We love beat-’em-up games like Final Fight, but we’ve never been big fans of fighting games like Street Fighter. Not because we hate them, but because all those combos can be very intimidating, and try as we might, we’ve never managed to destroy our opponents in online matches the way they can wipe the floor with us. Poly Fighter is the first fighting game we’ve genuinely enjoyed and couldn’t put down. It combines traditional one-on-one fighting with roguelike progression. It’s designed entirely for solo players and allows us to learn techniques from defeated opponents, which, you have to admit, makes it particularly interesting.
Fighting Our Way
In Poly Fighter, we choose a fighter, enter a series of battles, and try to complete three increasingly difficult leagues. Along the way, we face regular opponents, elite fighters, and bosses. Numerous branching paths allow us to choose our next encounter. Some routes offer opportunities to recover health or improve our abilities, while tougher opponents generally provide better rewards. Losing a round costs a life, and once we’re fresh out of them, the current run comes to an end, as is often the case with roguelites.
Combat follows the familiar side-on fighting game formula, with light, medium, and heavy attacks, grabs, special moves, and powerful super attacks. The devs, God bless them, have been kind enough to include two control options. On one hand, there are simplified inputs that make special moves easier to perform and, on the other, traditional directional inputs for players familiar with fighting games. Given how terrible we are at these types of games, you can imagine how happy we were to focus on learning the fundamentals without bothering our somewhat pretty little heads with memorising complicated commands. Even so, the easier option still leaves room to develop combinations and experiment with different techniques.
The playable characters have their own fighting styles, starting abilities, and movement characteristics. Hiro, for example, is a fairly traditional all-rounder who uses familiar projectile and uppercut attacks, while Adrian is a boxer who relies on punches and aggressive forward movement. Other fighters favour grappling or keeping opponents at a distance. These differences are quite important because our starting character influences how we approach the early battles, even though their abilities can change considerably throughout a run.
A Little Something From Everyone
Our favourite aspect of Poly Fighter is undoubtedly the ability to learn and combine techniques. After defeating an opponent, we can choose from available rewards that include new attacks, improvements to existing moves, defensive abilities, and other useful enhancements. We can replace techniques that no longer suit our approach, strengthen our preferred attacks, or experiment with abilities belonging to completely different fighters.
The combinations are particularly appealing, and we were absolutely blown away by how a character’s simple ability could be replaced with something as impressive as instant teleportation. Other possibilities include modifying special attacks with additional properties or combining techniques that help maintain pressure on an opponent. We like the freedom offered by this system, particularly how the abilities we acquire can truly change the way our chosen fighter operates. Mind you, acquiring a powerful technique doesn’t automatically mean it will work well with everything else in our arsenal. There were times when we picked something that seemed really cool, only to discover that it was pretty much like putting ice cream on pizza. They’re great separately, but not so much together, unless, well, you’re weird that way… :)
Through the Discovery Loop, we can encounter specific rivals and complete challenges to unlock additional playable fighters. Unless we’re mistaken, there are 16 playable characters in the Early Access version, with more planned for future updates. There are also ascension runs for those looking for additional challenges after completing the regular leagues. Considering the different characters, techniques, and possible combinations, there’s plenty of bang for your buck.
Poly Fighter borrows heavily from the early days of polygonal fighting games, so be prepared for chunky character models, colourful environments, exaggerated animations, and flashy attacks. It works wonderfully and, for us, it managed to bring back memories of arcade fighters from the 1990s. The only difference is that this time we loved playing it. We especially like how the modern lighting works with the intentionally old-fashioned character designs.
As this is an Early Access title, we look forward to seeing how the game develops in the future. We would definitely appreciate more variety in combat, a wider selection of basic attacks, and more dynamic and unpredictable enemy behaviour. Collecting additional techniques helps introduce variety, but the underlying battles don’t always demand enough changes to our approach.
A Promising Contender
Poly Fighter has two things that make it an easy recommendation for our readers: an enjoyable fighting system and an interesting progression mechanic that encourages experimentation. We had a blast picking our paths, collecting techniques, and building combinations that substantially changed our fighter’s capabilities. There’s still room for improvement, particularly when it comes to combat variety, but we’ve enjoyed our time with it far more than we ever expected. We’re certainly interested to see how HeartLoop Games develops it further.
- Developer: HeartLoop Games
- Publisher: HeartLoop Games
- Genre: Fighting, Roguelike, Action
- Platform: PC (Steam)
- Release Date: October 13, 2026 (Early Access)
- Game Modes: Single-player
- Version Reviewed: PC — Early Access
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