Review: Drunkn Bar Fight – PS4/PSVR

There’s nothing more English than going down to your local boozer, getting sauced up on the finest house ale, and then proceeding to have a scrap with anyone that dares to look at you the wrong way. I know this. I’m English and I’ve witnessed a fair few pub brawls in my local Wetherspoons on a Friday night. It’s never pretty and despite what your drunken self may think, it’s never going to be the Jackie Chan fight scene that it could have been.
Drunkn Bar Fight, then, is perhaps a more realistic brawler than you think.
Drunkn Bar Fight is a PSVR game, so you’ll obviously need a PlayStation VR headset to play. You’ll also need a pair of PS Move wand controllers. Your DualShock 4 and PSVR Aim controllers are no good here, though they’d make fine in-game weapons. Well, actually, the DualShock 4 can be used, but more on that in a little while.

The aim of the game is to stroll into a bar and knock out as many of its patrons as possible. Yes, it really is that simple. Simple premise, but difficult to execute. Using your PS Move wand controllers, you’ll flail and flap your in-game arms around in an effort to knock out your opponents. The game starts off simple by giving you one chilled dude to go to town on, but things progress quickly and the difficulty spike is a real challenge.
Before I knew it, I was fighting four fellas and my arms were absolutely killing me after having swung them around like an idiot. Still, I persevered and… I got my arse handed to me as the bouncer kicked the shit out me. My own fault, I suppose, and he was just doing his job. Something I discovered rather quickly in Drunkn Bar Fight is that it’s easy to lose and hard to win. It doesn’t take much to send your drunken arse down to the ground. After a few hits to the head you’ll be warped out of your first-person view to watch your limp body fall to the floor as the other patrons silently judge you. They don’t say anything, but you just know that they’re glad you’ve been dealt a whooping. Bastards...

Space is a requirement to play Drunkn Bar Fight, so if you’re currently reading this on a smuggled phone in one of Her Majesty’s finest correctional facilities, you should know that your poxy cell isn’t going to cut it. Go back to fighting in the shower.
Given that you need to be able to swing pretty much the entire area your arms can reach, it’s definitely a good idea to move the furniture out of the way and warn friends and family members not to come within slapping distance, lest they take a PS Move to the ear.
Drunkn Bar Fight doesn’t have the most depth to it. Sure, you’ve got the silly combat with enemies that obey their own laws of physics, and you’ve got numerous bar items that can be used as weapons, but when it comes down to it you’re not going to be playing this one by yourself for very long. Don’t take that the wrong way, though, because there is an extra layer of laughs to be had, providing you’re not a lonely sod with no friends.

If you’ve got a few friends and some DualShock 4 controllers spare, you can have a really good laugh. Non-VR players can take control of enemies and the results are hilarious. Did I “accidentally” forget that someone was sitting to my left when I swung my arm in a downward motion where a man’s crotch would be? Did I “accidentally” forget to use the PS Move wrist straps before throwing a PS Move to my right after being knocked down for the fifth time in as many minutes? It’s just one of those mysteries.
Graphically, Drunkn Bar Fight fares up fine. It’s not going to blow your mind (it may give you sore arms, though) but the presentation is perfectly serviceable, and when your really in the thick of things it is easy to overlook the graphical shortcomings. What isn’t easy to overlook, however, is the control scheme. It’s… complicated.
Given that you need to move around the various bars in order to keep yourself from getting pummelled, the control scheme could have been better. Fighting itself isn’t too bad, though there were a few instances where the tracking seemingly gave up and caused me to get battered by a not-so-nice lady. For the most part, though, the PS Move controllers function as well as you’d expect. What doesn’t go down well is how movement is handled. Using two of the PS Move face buttons, you can either move forward or backward. If you want to walk, say, to your left to pick up a stool to use a weapon, you need to look in that direction and press forward. That doesn’t sound too bad, but when you then want to move across to the other side of the bar to, say, throw some little Asian fella off the roof – yes, it’s brutal – it’s not so easy. You need to back pedal first, but that in itself requires some mental gymnastics as it’s similar to trying to reverse a bloody car.
It’s not completely terrible, mind you, and my friends and I still managed to have a stupid amount of fun as we took turns using the headset. The developer, The Munky, has since confirmed that it is working on an update that will implement a more user-friendly control scheme that will be familiar to PSVR players. Until then we are stuck stumbling around the boozer like some pissed-up scally in a Cardiff Wetherspoons. Like I said, it’s much more realistic than it seems.

Drunkn Bar Fight - PSVR

• 7/10
  Overall - Very Good - 7.0/10

7/10

Summary

Drunkn Bar Fight isn’t without fault, that much is clear, but it’s still a bloody fun game. You’ve got your single-player levels to work through and trophies to earn, but the real beef is in the game’s local multiplayer where friendships can be broken with a sly slap to the balls. Good times, then.