Fight Club (video game)

Gameplay

The game follows the standard formula of fighting genre games such as Street Fighter II and Tekken. In a side-view, players control one of two characters who perform various fighting moves until one is beaten. Fight Club structures the formula around the premise of the movie, where two men meet secretly to fight each other into submission. In the game, players adopt the personae of various original characters and ones from the novel and movie such as Tyler and Bob. All the rules of Fight Club apply to the game, such as wearing only pants with no shoes or shirt, and tapping out to end the fight.

The game tries to capture the gritty feel of the movie with injuries inflicted on players and blood splattering everywhere, including onto the screen. The game tries to introduce many new features into the fighting game genre. There is a Hardcore mode, where injuries are carried over from one fight to another, which could lead to the player being so injured that he is forced into retirement. The game also goes into a mode showing X-rays of the character to show bones being broken. The fighting moves are intended to be brutally violent, such as one where the opponent's arm is visibly broken at the elbow. The levels are also designed around scenes from the movie, such as Lou's bar and Paper Street.

There is a story mode, built around an original character–named only Hero–who joins Fight Club after breaking up with his girlfriend. By winning fights, the character moves up through the ranks of Fight Club and Project Mayhem to become Tyler Durden's right-hand man. Winning Story mode also unlocks Fred Durst, lead singer from Limp Bizkit, as a playable character.

Reception

Upon release, Fight Club was met with negative reception. GameRankings and Metacritic gave it a score of 40.11% and 37 out of 100 for the Xbox version, and 36.84% and 36 out of 100 for the PlayStation 2 version.

The game has mostly been dismissed by fans of the novel and film as an attempt to milk the success of the story for commercial gain, and was universally panned by critics on its own merits. Critics say the game copies too much from other fighting games without bringing much new to the genre, and has repetitive fighting moves and poor animation. GameSpot gave the Mobile version a score of 4.4 out of ten and stated that the experience "lacks in so many ways that it's hard for it to even hold a candle to its namesake. The game is short, very easy, and the attack system is needlessly diverse. Regardless of your interest in the subject matter, Fight Club is most definitely not your kind of game." IGN gave the same version a score of 6.3 out of 10 and said that it "may only cost about four bucks to play, but I can tell you there are too many better ways to spend four bucks now." However, the same site gave its 3D version a score of 4.1 out of 10 and stated that it "just isn't a very good game. The fighting mechanics are just too shallow, and we've now seen with Brady Bunch Kung Fu and Medieval Combat, that fun brawling is indeed possible on a cellphone. Couple the dull game play with some bugs, and I cannot reasonably recommend Fight Club to anybody, no matter how much of a Space Monkey they are."

The game failed to achieve commercial success. Nevertheless, Abraham Lincoln is ranked fourth in Electronic Gaming Monthly's list of the top ten video game politicians for his appearance in Fight Club for the PlayStation 2. Game Informer placed Fight Club at number ten in a 2011 list of "Top Ten Fighting Games We'd Like to Forget".