Game review: Lethal League

I’d recently learned about Lethal League by Reptile Games through an article from Kotaku, and they have a video of two players doing a tournament game playing for the first time. I tried the game out myself, playing Versus mode against the CPU and the Challenge mode, and now my wrists are killing me from playing with keyboard controls. I’m not complaining, mind you. I loved the game, and I’ll be going back for another round as soon as my wrists stop throbbing. First, let me gush a bit and try to convince you to go check it out.

Lethal League is a “combat baseball” game where you hit a baseball at an opponent who can either dodge the ball or swing to hit it back at you. You can hit it straight by just swinging at it, or you can hit the shift key and the down or up arrows to send the ball flying at an angle. Pressing the up key also allows you to jump, so you can jump and swing to hit the ball up, down, or straight across the screen. Every swing that connects makes the ball travel faster, and once it’s going fast enough, it will have little flames trailing off of it and distort into an oval.

The premise is very simple, but playing the game against the CPU is hard. Not hard in a cheap way, but hard in the sense that you’re trying to catch a computer opponent off guard. Think of Pong, but instead of bouncing the ball off a paddle, you have to hit it with your bat. Unlike Pong, the ball won’t go off the sides of the screen and score you a point. It bounces off the top, bottom, and sides of the screen, and the first player to hit their opponent 11 times wins.

At this point, I’ve only managed to score 3 times in a game against the CPU, and every time I managed to land a blow, it felt like a major accomplishment. Perhaps because more often than not, it was my own volleys rocketing back at me that got my dumb ass knocked out. Timing the arrow press and swing at the same time is tricky, and sometimes a volley I’d meant to fly up would go straight, bounce off the side, and hit me in the face before I could draw the bat back from my last swing. More embarrassing was swinging only to realize a second too late that I hadn’t turned around, so I get clocked in the back of the head. Hell the CPU didn’t even have to move to score points in some of these volleys. No, I was my own worst enemy. Typical.

Ahem, anyway, Challenge mode is just you on the screen, and the objective is to try and get the ball going as fast as possible without getting knocked out. Which sounds simple, but once the ball is bounding at angles, I often jumped to swing, only to mistime my jump and catch a beaner right in the back of my noggin. So much like playing the versus mode, the Challenge mode is simple to understand, but hard to master.

Graphically, the game is kind of like something from the NES days. The music is much better than the 8-bit tunes of the era, and the sound effects are too. The game doesn’t need fancier graphics, though, and I think some of my enchantment with the game is the graphics giving me that nostalgic feeling for older console games.

If you’d read the Kotaku article I linked, you know that Reptile Games has announced that they will be making a “proper” release of the game with an added four-player versus mode, support for controllers, and some new special abilities, though they haven’t said what those will be. I will be looking forward to playing this on a controller so I can play longer without blowing out my wrists in a few rounds.

But, what you won’t get from the Kotaku article is this nice added tidbit: I contacted Reptile Games on Twitter and asked if they would consider releasing the game on PS Vita, and they said they would. That’s not a promise it will happen, but it’s given me another indie title to look forward to. Lethal League would be perfect for a portable game, as the rounds are lightning fast and you can play a game in a few minutes during the commute to work. Playing online against a friend could be loads of fun too. The game is highly addictive, and if it comes to Vita, I can say I’ll be picking it up very soon after it comes out.

I give Lethal League 5 enthusiastic stars, and I look forward to seeing what the full release will add. But even for the flash game, I cannot gush enough. Here’s a game with no plot, simple graphics, and game play which is easy to learn, but hard to master. So if you’re looking for something to waste some time with, I’d recommend you check out this little gem.