No matter how skilled you are or how lucky you get, failure is unavoidable. But it’s what you do with failure that counts. And as the first-person shooter Anger Foot posits, you’re not only allowed to laugh but should laugh at your failures. Compared to many modern games, the intentional friction in Anger Foot is refreshing, if a little frustrating.
Anger Foot, a tremendously difficult action romp developed by South African indie studio Free Lives and published by Devolver Digital, hit Windows PC in July 2024. After a year on the platform, where it has received mixed reception, it made its way to PlayStation 5 on July 1.
Anger Foot immediately drew me in with its cartoonish aesthetics and and over-the-top, gory presentation, reminding me of my unsupervised time on the internet as a kid. (At risk of showing my age, its character design reminded me of that obscure late 2000s Nickelodeon show, Mr. Meaty.) Music and visuals are what differentiate it from the other games of its kind. Anger Foot’s stylistic flair is its strongest asset. I found myself regularly laughing at its goofiness; the game is hard, but also just funny enough to keep me from realizing how bad I was at it.
Image: Free Lives/Devolver Digital
Anger Foot doesn’t waste a moment getting you to the action — a mix of kicking, shooting, dying, dying, and dying. Mind, the gameplay loop isn’t complex by any means, as the only required objective is always the same: Make it to the end of the level. But even that task can seem insurmountable with how hard the game works to kill you. It makes sense when you factor in the context of the main character being this unstoppable menace to society, and the more you play, the more you realize Anger Foot is a game designed around intentional failure.
The game doesn’t let you focus on your failures for too long, as a button press instantly puts you at the top of the level. Each level has bonus objectives for you to strive for, encouraging you to replay them multiple times. Still, before you can even think about achieving objectives such as finishing a level in under 45 seconds or without taking a hit, you must first master completing the level by learning enemy placement and the level’s layout, which is a task in and of itself. This core philosophy is an interesting and enticing one, but unfortunately for me, the process of repetition and skill progression wasn’t satisfying, at least not at first.
For context, I’m not the best at first-person shooters, especially on a controller. Playing Anger Foot on the PS5 DualSense controller was a nightmare, and none of the available accessibility options provided any relief. I was unable to find a good balance of sensitivity and aim assist that felt just right. After I spent a ton of time fiddling with the settings, I found something that felt good enough, but the entire time I played, I wished that either the time to kill was slower, or that the guns felt better to use, or that fewer enemies would hide around corners, and on and on.
One death led to a dozen in the first handful of levels, but Anger Foot charmed me out of giving way to frustration. It’s easy to make (and just as easy to ignore) “skill issue” statements, but when a game has enemies that kill you sync into a dance in time with the game’s banging OST, well, you can’t stay mad for long. Anger Foot points and laughs at you every single time you fail in a way that makes you want to hop back into the level and get right back to kickin’.
After six hours with Anger Foot, I came away from it accepting that I’m just no good at it. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have fun with it. Anger Foot’s speed makes it the perfect game to chip away at — the type of game you can grind to perfection or boot it up to kill some time.
On paper, Anger Foot is a dumb, fun game about anger, respect, and dope sneakers — but if it has one lesson to impart, it’s to laugh at yourself a little more.
