lock it to a specific output for a stream or a secondary monitor. The roster itself is the one area where Dark Screen Games clearly put real effort in. Characters from Axiom Verge, SteamWorld Dig, Jotun, Awesomenauts, Flinthook, Nuclear Throne, Darkest Dungeon, Owlboy, and more are all here, alongside a handful of original fighters. Some of the character art is genuinely well done. The Penitent One from Blasphemous is a standout. Others look low-res and rushed. The sound design is barebones across the board - no voice clips, weak hit feedback, a generic soundtrack - and the game's announcer is the kind of addition that makes you want to find the audio slider immediately. On Steam, only about 21 percent of user reviews are positive. OpenCritic puts the critical average at 29 out of 100 across 27 reviews. That consensus is not wrong. If you have a group of people who loved the source games and just want something chaotic and low-stakes on a couch for an hour, there is a sliver of fun buried in here. The bounty mechanic occasionally produces frantic pile-ons that work as dumb party chaos. But the moment anyone at that couch starts paying attention to the actual combat, the illusion collapses. No online, no ranked mode, no real character differentiation, and technical problems that have not been meaningfully addressed years after launch - this is a hard game to recommend to anyone who came here because they wanted a good fighting game rather than a licensed character showcase.

Fred · Scout Team

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