Dynasty Feud (PC) Review

In an attempt to differentiate itself from its competitors, Dynasty Feud forgoes the standard one-on-one battles found in most fighters in favour of five-on-five battles. Instead of selecting a character, players select dynasties.

Each dynasty features five characters tied around a theme. Clan Yngling is comprised of Vikings, The Cartwrongs are an American Wild West family, and the House of Arthur is, appropriately, made up entirely of knights.

It would be easy for each dynasty to have one member of the team fulfil one purpose: someone is a tank, another is ranged, one specialises in close-up combat, and so on. Thankfully, Kaia Studios opts for a more personalised approach, with each dynasty having a unique focus to coincide with their team.

Fancier's Crew, a clan composed of pirates, primarily focuses on attacking from across the stage and setting up explosive traps. Conversely, Nekoyama Shi, a team made up of cosplayers, exclusively uses melee attacks.

With the inclusion of stats for each character, Kaia Studios insures that there's a natural balance to the roster. Most of the cast will die in one hit, but slower characters that focus primarily on melee are given added health to offset their natural disadvantage.

Unfortunately, while the cast is generally well balanced, the same cannot be said for the rest of Dynasty Feud. Underneath the excellent character design and charismatic art style lies a near broken arena fighter.

Attacking and moving should be smooth and natural, but it seldom feels immediate here, thanks to input delay plaguing most of the combatants. The lack of any sort of combos also means characters are stuck doing the same one to two moves repeatedly until death.

Upon dying, the respawning dynasty can choose exactly where they want to spawn and, due to an invulnerability period that lasts far too long upon reviving, can then kill their opponent with incredible ease.

Most arena fighters get around this problem by having characters spawn in one specific location, but choosing where a character respawns puts the opponent at an incredibly unfair disadvantage while risking the chance of the fight boiling down into a back and forth of spawn kills.

Stages are also lacking in any sort of balance. Ranked and private matches disallow the option to pick stages, so it's impossible to pick the less active ones for competitive play. This becomes a huge problem when the same few stages keep rotating as some levels have far more hazards than others.

Hazards wouldn't be a problem if they were consistently designed and if stages could be manually picked, but, as is, they're too sporadic and too random to be enjoyable. A stage breaking away as a fight goes on is a novel idea, but only in moderation. In excess, it kills what could have otherwise been an enjoyable fight.

Dynasty Feud's roster and general concept is innovating and endearing, but it feels as if not enough time was spent on the other aspects of the game. Combat isn't fluid, the mechanics are broken while awarding cheap tactics, and stages have no design consistency to make them enjoyable.

With more time, Dynasty Feud could have ended up as one of the best original fighting games on Steam. As is, it's just another great idea rushed out to the masses before it could be fully realised and perfected.