Action Fist is about a boy (or girl!) as they travel to fight the person that stole their scarf, dog, and girlfriend. Naturally, the scarf is the most important of the three. While this story is mostly linear and plays out in silly, text-only cutscenes, there's a quirky charm to the stilted dialogue and ridiculous goals. There's no real mention to the plot while you are on your robocidal rampage, though, so don't expect anything except the most bare-bones excuse to blow things apart. It's worth mentioning that the character design of the game is stellar, from the main characters to the robots that chase them down.

The artwork and music of Action Fist is absolutely fantastic. The artwork exhibits a retro style similar (although slightly inferior) to that seen in games like Noitu Love 2. The animations are smooth and excellent, while the colors are clear and used effectively. The sound effects are all spot on, and the music is extremely catchy. The presentation is one of the strongest features of the game, and it's obvious that a great deal of caring went into making Action Fist one of the best looking and sounding games around. As a bonus, all of the music tracks are made in Modplug Tracker, which means that you can play them through a standard music player or even edit them! This, combined with the catchiness of the music, makes Action Fist the perfect candidate for remixers.

The basic gameplay of Action Fist follows the standard run and gun formula. You progress through the levels, triggering checkpoints and blasting apart robots. You have basic moves such as double-jumping, wall-jumping, and firing in four directions. There's two stages to most zones, and the end of the second stage has a boss. There's nothing particularly revolutionary in this, but this is not a bad thing, since the levels are very tightly designed and keep the player churning forward in a cacophony of gunshots and explosions. The strength of the level design is one of the major selling points of Action Fist, and it's quite a large one.

The gimmick that sets Action Fist apart from other games of its kind is the inclusion of a modular weapon upgrading system. It functions somewhere between Gunstar Heroes and Radiant Silvergun, but still has unique elements to it. In short, you have two guns that you can switch between at any time. Every gun has three attributes: color, gun, and bullets. Color determines the damage your gun deals to enemies: same color deals double damage, everything else deals slightly reduced damage from normal. Gun determines the way you fire. For example, you might have a three-shot spread, or your gun might fire twice as fast as the normal gun. Finally, bonus gives your bullets that extra pizzazz, and include functions such as bullets that travel faster or hit harder. The combination of color importance and gun modification adds a lot to what would otherwise be a normal game.

Another gimmick added to the game are the secret areas. At certain points in the game, you can diverge from the main path and move through a different level. A good example of this is when you are breezing through the cave system and travel upwards through a laser shaft. The game is relatively linear, though, as you can't travel back to old paths or redo older levels. There's also some levels that don't follow the standard run-and-gun formula of the rest of the game, like the second level. Everything ties back into the theme of blowing stuff apart with multicolored bullets, however, so you need not worry about a sudden strange shift in tone. These main levels are also as well designed as the normal levels, so you don't have to worry about getting stuck with a worse level than that you were playing through.

While Action Fist is certainly adrenaline pumping and quite good, there's a number of problems. The gameplay mechanics do not seem to have been fully thought out, and often fall short of their true potential. For example, there's no incentive to play after you've beaten the game with one character. Scoring is not present at all in the game, which would've been a natural addition thanks to the colored bullets mechanic. The controls of the road level are stiff and sometimes troublesome. There's also some truly massive lag. You may not experience it on the title screen, or even in the game, but there is a ridiculous amount of framerate lag for seemingly no reason. Played on a Windows 7 box with excellent specs, the game run at a whopping 5 FPS except during level ends and the title screen. Upon starting up the game againt, it worked fine for a while, then suddenly decided to lag.

Beyond the standard minor complaints and a seemingly random issue with framerate, Action Fist is an excellent game. It's one of the better freeware games we've played, and possibly the best game that its prolific developer has ever made. Assuming you don't get irritating slowdown, we can guarantee you'll lose yourself in Action Fist until you shoot your way through hordes of robots to reach the very end. You can download the game from the developer's website. He also has a stable of other games available to play; we personally suggest Sim War V.

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