Anger Foot is the latest from Terra Nil developer Free Lives and hit indie publisher Devolver Digital. Controlling a sneakerhead with a series of his most trusted pairs of shoes robbed from him by various gangs, you must engage in a quest for revenge, kicking shooting and blasting your way through setpiece levels across a sprawling city.

It’s a simple premise, tasking players with engaging through shootouts in tight corridors where only a hit with a baseball bat or a bullet or two will kill you. This then fosters a Hotline Miami-esque mantra where you’re combing through levels at a fast but at times trepidatious pace, clearing areas and doing your best to get out alive, only now from a first-person-shooter perspective. This powerful hook left me thoroughly impressed with my time spent with preview builds. However, despite always remaining fun, Anger Foot buckles under itself a little when blown out into a fully scoped game.

Anger Foot is only a little bit of a disappointment. Free Lives has really nailed that feeling of struggling to pull yourself away from the game when you’re in it. Players will always be taking several goes at a level to find that perfect run, still only clearing it by the skin of their teeth. Through apartment complexes rife with graffiti, sewers with snakes and sewage squids, and office workspaces where papers are sent flying in your hail gunfire, everything is always hectic. It’s a one-shot kill for 90% of enemies, but also you. Survival and level clears will require speed, a well-placed kick or shotgun blast to an enemy’s head here, or a discard throw of a gun to another foe there.

There are a generous 63 levels to work through across the game’s several biomes. Each world being its unique setting does well to keep things fresh, but there is still that emphasis on tight corridors to work through. Right when Anger Foot starts to feel like it’s going to run out of things to show you, it introduces you to levels with more verticality. Suddenly those tight corridors of office complexes are meshed into sprints across rooftops or deep sewer canals bend and twist, occasionally throwing in a boxed-in combat arena in interesting ways.

Anger Foot’s replayability doesn’t end with its tense levels that’ll take several goes to complete. You’ll also do well to clear as many optional objectives in a mission as you can because they’ll net you with stars to gradually unlock various pairs of shoes to fit yourself with. Each shoe can mix up gameplay exponentially. A pair that resembles Timbalands gives each foe big heads, making headshots all that easier to land thus making the headshot-based challenges that much easier. ‘Holy Sandal’ slides net an extra life if you’re finding yourself struggling. Converse-like ‘Scavengers’ reload your gun with every successful kick kill. The meta can change in an instant with shoes like ‘Double Springers’ which simply allow for a double jump, letting me clear levels more efficiently by now reaching that ledge I couldn’t prior. There are so many weird and colourful ways of play in Anger Foot that are all worth celebrating. There’s even a pair of clown shoes that as far as I can tell have no gameplay impact except… squeaking when you walk. Why? Why not!

It’s areas outside of these admittedly strong elements that I struggle with Anger Foot. In my preview time with the game, I revelled in the game’s irreverence and humour. I was taken by the instances where you’d be taken away from fast gunplay and in these vignettes where you can just take in environments and chart with weird locals and gangsters. Here is some of the best humour, including locating a woman who’s simply worshipping a slice of cheese or a grizzled, tired cop who relents to you about how ‘crimate change’ is real.  These vignette pieces are always quality and also are just a means of witnessing how gorgeous Anger Foot can be despite its littering of beer cans and graffiti, with lush lighting and striking anthropomorphic enemy design. Getting a fully-fledged experience that can run upwards of 10 or so hours, however, and that humour and style can get a little old.

I know this is also the developers of games like Broforce and Genital Jousting. I’m aware Free Lives is kind of the king of irreverent games. I just also can’t help but notice that the less tactful parts of the game stick out like a sore thumb. Kicking down the millionth cubicle door to blast a guy on a toilet’s head off gets old. I take umbrage with the boring, uncreative boss design of a later level that has you shooting glowing pus sacks of a fat guy. I am in shock and awe at the incredibly dated and perhaps largely unrecognisable reference to ‘Spider Pig’ from the 2007(!) film The Simpsons Movie. Yes, really. Portions of this game have such simple, punchy jokes. Clever non-sequiturs that’ll genuinely get laughs out of me. Other portions are just… that other stuff. It’s incredibly jarring and does not feel like I’m playing the same game when this happens.

In my earlier playing of the game in various builds before release, I found concern in the boss design found within. Namely, the fact that it was very straightforward, uninteresting and easy arena-based gameplay with simple dodging required. This remains true for the majority of the game. A giant slime monster will slam down hands on you on platforms above a slime lake in a very readable fashion with not much else to juggle except an occasional kick here or there to the big guy in front of you. Then you do the same but now you’re standing on platforms above a different type of lake popping off shots at the aforementioned bulbous fat guy.

Rare attempts at mixing up the boss fight gameplay aren’t all that successful either. One sequence had me navigating a boat in a lake, fighting a big beasty as I avoided additional enemies and did my best to steer the stupid janky thing, only to be knocked into the geography or walls of the map and get stuck, needing a restart. This is a very late and very dissatisfying boss. The one nugget of gold in this bunch is an encounter about halfway through the game where I was taking on a feline anthropomorphic CEO in a lush office space where her shots were fatal and my only salvation was cautious dodging between pillars. Wielding a burst assault rifle, I had the sweaty duty of pulling off pop shots and whittling down their health as best I could. What a diamond in the rough compared to everything else on offer.