Behooven to the hardware
Before I can begin this review, I need to address the draft horse in the room; Yes. There is a reason this indie fighter has an uncanny resemblance to a certain popular IP that happens to also star cute and cartoony ungulates. I could go over the game's near decade of history. However, I would like to focus this review on the product in front of you today. If you would like to learn more about Them's Fightin' Herds' past, I would direct you to the excellent documentary on the subject made by Esteban Martinez over on Youtube.
Them’s Fightin’ Herds is a game mostly inspired by the lineage of "Anime" fighters that find their roots in the likes of Capcom's Darkstalkers, Ark System Works' Blazblue, or French Bread's Melty Blood: Actress Again. What we have here is a 4 button fighter; Light, Medium, Heavy, and Magic buttons that often times a character's kit is centered around. There are a few universal mechanics across the entire cast such as a dedicated Anti-air attack, grabs, and a universal launcher. Each ungulate however uses the tools wildly different and even have very different forms of movement caked into their kits. For example, Velvet gracefully skates along the ground as if she has ice physics if you crouch after a dash, while the timid Pom can both air dash and glide safely to the ground with her wool pompadour. The combo system itself is also pretty free and open feeling too, and there's a fair bit of expression to be had in how strings and combos are done thanks to the gravity-scaling Juggle Decay system. While maybe not as beginner friendly as examples of the genre that attempt to boil everything down to its most basic mechanics, the relative ease of execution, tight-knit cast, and the package's smart use of various modes of play make for something that is accessible yet doesn't compromise on depth.
Of course, that would all mean nothing without the means to properly sit down and learn. As someone who only skimmed the surface of various genre examples before the steam release of this game, TFH's teaching tools are one of the game's strongest suits. The tutorial mode does a great job of breaking practically every mechanic in the game down, from simple stuff like blocking and the magic series ABC combos, to an outright brilliant dissertation on ethereal fighting game mechanics such as what Frame data, hit boxes, and hurt boxes are. The witty dialogue, breakdown of mechanics, and the way the tutorial urges players to come back and run through it multiple times to reinforce knowledge provide it with replay value. This is of course only the beginning of TFH's teaching tools, as not only is the training mode filled to the brim with almost any feature you could possibly ask for, not only are Replays there complete with being able to review them with the training mode data sets with pause and frame by frame, but there is an incredibly powerful pair of practical modes that bear special mention for how they contribute to the on-boarding process.
The first of which is the story mode. Not content with just the usual arcade ladder (arcade mode is there for those who want it.) or a simple 'cutscenes with fights' style approach; Story Mode is replete with RPG-inspired overworld traversal, platforming challenges to teach you movement options, and a set of combatants that were designed to help players build strong fundamentals. The simple predator that makes up the most common of enemy encounters in Story mode is a wolf that has a big lunging overhead attack and a slide along the ground to teach players to deal with high and low attacks, or the boss fight against Velvet being designed to teach players how to deal with projectiles. It probably also doesn't hurt that much of Story Mode's script was penned by famed cartoon director Lauren Faust and her son Ryan Faust, which lends the writing a warm and genuine feeling in between the dad jokes crammed into many of the incidental NPCs. Story mode in its current state should take most players about 3 to 4 hours provided lower difficulty levels are selected by those who are newer to fighting games, as the higher difficulties feature far more aggressive AI, less opportunities for healing, and show off just how powerful (and cheap!) the extra moves bosses get can be. Play on the harder difficulties if you crave that SNK difficulty. It should be noted that as of the writing of this review (and April of 2020 when the game initially got its 1.0 release on PC), only Arizona's section of the story mode is available. Although developer Mane6 has promised their commitment to having story chapters for the other members of the core cast, progress on such has been decidedly glacial.
That other all-important piece of the puzzle here with Them's Fightin' Herds is the online component. TFH uses the GGPO middleware for rollback netcode to make for as buttery smooth of an online experience as possible, and with crossplay to boot. Both of these worked, for the most part. Let me preface this by saying all of my online testing was with a network adapter and fully wired, but I had a crash (which seems to be a general bug this port currently suffers from) trying to get into a match. I also had one match where a hiccup during the match seemed to have introduced a bunch of delay. These cases were the exception to my otherwise smooth experience, though. Besides that one match, everything worked and felt like I was playing with someone next to me. Classic Lobby and Casual match also make sure you can just get into matches without having to fuss about much either, but that would of course ignore what may actually be my favorite lobby system in any online fighting game.
The pixel lobby has an impressively stacked feature set to it, including online training with other players, chests containing salt (the currency of Foenum) that can be fought over to buy lobby cosmetics with, a battle shrine that works like an arcade cabinet, and the Salt Mines. Even if popping into an empty lobby, merely wander around and find the entrance to the salt mines to start up this impressive mini-game wherein you and anybody else that joins have 15 minutes to survive an onslaught of the predators from the story mode, all while mining for salt and collecting hats! Having all these ancillary activities in the online lobbies to warm up with and have a chance to interact with the community in a lobby can do wonders to limber you up when you eventually do throw down with someone!
The truth about fighting games though is that even if a game has all the substance fit to burst, it can drown if the style isn't there. Say what you will about the divisive nature of how it presents itself, TFH is a looker with its emphasis on high quality 2D animation, colorful cast and environments, and the way it blends Pixel art, Flash style animation, and 3D fight environments in a way that's stylistically cohesive. The soundtrack also needs special attention, not only for general compositional strength, but because of how impressive the dynamic music system is. For example, when a character starts gaining momentum in a match, their instrumentation will start to seep into the stage's normal melody, meaning that each stage has a musical variation in the soundtrack for each character.
Being a 200 hour veteran of the Steam release of TFH, I'm happy to report that there seems to only be small compromises to the proceedings on Switch. The simple UI from the PC release seems to be the only option available, and load times can be a bit longer, but weather docked or in handheld mode, framerate was always at a solid 60 FPS save for points where data had to stream in such as the end arcade predator rush and during a character win quote once. Resolution also looks nice and sharp. That being said, there are some assets that are of noticeably lower quality than their counterparts in the PC release.. However, this is minor if it means the game gets to run at 60fps when the action heats up.
I also feel it is worth mentioning that I had quite a bit of issues with game crashes, particularly while specific animations played or while the game was trying to load up fights, whether they be the predator fights from story mode, or the aforementioned online match. I did reach out to a representative at Mane6 during the review period and they assured me that a day 1 patch should remedy some of these issues. They aren't frequent enough to render the game unplayable, and the generous auto-save during story mode made sure I never lost a lot of progress, but game stability is a huge issue I had during the review period. A feature that unfortunately had to be cut from the PC release is the custom combo trial; while the function to save and load custom combos is there, the file sharing infrastructure that allowed for combo files to be shared between PC players is not there. Also, while the game itself is feature-rich, the base roster of 7 characters is rather paltry, and the promised wave of DLC will only bring this cast up to 11. While some may view this as good, given that there are less matchups to memorize, having that variety of cast is important to a healthy game. It should also be noted that because of the small, dedicated community playing the game, the developers chose to not have ranked play in TFH, and thus no skill-based matchmaking.
Them's Fightin' Herds is one of those indie games with a lot of heart and moxie, that wears its heart on its sleeve and shoots for the stars with what it tries for, even if not everything comes out polished on first blush. It is a fighting game born out of passion and intersects at a weird venn diagram of people that a project like this will even appeal to. In 2020 at its 1.0 launch on PC, Them's Fightin' Herds was something that had such wildly new ideas for how to take fighting games as a genre forward, and came at the perfect time for online play to take center stage. In 2022, it is ever so slightly harder to recommend when games in the triple A space seem to have taken notice of features that TFH beat them to market with. If you want a game with heart, soul, and a unicorn that shoots a demon out of her magic book, you've come to the right place. if you want a fighting game that's got the correct number of buttons for single Joy-Con play with a friend on the go, TFH ain't a bad choice for that either!