One Life Left - Divekick

One button dives, the other kicks. There, now you know everything you need to know to play Divekick. Created by Iron Galaxy, a studio comprised largely of fighting game enthusiasts and players, Divekick is a (literal) two button fighting game that began as a joke and transformed into much, much more. The goal is to kick your opponent before they can kick you. Each character has around 2,000 health, and the kicks each do 1 billion damage. To kick your opponent successfully you will need to maneuver your character above them by diving straight into the air with the dive button. To back away from an opponent, kick the ground so hard that the Earth rotates underneath you, giving the appearance of backing up.
This simple setup masks an incredibly complex game. While Divekick is easy to pick up (though I did have one or two friends who had trouble remembering which button did what), it is fairly difficult to master. The game came out August 20 had time to play with a couple of groups of friends. Each group understood the game quickly, but as I played more and more, I found myself consistently beating people who had just picked it up. The result is a game that works well for both parties and competitive play. If you have a group of friends who are into Super Smash Brothers and games of that ilk, you should definitely check it out.
While I can wholeheartedly recommend Divekick’s gameplay, I feel that its humor might need some explaining. I mentioned earlier that the game began as a joke, specifically a grand joke about the fighting game community, and fighting games in general. As the project got larger and larger it continued to add more jabs at fighting games and competitive video game play. This means that a lot of the humor can come across as either hard to understand, or somewhat crass and occasionally racist. The important thing to remember is the Divekick, as fun as it may be, is also a satire. When it includes a character named Kung Pao who jumps around making Bruce Lee-esque chirps and squeaks, Divekick is commenting on the racism so prevalent in fighting games, not continuing it. Plenty of the humor is hard to understand as well. Some characters are references to real people, and the only reason I know that is because I followed developer footage of the game as it was made. Divekick is still a funny game, however. I found my friends and I laughing at least once per match, if not more. The characters all bring a lot of ridiculous personalities to the field, like Kick, who speaks entirely in bastardized Will Smith quotes.
Along with the classic fighting game Versus Mode, Divekick also contains an arcade style Story Mode. In this mode, the player will select a character, see a short comic strip explaining their entry into the Divekicking circuit, and then proceed to fight through the rest of the roster. These fights are occasionally peppered with more story content, but are largely bland and kind of frustrating. Creating good fighting game AI is always difficult, and the enemies either feel like complete pushovers or unbeatable champions. The Story Mode is good for a few laughs, and it is definitely worth seeing all of the characters’ intros. Versus Mode is the true draw of the game though.
Unfortunately for many college students, Divekick is only available for Sony consoles and the PC. While 360 users are out of luck, anyone with a solid computer, a Playstation 3, or a Vita can download the game for the easy price of $9.99. If you are playing the PC version. All the versions except the Vita version can also be played online, but it really is a lot more fun with some friends in the room.
Divekick gives people who are not knowledgeable about fighting games the chance to experience that kind of competitive flow without having to learn a ridiculous amount of combos. Combine that pick-up-and-play ease with solid humor and a pretty cool soundtrack, and you have yourselves one heck of a game.