Cruz Brothers

I came into Cruz Brothers curious about what a Brazilian indie studio could do with a 2.5D hand-drawn fighter built around real MMA personalities. I left with a sore controller hand and zero interest in returning. The premise is earnest enough: coach Marcus Luz, disgraced after losing his star fighter to the Sons of Subversion biker gang, recruits brothers Felipe and Igor Cruz to climb the underground boxing circuit and settle a revenge score. The story mode plays out in comic-book panels with voice acting that oscillates between charming and painful, but it at least gives you something to follow across its 13 chapters. The roster spans around 21 fighters and the character concepts are genuinely interesting on paper. You have boxing purists, street brawlers unafraid to throw kicks or worse, and outlier characters whose specials lean hard into fantasy territory - fireballs, electricity, and limb-breaking stun moves that set the ring on fire. Filling a super meter and unleashing one of these attacks is the closest Cruz Brothers gets to a high point. Characters also carry different HP, damage, and special attack stats, which is the primary source of differentiation because the base move sets are nearly identical across the board - three-hit combos, a special, a block, and a dash, with the same button inputs for everyone. Character nuance is almost nonexistent at the fundamental level. Here is where things fall apart. Input lag is the defining experience of Cruz Brothers on PC, and for a fighting game, that is the one thing you cannot paper over with style. Multiple reviewers clocked delays approaching two seconds between button press and on-screen action. The game also drops inputs outright, so you will eat a combo you had technically blocked, then watch a slow-motion cinematic zoom of your character getting punched in the face for it. Movement is similarly broken, with characters skipping and teleporting around the stage. The four-player Spetsnaz Party mode, which throws two CPU opponents into a local multiplayer bout, sounds fun until the framerate tanks and fighters start disappearing off-screen mid-fight. On Steam the game sits at a split community reception with only a handful of reviews, which tells you most players bounced early and never came back. There are things DCF Studios clearly cared about. The hand-drawn art style is distinctive. The environmental destruction on stages - collapsing roofs, floors catching fire - adds atmosphere even if it has no gameplay effect. The in-game DCFU card system hints at a broader universe the developers were building toward. And the post-launch "Training Camps" update structure showed genuine intent to improve the product. Whether those improvements ever landed in a meaningful way on the PC version is hard to verify. What is verifiable is that in its reviewed state, the core feel of the game - the thing every other feature depends on - does not work. A fighting game with broken input response is not a fighting game, it is a slideshow you occasionally win.

Fred · Scout Team

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