SNES A Day 176: Doomsday Warrior

doomsday_warrior_us_box_art

Approximate Release Date: April 30, 1993
Genre: Fighting
Developer: Laser Soft/Telenet Japan
Publisher: Renovation Products

Well, at least the developers of Doomsday Warrior tried to make a good fighting game.

They still charged people to play their terrible rip of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, though, so my goodwill only extends so far. Doomsday Warrior feels like an unfinished product because many important things were seemingly neglected: poor hit detection, only a few arenas to fight in, inconsistent art styles, that sort of thing. The one that’s most jarring is the weirdly upbeat and happy-sounding music, which sounds out of place in a game that’s ostensibly about warriors fighting to prevent the apocalypse. It would fit something like Smart Ball, though!

It’s fun to mock Doomsday Warrior for those things, and the fisticuffs parts aren’t any better. The characters are more varied than you might expect – you can play as a demon dinosaur or a liquid metal robot – but the characters all feel the same. I don’t think there’s a difference in speed or power between the fighters, and I wasn’t able to consistently do special moves even after looking them up. Movement is floaty and there’s a delay when pressing buttons and your character reacting. I had a lot of trouble in the “normal” difficulty mode, but I can’t tell if the AI is just that much better than I am or I’m unable to deal with the controls. Or both.

The only feature that is kind of interesting is the light RPG stat system that rewards you for skillful play. For every life bar at the top of the screen you have full when you win a fight, you get the ability to buff your character’s offensive and defensive stats between matches. Power Moves had a similar idea, and it’s fun to see these early fighting games experiment with ways to stand out from Street Fighter II.

But boy did I hate playing Doomsday Warrior. It’s just a bad game that manages to be bad in a boring way. I like some of the character ideas so the unfinished feeling exuding from every inch of this game is a bummer.

As an aside, Doomsday Warrior is technically a Super Scope game. By plugging the peripheral into the second player control port, you can access a stage select. Weird!

Tomorrow: We trade in one generic sounding game name for another with Outlander.

One thought on “SNES A Day 176: Doomsday Warrior”

  1. Doomsday Warrior had all the potential in the world. It really had all the right ingredients such as interesting characters, a mostly rocking soundtrack, unique (for it’s time) RPG elements, and really bright and beautiful mode-7 graphics, but then the chef just boiled them all together in toilet water. The controls and gameplay absolutely sucked. The one stage available for two players was the one dull ugly one with the God-awful “nails on a chalkboard” theme. Lastly, the final boss, uncreatively called “Main”, was broken and unfair as Hell.

    I would love to see these characters retooled and added into a modern fighting game. Grimrock is adorable and Nuform is just such a cool concept.

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