Veteran Combat

I went in with low expectations and Veteran Combat mostly confirmed them, but in a way that I can at least explain honestly. This is a local-multiplayer-first, arcade-style 2D brawler from CyberphobX, released back in 2015, built around a tournament structure and a cast of deliberately absurd WW2-era characters. Think less Street Fighter and more Flash game you'd find embedded in a now-defunct gaming portal - except the aesthetic is intentional and the price tag reflects it. The roster gives you twelve selectable fighters plus three hidden opponents to unlock through the tournament mode. Characters like Igor the grenadier, Natasha the spy, and Dr. Bloodpressure the field surgeon at least have personality on paper, and each carries up to ten character-specific special moves locked behind hidden key combinations. That depth - shallow by modern fighting game standards - is the game's one real mechanical hook. You will need the manual. The developer says so explicitly, and they mean it. If you go in button-mashing, you will hit a wall against AI opponents whose patterns are simple but punishing if you haven't found your character's toolkit yet. The twelve stage locations are a genuine bright spot in terms of concept. Fighting on top of a moving train or on the wing of a plane in flight has arcade energy that fits the tone. The black-and-white film aesthetic and period-appropriate music do give the whole thing a consistent atmosphere that you can appreciate for about thirty minutes before the novelty runs dry. The problem is that there is no ranked mode, no online multiplayer worth mentioning in performance terms, and no real progression system to keep you coming back. The team-fight mode - where up to three players per side can square off on the same keyboard - is the closest this gets to genuinely fun for more than one session, and even then you are bumping elbows at a desk. From a purely performance-focused angle, there is nothing to analyse here. No netcode to stress-test, no movement tech to lab, no ranked ladder. The controls are standard enough that any keyboard will do the job. The game runs in windowed mode by default, which in 2015 was already a strange choice, and the overall feel of the input response is functional but not crisp. Anyone who cares about frame-perfect inputs or TTK will bounce off this in minutes. The Steam review pool sits at 75% positive across 24 reviews, which tells you this is a curiosity item that makes people smile rather than a product that inspires serious players. Buy it if you want something cheap to throw on with a friend or sibling on the same keyboard for a short session. Do not buy it expecting a mechanically interesting fighter with any long-term legs. Fred, Scout Team