Wanba Warriors is a very different sort of fighting game. Rather than do battle with fists and feet, Wanba Warriors swings blades made from ink.
It’s hard to tell what to make of Wanba Warriors. On the one hand, it’s clearly a 2D fighting game. You have an HP bar for your health and what seems to be a stamina or MP bar for your magic abilities. You swing pole-based weapons (usually spears or polearms) against your opponent to knock them out, supplementing the simplistic combat with magic spells such as fireballs, spinning sword shields, or just bees.
But unlike every other fighting game ever made, Wanba Warriors presents itself in a very unique way. The visuals are meant to replicate water-based ink from calligraphy or Chinese ink and wash paintings. The characters themselves are little more than balls with the barest amount of accents to set them apart from one another. There’s a devil, a skill, a Raiden-like character wielding a bow on a stick, a Viking, and some guy in yellow that wields lightning. There’s no background other than the washed-out grey of parchment paper.
The combined effect is striking in its simplicity.
We’re not sure about the plot, other than these characters are from all different periods of time and space and have gotten together for some sort of Mortal Kombat-esque fight to the death. “Step into the absurd world of calligraphy combat and prepare to lay the smackdown upon all who dare to oppose you,” reads the game’s description, “dishing out damage with your chosen ink brush of brutality!”
Wanba Warriors also has some VERY modest system requirements, needing no more than 500 MB of RAM and a Pentium 2.0 GHz processor to run on PC.
You can download a demo of the game here, but the full release isn’t scheduled until later this month. Wanba Warriors will release on both Steam and the Nintendo Switch via the Nintendo Store. Pricing hasn’t been announced, but expect that to be pretty modest too.
Source: Zodiac Interactive
