Fights In Tight Spaces

Developer Mode7, Bithell Games Publisher Ground Shatter Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK Release Early 2021

As any good action hero will tell you, beating the bad guys is only half the battle. Looking good while you do it? That’s how you secure your place on the dorm-room walls and DVD shelves and YouTube compilations where real heroes are remembered. And this is something that Fights In Tight Spaces knows all too well.

Developer Ground Shatter is taking cues from the likes of Mission: Impossible, Oldboy and John Wick to bring that brilliantly what-it-says-onthe-tin title to life. Think lifts, bathrooms, corridors, the back of a van – any confined space just big enough for the kind of tightly-choreographed collisions of muscles and sweat that end up clipped from their original context to be admired like a butterfly preserved under glass by action fans.

The way it realises these cinematic ambitions, though, might come as something of a surprise: turn-based battles play out on chessboard grids, with visuals that draw equally on Superhot and Saul Bass. It’s also a card game, of the Roguelike deckbuilder variety where each fight rewards you with a fresh selection of options to slot into your deck. In this case, it might mean choosing between a split kick, a throwable tranquiliser dart or a manoeuvre to slip past an opponent just in time to push them in the path of a bullet that originally had your name on it. Each card triggers a beautifully crafted animation, and by stringing together a few moves you become the director of fight scenes that feel worthy of admiring alongside those of the game’s own heroes.