Blazin’ squad.
A totally original pixel art fighting game in 2024 is certainly a welcome surprise. What’s more of a surprise, though, is discovering that Mark Minkyu Chung touts himself as a solo game developer. Known by his developer handle Rarebreed, we hopped to Blazing Strike’s credits roll to corroborate the seemingly impossible. And, sure enough, he appears to have done pretty much everything himself, from programming to art direction, rollback netcode implementation, and sound. Where he’s had help, he’s still the lead credit of two individuals for things like animation, character, and environment design. To that end, it appears Blazing Strike’s vast majority is indeed the effort of one man – a head-spinning feat considering the comprehensive nature of the end product.
A love letter to the fighting game hardcore, there’s plenty of SNK about Blazing Strike, with incredibly tall, superbly rendered sprites, tons of animation frames, and a scaling effect that zooms in and out based on the proximity of the combatants. Indeed, the game’s graphical style is arguably its most polished asset, and bears some visual kinship to Rage of the Dragons. The spritework appears genuine, as if it was crafted on old-school tools, and boasts a near-CPS3 quality (that being the hardware that fuelled Street Fighter III and Red Earth). The colour palette positively beams, with attractive blending, and, although samey at times, the backgrounds are truly top-notch, featuring a range of sci-fi cityscapes and in-theme prison courtyards.
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