Like its predecessors, 2 Fights in 2 Tight Spaces is proof of the magic in modest and specific ambitions. This is a game attempting to do one, simple thing: to capture how it feels to have a sloppy bar fight regaled to you by someone so drunk they’re convinced they’ve just witnessed a feat of John Wick-tier choreography down their local – all through the emergent storytelling potential of the tactical roguelike.
This entry is the series’ GTA London, in that its card-based fights often take place in pubs and chicken shops. Six pints. Two fillet burgers. One cleaver through the thigh. A quiet night out, all told, but I’ll take it. Draw the right hands, play the cards in the right order, and you’ll watch as heads get plunged into deep fat fryers, hammers get yanked from hands and returned to sender, and haymakers hit three sets of jaws still hanging from the surprise of it all. Then, watch again as leaders pushed out of position into their henchmook’s firing arcs eat shotgun shells they probably paid for themselves. A good round here means being a film director: breaking a fluid fight scene down move by move, then commanding it all in slow motion. It’s impossibly stylish, but there’s also an inherent comedy to slipping out between two gunmen, then watching them take turns to shoot each other in the chest – as if they simply had no choice in the matter – without breaking kayfabe.
The gist of 2 Fights in 2 Tight Spaces (hereafter referred to as ‘2 Fights’ to prevent my brain leaking out of my ears and into the gaps between its disjointed syntax) is Into The Breach meets Slay The Spire, although this description both sells the game’s own flavour short, and sets it up for inevitably disappointing comparisons. To start, you’ll choose either campaign or skirmish – a shorter campaign with potentially bumpier difficulty spikes. Next you’ll pick one of four agents, and one of several pre-made decks: balanced, defensive, aggressive and so on. Finally, you pick one of five difficulties. These are interesting, since as well as altering the usual bits like enemy health and damage, the lower difficulties also promise you a more balanced draw each turn – at least one guaranteed movement card, for example.
As the run progresses, you’ll find, upgrade, and remove ability cards that you’ll play from a limited pool of action points each turn, and you’ll also choose routes. Different routes offer different challenges, and stops at either gyms or hospitals. Gyms let you upgrade, buy, or remove cards. Hospitals let you heal or increase your health. Both these things cost money, which falls out of people when you beat them up and complete a mission, just as god intended. You’ll also get bonuses to both cash and health if you manage to complete sub-objectives. Smash two heads into objects, for example, or knock out two enemies in the same turn.
I said up top that I’d be truncating the game’s name to 2 Fights, although the Tight Spaces of it all is crucial here. Perhaps more than anything, this is a game about using limited resources in an increasingly limited space (foes like to close in, quick), to put yourself in the most advantageous positions possible. Or, to put it simply, about making the most of a bad situation – and ideally looking damn good in the process. Things follow the Into The Breach model of having enemies rearrange themselves at the beginning of each turn. Enemies give you perfect information about each of their intentions, allowing you to then manipulate them into hitting their mates with the right positioning. New to 2 Fights is a focus on utilising environmental hazards, such as the aforementioned deep-fat fryers.
For me, rounds usually started by working out my exit plan. On normal difficulty and below, you’re guaranteed that one movement card to shift your agent’s position a few tiles – whether that’s a basic shuffle, squeezing between two enemies to occupy a diagonal space, or simply flipping over a henchmook’s shoulders to land behind them. A roguelike structure means a contiguous health pool so, whether intentionally or not, 2 Fights encourages self-preservation above all else. This occasionally becomes an issue when you’re incentivised to make passive plays in favour of exciting combos, but usually works as I imagine was intended. Both danger and a means to avoid it are pretty much guaranteed – the tactics are about how you’ll make use of the space in between.
Early Access usually means one of two things: either an obviously incomplete vision of a final game, with huge swathes missing, or a near-complete vision with technical and balance issues. 2 Fights has a little of the former, but feels much closer to the later. I encountered a few obvious bugs here. A fight where, after my round was over, multiple red dots appeared on my character, who was then shot to pieces by off-screen snipers, with no warning. Another fight where two out of three opponents decided to stand and do nothing until I moved into ranged and provoked them. Irritating, but nothing that strikes me as unfixable in the short term rather than the later.
The balancing, though, is where the game feels like it needs the most attention. As mentioned above, you get a choice of four agents with three decks each before you’ve played a single round, with extra decks to unlock for gaining experience through runs. While there’s a hint of where new players should go first in some flavour text, there’s no real telegraphing towards what the baseline experience should be. I soon found that aggressive decks feel much more useful than balanced decks, with mobile decks a close second. As for which character to pick, who knows? It feels like what 2 Fights is missing most of all is a short, narrative campaign with a single character – or two for co-op – to get new players properly acquainted. It’s hard to work out the value of going off-script in a deckbuilding game if I’ve got no idea what the script is as a baseline. It’s a problem both Slay The Spire and Into The Breach solved with much more gradual progression and initially limited character rosters.
The secondary issue, and one that can be much more frustrating in the moment, is that sometimes you just aren’t given the right cards to avoid damage, or even do much of anything. This sort of thing is obviously a byproduct of randomness, but it does feel like the cards could do with some shuffling behind the scenes to avoid this happening. All in all, though, this is already shaping up to be a great tactics game, especially for one that’s just started its early access journey.
