Roof Rage

This is one of the best and worst games I've ever played. It's so incredibly good when it works but a lot of times it just makes me want to punch a hole in the screen.
Pros
- The art style, even if simple, is quite good and I love all the little sprites for the fighters.
- Each character has A LOT of moves and most of them are usually pretty fun and cool looking.
- The floatiness of hit characters is both a pro and a con, it lets you make such satisfying and elaborate combos mid air *buuut*...
Cons
- The floatiness can be so frustrating at times where it seems like you're just getting combo-ed to hell and back without much to do to get out of it and what makes it especially worse is...
- The AIs are genuinely the most inconsistent I've ever seen in my whole life, sometimes they just die because they forgot how to double jump or because they threw random moves that made them fall in a pit and other times they just combo you for 50+% of your HP and...
- The difficulty settings don't matter at all, I've played arcade mode at every difficulty level and there's no discernible difference after the first stage, if you set it on easy you will demolish the first one or two fights and then the last three or so stages are just harder than their counterpart at hard difficulty. It's so nonsensical I can't even begin to understand how someone could have willingly coded this. Also, it's so utterly obvious that even though the game is named Roof Rage the AIs weren't programmed at all to deal with platforms, since they will constantly stall and jump randomly if they find themselves on a platform different from the one the player is on (it gets just slightly better if that platform is above them).
- The fights in arcade mode also make zero sense, 90% of the time you will go through the same stages fighting the same characters, fighting most of the cast excluding the character you picked, except that the game sometimes chooses to make you fight them anyway, because some stages seem to be hardcoded to have a certain character in them(Pakaw is the most obvious example)
- The achievements on Steam lie about what you have to do to unlock them. There's basically just two types of achievements: the single one for beating arcade mode without dying(not valid if you do it at easy difficulty) which also unlocks the only unlockable character(which is the final boss) and the achievements for beating arcade mode, one for each character. Now, since the boss achievement explicitly tells you that you need to avoid dying to get it, you would expect the other achievements(which just tell you to beat arcade mode with a certain character) to behave differently, but NOOOO the developers probably were too lazy and just recycled the code, so you have to beat arcade mode without dying for those ones too.
- The character balance is also all over the place, I've played with all of them and got the achievements for most of them and I can confidently say that some are just 10 times better than the rest. The most egregious examples are Pakaw, Needle, Thyra, Nisassa, Hoon and Pao. All of these characters have either near-undodgeable moves, moves that can do 50% of your HP in A SINGLE HIT or moves that allow them to be untouchable as long as they like.
- The developers got the move lists for some characters wrong, for example Pakaw has 2 whole special moves that aren't listed(the diagonal special air kick and the crouch special fireball) and Long has a move in his move list which he simply can't perform.
- Duo fights in arcade mode are also completely unbalanced and combined with what I've said about the AIs before makes them simply unbeatable at times, for example a duo fight against Nisassa simply can't be won(doesn't matter the difficulty you chose, remember) unless the AIs kill themselves on accident. Even if you can win there's always an enormous chance of getting hit once and then combo-ed to death since the game wasn't really built for fights against more than one opponent(for example you don't really have i-frames after getting hit by anything, so they can just rack up damage on you constantly once they start juggling you).
Even though I listed a lot of cons I think the game is still very much worth it if you're buying it at a heavy discount as I did(2€ is nothing for a game that *can* be so fun), especially if you plan to play it mainly with friends and avoid the arcade mode(don't consider playing matches with random online an option, you won't find a single match).
Edit: after another day of playing I finally got all achievements and I must say that damn, do Nawi and Lionel s*ck compared to the rest of the cast. Also, I forgot to talk about the bugs in this game, like basically every grab having a way to get stuck in place or freeze the opponent if something goes wrong, the diagonal rooftops are completely nonsensical and won't work with any part of any character's toolkit and the game loves to crash sometimes(happened like 6 times in 20 hours of play).

Fantastic retro style platform fighter, but that price is crazy. If they dropped it to $3 permanently they'd certainly have a playerbase. Hope they do, or even make it free.

Even if the game is abandoned, unpolished, buggy (sometimes your character just freezes and you have to restart, happens a lot with the sumo guy) and unbalanced, still feels great. Would recommend to buy on sale. Mixes Smash and Street Fighter.

Roof Rage is a great fighting game with its tight controls and beautiful pixel art, even if its character roster and map selection is insubstantial.

Distinct fighting styles.
Make sure to check out each character's combos individually.
A large portion of the combat takes place in the air.
the final boss truly interesting and engaging.

This is a dangerously slept on platform fighter! I remember seeing this and wondering why no one has tried this before, and while my thinking wasn't fully comprehensive, I believe this is the best version of the concept we've gotten so far. The characters have bigger and more individualized movesets than in Smash, but not to the point of being bloated or cumbersome; anyone can find a character they like and have their moves down in the matter of an hour. The movement also adopts this "advanced but streamlined" philosophy, with every character being able to recover from almost everywhere, which leads to some grippingly goofy-ass off-stage interactions. Every character's design fits their playstyle, and the animations are shockingly expressive and readable for just out bite-sized those deadly gromets are. The stages all feel appropriately like they could occur during the last scenes of any martial arts movie, and they compliment your character's versatile movement by giving you plenty of walls and platforms of varying heights. If you're a person that has friends that are willing to learn a game with you, absolutely give this game a shot; it can be as seriously intense or as nonsensically SmashBrosian as you desire.

GEMMMMM, THIS GAME NEEDS REWORK AND NICE UPDATEEEEEEEEE, COME ON DEV !!!