One Must Fall: Battlegrounds Review

Diversions Entertainment created One Must Fall: Battlegrounds, using their proprietary Phoenix engine. At first glance, you will likely be quite pleased with the variety of visual effects this game has to offer. The design team also did a decent job on converting the 2D manga-style art from the original into a full 3D ambiance. Battles are conveyed through a colorful display of effects that come into view each time players use their special moves or combos.

Other features were also incorporated, such as solid lighting as well as cool-looking particle effects - tiny chunks of metal and armor fly all over the place while you kick the living crap out of your opponent. We initially ran the game on an AMD 2500+ processor with a GeForce Ti 4800 graphics card. Right at the beginning we encountered problems. The game is loaded with bugs and will crash unless you install all the available patches and updates (head over to AT Files). Sadly, the game's auto-update option wasn't of any particular help either. True, with the updates, the game was slightly less buggish, but it would still crash if a player would accidentally hit the 'Windows key.' After all this, we decided to test the game on a slightly more powerful rig (AMD 3 GHz, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9800 XT 256 MB DDR). Everything worked smoothly at 800*600. Unfortunately, once we switched to 1024*768, we were treated to a drastically lower frame-rate. Clearly, the game is way too buggish for players to enjoy thoroughly. The technical flaws should've been well out of the way by now - the developers had two and half years to do the job properly.

The sound design in the game is barely mediocre. There's really not much to hear while you're fighting, and this certainly doesn't improve the in-game ambience. Perhaps the only notable thing here is that each arena treats you to a unique music theme, which makes the experience a bit more enjoyable.

One Must Fall: Battlegrounds still has extreme potential to become a hugely admired multiplayer game. But, before that happens the lads at Diversions Entertainment may have to cough up a huge consignment of patches to tweak the many issues we observed throughout gameplay. It was amusing to see some of the familiar moments from the original... while this moment may not do much for average gamers, it's still a nice touch for fans. Also, the game's single-player campaign was a bit of a letdown, since there's really not much to keep the gameplay challenging enough. Gamers might come back to the game to try out the multiplayer mode, but chances are most of them will become frustrated due to the ever-present bug festival.