These days, there are as many video games as there are grains of sand on a beach. The sheer breadth of experiences on offer boggles the mind. Depending on the game, I can run, jump, and shoot, or I can eschew violence entirely to chat up random passersby. I can play music. I can build worlds. I can lose myself in abstract imagery. I can solve problems as I please or be taken by the hand and guided through an experience. All of these approaches to game design are valid, but also, every video game should have a kick button.
I’ve been playing Anger Foot, a new first-person action game in which your main means of interacting with the world is a swift boot to the face, and it has reinforced one of my longest-held beliefs: a dedicated kick button elevates any game that it’s in. In Anger Foot, perhaps the apex of this trend, kicks send dudes, garbage, and everything in between flying. The game’s pace is reminiscent of Hotline Miami, albeit in first-person; you blaze through dingy apartments and across trash-strewn rooftops clapping enemies before they clap you, with split-second miscalculations meaning certain death.
Each level is made up of numerous mini encounters – various combinations of bat-swinging alligators, gun-toting goons, shield-obscured SWAT cops, and multiple enemy types that are liable to explode – but almost every single one begins with a kick. Levels are chock full of doors. If you kick one down, odds are, shit’s about to get wacky. Hordes of enemies throw themselves at you, and the soundtrack morphs from a pulsing beat into a full-on cacophony. Then, several additional kicks (and maybe a few gunshots) later, everything calms down, and you can exhale.
This simple rhythm makes for an experience that’s compulsively propulsive. Behind each door, a new thunderclap of violence awaits. Even the simple action of kicking doors feels good. They splinter – practically shatter – when brought into contact with your wriggly green toes. Enemies, tables, toilets, trash cans, shopping carts, and pretty much anything else you can imagine similarly ricochets away as though it’s been hit by an eighteen-wheeler, each with its own crunchy, punchy sound effects. Sometimes things you’ve kicked hit walls. Other times they go sailing down stairs or off buildings. This is a game that wants you to survey its world, take in all the clever little details, and think “What would happen if I kicked that?”
Anger Foot has caused me to hark back to one of my happiest early gaming memories: playing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic on the PC at my mom’s house as a teenager. That game wasn’t quite so narrowly focused on kicking, but it nonetheless allowed you to do so whenever you pleased. This, combined with sophisticated physics (for the time), meant I would regularly toy with my orc foes by letting them chase me up flights of stairs and then, just as they were about to catch me, kicking them back down. They’d proceed to dust themselves off and drag their measurably more mangled bodies in my direction again, only to receive another kick for their troubles. I’d repeat this as many times as necessary, cackling the entire time, because teenagers are evil.
I’m going to take this a step further: As far as I’m concerned, the shove from Baldur’s Gate 3 is a kick. This is because the best kicks are a means to the end of creating one or more additional funny collisions. In Anger Foot, kicks send doors crashing into enemies, who in turn wilt against whichever wall they’ve been pinned to. In Dark Messiah, kicks caused big, burly dudes to take laughably ungraceful tumbles down stairs or into spike traps. In Baldur’s Gate 3, shoves, which are kicks, send enemies – even bosses, in some cases – off ledges onto the cold, hard ground or into endless abysses, never to be seen again. Every time you do it, you come away feeling devious, like you’ve gotten away with an affront to God and game designers alike. And yet, the game was designed with this exact thing in mind! It is ingenious.
Maybe that’s why video game kicks rule so hard: They feel unfair – like a dirty trick that only the player can take full advantage of. Parrying a blade is elegant, an act of beautiful precision. Kicking somebody who just parried a blade in the stomach is classless. But I don’t want to be classy; I want to win. And laugh at somebody falling down the stairs.
