Sango Fighter 2

Want to spend a Saturday night moving figures across a chessboard and waiting for attack animations to render? Sango Fighter 2 is exactly that — a real-time tactical game released in the mid-nineties by what are apparently Asians (authorship remains a mystery), attempting to blend chess elements with arcade action dynamics. On DOS, it definitely had something going for it.

You play as a soldier you place on a game board full of enemies. Each has their own stats, attack, defense, special abilities. You move, attack, and defend in real-time. It's not purely turn-based — movement and time flow simultaneously, so you have to account for the opponent moving and attacking too. Plus you can control multiple units at once, which creates even more chaos if you don't know where to look. The graphics are extremely modest — units look like blurred robots, animation is minimal, sound contributes more to stress than atmosphere. On an unaccelerated monitor it was slow and sluggish, with controls struggling to keep pace without much success.

The problem is that strategy and action want to kick each other in the teeth. While you're thinking through your move, enemies attack you. While you're fighting, there's no time to think. The result is an awkward hybrid that fails at both disciplines — the strategy is shallow and linear, the action is slow and clumsy. It's not a bad idea, just the execution doesn't match the ambition.

Today you won't play it looking for substance or experience. It's more of a curiosity from when indie creators (or whoever they were) tried to experiment, and the experiment simply didn't work out. Try it in an emulator if you're curious how things were in the nineties with games that came from nowhere — but don't fool yourself into thinking you'll play it and say "oh, I never knew about this."