Foul Play is a game in which a well-turned out Victorian gentlemen teams up with a chimney sweep to tackle an army of daemons. Need I say more?

Yes apparently, because there’s a twist. Foul Play, which is available on XBLA and Steam,is actually about a play that tells the apparently true story of the mustachioed Victorian exemplar Baron Dashforth and his hunt for his daemon-hunter father. It’s a 2D side-scrolling brawler in the vein of Golden Axe, or more recently Castle Crashers, with one of the most original concepts I’ve seen in a game in a long time. Dashforth and Scampwick, his cheeky cockney side-kick, bash, flip and cane their way through hoards of enemies, but it’s all a show. So there are no health-bars, no deaths and no danger. Dashforth’s mission is to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, and failure only comes if the audience lose interest. It’s like if Streets of Rage and Guitar Hero had a love-child and give it nothing but Sherlock Holmes books and Dr.  Faustus to read.

The gameplay focuses on Dashforth and Scampwick dealing with the enemies/actors in as stylish a manner as possible in order to keep the audience happy. There isn’t a wide array of skills to learn, which on one hand makes the game very accessible, but on the other hand makes it very easy. Once you’ve learnt the parry, grab, repeated smash routine which renders opponents completely vulnerable and builds up combos very quickly, the game is pretty much done in terms of useful moves. It doesn’t stop the combat being extremely satisfying right the way through, as the thrill of building up monster combos by tossing enemies around the stage like bean bags never gets old. The audience love a good combo, and will throw their top hats into the air in rapturous applause as you beat the enemies into submission, but they hate to see you get hurt, so you can just as easily lose their acclaim if you take one too many kicks to the groin. The combat isn’t without fault though. Because of the 2D presentation, it’s often very difficult to judge whether the enemy in front of you is actually in front of you and not half a foot to the left. It’s extremely frustrating when you’ve worked your thumbs off building up a combo only for it to be ruined because your swings only harm the fresh air as your enemy blows raspberries at you from slightly to the right.

If you maintain a combo for an entire scene you get extra points, which add extra incentive for you to dodge, parry and bash your enemies with stylish speed. Also, for each act there are a set of challenges, like killing a certain enemy last or completing a certain section in under a minute. The challenges are satisfying to achieve, and apparently they add to the star-rating at the end of each act. On that note, I have no idea how the star-rating system functions. You receive a rating of zero stars to five stars based on your performance, but as far as I can tell the rating has no correlation to what actually occurred within the act itself. Sometimes, my co-op partner and I would kick ten bells out of the unlucky bad guys in a whirlwind of expertly executed combos and come away with a mediocre three stars. Sometimes, we’d plod through a level rather uneventfully and get a glowing five-star rating for our troubles. It was perplexing.

The game is an absolute joy to play, especially with a friend. Each of the five plays takes place in a different, colourful environment, from Cairo to Atlantis to Somerset. The characters of Dashforth and Scampwick manage to be funny and charming. The game made me genuinely laugh at loud on several occasions, whether it was the stage-hand getting caught on-stage with a cup of coffee before rushing off to the side, or the enemies crawling slowly off stage after they’d been ‘killed’. Foul Play is such a charismatic game that I was won over in the first couple of seconds of playing it. To aid the stories told within the plays about Dashforth’s relentless hunt for daemons wherever they rear their ugly heads, the player unlocks pages in the ‘Daemon Journal’. Some tell the story of Dashforth’s father and his own battles, some recount the actions the player recounts on stage, and some describe the bosses fought through-out the game. They offer finer details on a highly enjoyable story and add an extra few jokes for good balance.

As I said, the lack of combos to be memorised or threat from enemy attack beyond audience displeasure makes the game very easy. My co-op partner and I glided through the game only failing a couple of times. The bosses are a colourful cast of twisted monstrosities that provide a bit more of a challenge than the standard baddie, but not enough to cause a panic. However, the last boss was a different matter. It has more health than every other boss monster combined and can do audience alienating attacks that drain their applause quicker than you can gain it. It added a bit of crunch to the finale of a game that had been a breeze up until then, and I welcomed it.

With its glorious combination of an utterly unique concept and Victorian-based humour, it was always on to a winner in my books, and predictably I loved practically everything about Foul Play, from the Egyptian first act to the bow at the end of the final play. It might not provide much of a challenge, but in terms of charm, it’s unbeatable. I’d heartily recommend you hire some kind of companion and sit down to play Foul Play together, unless you’ve got some kind of irrational fear of top hats, in which case it’s probably one to avoid.

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