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FIST is a Metroidvania with Spectacle fighter type combat. I like Metroidvanias and I like spectacle fighters, so I really enjoyed playing this game. I would've likely enjoyed this game a lot more if it took advantage of the spectacle fighter combat aspect better….. But more on that later.
As I mentioned, FIST has spectacle fighter combat. So instead of simply spamming the attack button in something like Castlevania, you're using a mix of light attacks, heavy attacks, SP attacks, and switching between different weapons. SP attacks do lot of damage, but they take SP. You recover SP by doing regular attacks against enemies. So you're encouraged to master combos which incorporate both regular attacks and SP attacks, which is great.
There's 3 different weapons in total, and there's a few hours in between as you get new weapons, so the game is nicely paced in this regard since you have a decent amount of time to master each weapon before you get the next one. Whenever I got a new weapon, I really enjoyed incorporating it into my combos, and it was really fun to master combos that used all 3 of the weapons! In addition to your main weapons, you also have 4 "sub-weapons", which cost EP to use. You can use these weapons to either heal, parry attacks, throw out a decoy, or shoot homing missiles. Out of all the Metroidvanias I've played, the offense aspect of FIST has to be one of the best I've experienced.
While it would've been fun enough to do cool looking combos on enemies all day, the developers were also able to make the game challenging. Regular enemies are challenging through a decent amount of variety in what they can do such that you have to approach them in different ways:
• Some enemies have ranged weapons who'll be able to attack you before you can reach them, forcing you to dodge
• Some enemies can randomly disappear mid combo and attack you from above
• Some enemies have shields that can only be broken through certain attacks
• Some enemies are in the air and shooting at you from far away, forcing you to do some mid-air combos to reach them
• Some enemies "charge" at you with super armor, so if you try attacking them, they'll tank through it and hit you
• Some enemies can enter a "counter" stance where if you attack them in any way, they'll parry the attack and hit you back
In addition to having a decent amount of enemies, you're quite often going to be facing multiple enemies at the same time. Every so often, you'll enter "arenas" where waves of enemies will keep spawning, such that you can face 4 enemies at once. So combat definitely never feels like you are one-sidedly comboing enemies to death. If you were only facing one enemy, you could likely infinite combo them to death. However, since you're facing multiple enemies, you have to master dealing as much damage as possible in the shortest time possible so that you're never in one place for too long and can move onto the next enemy as fast as possible. So not only is the offense aspect of FIST really good, so is the defensive aspect.
In regards to the bosses, they all offer a decent challenge. Bosses can basically be split into 2 types. "Humanoid" bosses can be juggled in the air every so often (they have super armor for a few attacks) while "Heavy" bosses can't be juggled in the air, but after doing enough damage to them they'll be vulnerable to a ground combo (or every so often they'll just stand around doing nothing, at which point you can go ham on them). Apart from these categories, bosses for the most part feel very distinct from each other and so whenever you face a boss, you have to master their moves and how to dodge them. While bosses are reused every so often, it's very rare.
Most Spectacle Fighters are a series of combat encounters one after another with pretty much nothing else. FIST on the other hand is also a Metroidvania, which means there's a decent amount of platforming and exploration. The platforming is pretty decent, especially later on when you get the whip weapon and air dash at which point the mid-air platforming sections are really fun. The exploration also feels rewarding. The rewards are basically stat boosts to your HP, SP, and EP bars. While this is nothing new, it's particularly designed well in FIST since you HP, SP, EP bars are very tiny in the beginning. For example, your SP and EP bars start out at 2, so exploring and increasing these bars by 1 feels huge. Not only that, but you can find "data disks" by exploring, which allows you to learn new combat moves, which is always something to look forward to.
While I found the non-combat sections of the game a decent way to change up the pace, one thing I really didn't like was that this game has a lot of underwater levels (emphasis on a LOT). I generally don't like water levels, but in this game it's even worse since when you're underwater, you can't do ANY combos anymore. Not only that, but the enemies you face are a lot more simple, needing only like one hit to take them down. I really wish all of the underwater levels were replaced with more land combat encounters, since I didn’t enjoy any of them.
One last thing I'll mention about the combat isn't exactly a negative, but more like a missed opportunity. As I was playing the game, I felt that FIST was a great game, but it didn't quite reach the levels of something like Hollow Knight, where you really have to master the combat and bosses in order to succeed. Then near the end game, I reached a room with an "arcade machine". By interacting with the arcade machine, you could face bosses that you've previously fought all over again if you wanted. Not only that, but there were 3 "tournaments" where you faced 4 bosses in a row, with the last 2 bosses always being ones that couldn't be found in the game. These "hidden" bosses were basically Hollow Knight level bosses where they were really challenging and really required you to master them before you could beat them. I really wish these bosses were spread out in the game instead of all being saved as an optional thing at that absolute end of the game, since the difficulty curve would've been a lot better for it.
There's a story, but it's fairly lackluster. You play as a rabbit who's in a town that's run by machines who are bad and you have to stop them. These machines are after something called a "spark" and if they get it, they'll be unstoppable which is really bad. The problem is that the game does not explain at all about WHY these machines are so bad. So while the story is really pushing me into caring about wanting to stop them, I really don't because I am never shown the machines doing anything particularly horrendous. If anything, I kind of find them funny since every so often the machines make jokes. They're kind of too "authoritarian", but that's about it. I also didn't care about the protagonist all that much, since his only goal seems to be to stop the machines, which is really generic. Since I didn't care about the antagonist nor the protagonist, I didn't find myself engaged with the story.
Overall, I really enjoyed the gameplay of FIST. There's very few 2D spectacle fighters I've played, and after playing FIST, I wish there was more of them. Hopefully if I play some in the future, the developers will know better than to put underwater levels in their spectacle fighter :P