Project Z.E.D Game Sample - PC/Indie
80WARNING! You may need to turn your audio down, as some tunes are not audio balanced and much louder than others. I lowered the sound and it's still loud.
You may have not heard about this one, but it's sure turning out to be a pretty swell poverty fighter. Currently known as "Project Z.E.D", the game is your standard 2D versus fighter with your standard 2D fighting systems from tried and true fighters (Two Assault Dashes with different properties, Push Block, Just Defend, Combo Burst, Ex Attacks, etc.) and a more Western kind of Comic style to the characters with more urban and industrial settings. This is one of the few "original" games made with the M.U.G.E.N engine, and it's already one of the most ambitious and interesting of the bunch. It's generally created by one guy: Sean English, who also goes by the moniker of "Inch1989". Also of note, it's developed in the newer M.U.G.E.N engine, which means more quality of life features and a higher resolution.
I didn't think much of the characters or how they were drawn at first... they seemed pretty generic at a glance, but I was actually pretty impressed when they started animating; they look a lot better in motion than they do in stills. A lot of effort was put into not only how the characters look in motion, but that they have original voices and multiple quips for their various moves... a lot of Indie/Doujin fighters use voice samples and assets from other games, but this game is trying to have its own identity while still being familiar and accessible to novices and pros alike. Yes, the game has your clone-esque fighters like "Jonathan" who is like a weird contradictory version of "King of Fighters" Kyo/Ash (as he uses "ice flames"), but he has his own distinctive traits that also differentiate his skillset, so the characters "pay respects" to famous characters versus outright plagiarizing them. A few characters are fairly unique as a whole (the ones currently developed and the proof of concepts for future characters) and, in this regard, I'm a little excited as a whole to see more of this game come to light.
The game is very combo and juggle friendly and it doesn't take long to orchestrate combos that can take a generous amount of health or even deal 100% damage as each character has access to quite a few moves and specials, not to mention the four-button attack scheme (two punches / kicks) isn't a particularly advanced system. If you learn to abuse Assault Dashes on top of this (which charge up over time), you can easily wreck your opponents. As such, I imagine tweaks will either be made to certain combo chains or damage scaling will be adjusted in the future (there is scaling, it's just not high enough). This demo has four playable characters and is a good foundation for what the creator has in store going forward (with obvious tweaks and balancing I imagine) with a placeholder menu, GUI and story elements (which I cut from this video).
You can get the game from Sean English's (Inch1989) channel at:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Inch1989/featured
or from this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNiP3viHk7A
Additionally, you can get more insights as well as more advanced builds of his game if you support him on Patreon or Twitter at:
https://www.patreon.com/projectzed
https://twitter.com/projectzedfg?lang=en
I play through the game on high difficulty to give an idea of what the gameplay is like. Enjoy.
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