Go Fight Fantastic

I want to like Go Fight Fantastic more than the numbers say I should, and honestly, I mostly do, with a very specific asterisk attached. Dinomite Games built something genuinely warm here: a vibrantly hand-drawn isometric hack-and-slash set across Bird Planet, a world overrun by jelly-like invaders while your crew of interstellar smugglers (led by a space-dog captain named Bowie) tries to hold things together. The aesthetic is pastel and bouncy, the character designs are anime-adjacent and full of personality, and the whole thing has the kind of handcrafted attention to visual detail that I always want to champion on a site like this. The four playable characters each carve out a real role. Max Sparkles is the healer, shielding teammates and dropping healing orbs. Dark Matter is your pure striker, close-range and reckless. There is an archer built for distance and a tank for soaking punishment. In solo play you pick three of the four and hot-swap between them mid-fight, which is clever on paper, it turns one player into a mobile roster rather than a fixed build. In practice, though, the game was clearly imagined as a three-person co-op experience, and the difficulty scaling does not adjust meaningfully when you are alone. Several reviewers flagged this, and I felt it too: medium difficulty in solo puts real pressure on you in ways that feel like the engine never quite accounted for the missing human hands. A Story difficulty mode exists if you just want to see things through, which I respect, but it is worth knowing the gap is there. The Meteorite upgrade system adds a pleasant layer of depth. Enemies and hidden chests drop meteorites ranging from common to epic rarity, each slotting into one of three character slots and tweaking stats like ability power, cooldown, speed, or life steal. You can even push a healer toward meaningful damage output if you equip correctly, and that kind of cross-role tinkering is exactly the kind of thing that makes short games feel replayable. The six-chapter story mode will run you roughly three hours, so the meteorite hunt and a separate Horde Mode (a wave-survival leaderboard challenge) are where the replay legs live. The Horde Mode does have one strange omission: the music cuts out entirely, which feels like a rough edge left unpolished rather than a deliberate choice. Speaking of the music, when it is playing, it earns its keep. Guitar-forward, high-energy tracks that match the kinetic pace of combat well. There is even a jukebox on the ship hub where you can swap in music discs collected across levels, which is exactly the sort of small, handcrafted touch I appreciate. Sound effects hold up too. The online co-op, however, has been a recurring pain point in community feedback since launch; reports of lobby readying bugs and thin player population make online matchmaking with strangers unreliable. Local co-op is where the game genuinely sings, and if you have two people on the same couch, most of the solo-mode friction evaporates into laugh-out-loud chaos. Go Fight Fantastic is a small game that knows roughly what it wants to be. The hand-drawn world is worth a look, the class swapping mechanic has real ideas behind it, and couch co-op elevates the whole package. For solo players who do not mind a steep difficulty curve and a short runtime, it is a decent afternoon. For everyone else: find a friend first.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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