Fist of Jesus

Fist of Jesus is a side-scrolling beat-em-up from Spanish developer Mutant Games, adapted from an award-winning short film of the same name. Lazarus gets raised from the dead a little wrong, the infection spreads fast, and the unlikely duo of Jesus and Judas is left to fix the mess one undead skull at a time. The whole setup leans into its own absurdity with real commitment: enemies include Roman soldiers, cowboys, mythological creatures, and steampunk contraptions, all rendered in a cartoon style that keeps the gore feeling more Tex Avery than genuinely grim. There is something genuinely charming about a game that plays spaghetti-western whistles over biblical carnage and refuses to apologize for it. Each character brings a distinct kit. Jesus can summon Jesusbread to heal up, trigger a Jesusploxion for close-range crowd control, and call down a Jesusfire wall that scorches everything chasing you down the lane. Judas counters with the Judaskameha, a full-screen ranged blast that is exactly as Dragon Ball Z as it sounds, plus the Judastars raining giant projectiles across the battlefield and the Judaskiray as a brief damage shield. You swap between the two on the fly, and both draw from the same currency pool, Denarii dropped by defeated zombies, that funds upgrades, ability enhancements, and the Reliquiae, collectible relic sets that unlock bonus perks and double as a parade of nerdy in-jokes. The RPG loop is light but present enough to give early sessions a satisfying drip of progression. Where the game gets complicated is in its mobile origins. The combat is built around a single attack button, with a timed stun-meter minigame offering dramatic finishing moves. There are no true combos to chain, no complex footwork to master. For two to three hours this holds up fine: the spectacle of the special attacks, the weapon drops from crates, the fish you can throw, the sheer nonsense of the arena themes carry the experience on novelty alone. Stretch that across all sixty levels and the cracks show. Boss health pools balloon, grinding becomes the path of least resistance, and the arena-style maps, small and quickly traversed, stop feeling varied. Hit detection is loose enough to punish you at odd moments, and controller support, while workable, comes with some mismapped buttons that require patience to sort out. The soundtrack deserves a moment. It is persistently, cheerfully out of place: western twangs and gentle flutes scoring mass zombie executions. It should not work. It kind of does. There is a particular frequency of weird that this game occupies, where the music, the title cards for divine punishments, the relic names riffing on pop culture, and the actual plot all feel like they were made by the same person who thought the short film was funny at 1 AM and just kept going. If you catch that frequency early, Fist of Jesus earns its hours. If you need mechanical depth to stay engaged past the novelty, it will lose you before the back half. Kai, Scout Team