Don’t Pick on The Fat Kid Bashes Its Way onto Steam’s Early Access

By: GeekyGamerGirl87

Developed and published by Almighty Games, Don’t Pick on The Fat Kid is an indie beat ‘em up that is entering Early Access on Steam come June 8, 2018. When I first laid eyes on the game, I was very interested in playing the game because the art style caught my attention, and you play as a heavy set main character which you don’t see often in games. Therefore, I would like to take the time to thank Almighty Games for providing me with a free copy of the Early Access version of the game to play, so that I could write  my review.

The story is straight forward. You play as the fat kid, who is told by “goth chick” and “geek boy” that he should asked “skool girl” to go to the prom. This sounds like a great idea to you; however, you have others who want to stop you from achieving your dream prom date. Long story short, this is high school –or at least how I remember it—in the form of a video game.

One of the  main reasons I was drawn to the game was because of the art style and the graphics. The game is beautiful in that department. I played on the highest resolution and was blown away by how well it looked. I also liked the fact that they did use a heavyset person as the main character. Most games would stay away from this, so it is refreshing  to see a heavyset person as the lead. Although, some of the special moves used in the game are a bit cliché when it comes to heavyset people, and it would have been nicer to see a heavyset person taking a better lead role, none the less there is still a heavyset main character, and I can’t name many games that offer that.

You select from four different modes to play in the game which are: easy, normal, hard, and nightmare mode; in which each of them has their challenges. For the sake of the review, I played on easy mode so that I could enjoy the game. However, even on easy mode I had some difficulty. This was not due to the game being hard, but it was more so do to the controls for the game.

You can use keyboard/gamepad for the controls. Which, the controls were a little stiff to me on both keyboard and gamepad. There were times when I could not execute the fat kid’s specials because the gamepad nor the keyboard would respond accordingly. When I went to use the “fart” special move he would instead “bowl” or “belly bump.” However, there is one portion of the game where you are fighting jocks with helmets and to stun them you need to use the “fart” ability to stun them and attack.

Luckily the game is in early access, so I hope that this is one of the things they will be able to patch and work on. I did like the fact that you could reconfigure the controls for keyboard and they did help a bit with the stiffness for the keyboard controls. On the other hand, I would also like to see the ability to reconfigure the gamepad as well. I would ideally like the option to play with the directional pad or analog stick, as opposed to being  forced to play with the analog stick. I think the directional pad would be a better option, but again that is just my preference.  However, after doing a little more research it appears that they will be fixing the configuration with Xbox Controller and so I am looking forward to that patch so that the gamepad will flow a lot better.

The game does offer achievements for those who do enjoy collecting achievements. You will be able to collect up to fourteen different achievements in total. Well, again as the game is in early access there is no telling if these same fourteen achievements will still be there or if they will add more to the game, as they continue to work on the game. Also, I did not see any mention of trading cards for those of you who enjoy collecting the trading cards. However, I have seen before where games in early access will not add trading cards to their games until an official release and sometimes even after the game has been out for a while, they may do a patch and add trading cards. Therefore, there is a chance that the trading cards feature could be added later.

Overall, Don’t Pick on The Fat Kid is still a good game and as it is in early access I am hoping  that they will be able to fix the issues with the controls soon. I would love to see more improvements from the game. I love the fact that Almighty Games stepped outside of the box with their main protagonist and feel that this can be a great beat ‘em up.  If the game does good, perhaps they could add a DLC that introduces co-op mode where you could play with “Goth Chick”, “Geek Boy”, and even “Skool Girl” it would be very interesting to see where this game actual goes, and I am hoping again for good things with it. If you would like to play Don’t Pick on The Fat Kid in its early access state, you can purchase it on Steam for $9.99 USD.