I rushed hurriedly to the booth and hopped on a system with a two button arcade box, one of the most unnecessarily overengineered and beautiful pieces I had ever seen. Lovely art with two huge blue and yellow buttons in the middle proudly labeled Dive and Kick. Two matches later and I was hooked. I interviewed the creator, I bought a shirt, I kept up on the news, I raved about it whenever possible, and I waited with anxiousness. It came out yesterday and I was so excited, I wrote a haiku about it.
If all of the waxing poetic about the game wasn’t an indicator, I like it. Superficially, Divekick is a joke. Obviously. One of the characters is a doctor named Dr. Shoals who has rocket boots and its looking for a cure for a foot disease called Foot Dive. Of course it’s a joke.
But if you give it a chance (i.e. exactly one match), you quickly realize it’s so much more than that. It’s a fighting game that attempts, and succeeds in many ways, to equalize all competitors. Gone are people who juggle your character across the map for 30 seconds and leave you with 2 hits until death. No longer can you put your controller down while waiting for someone’s massive combo to end. And obliterated is the feeling that no matter what you do, there are some people that know way more about the game than you and will exploit programming flaws to eviscerate you. By limiting your input to jumping, kicking, and having a few variations on moves for other characters, it’s as close to one on one, equal combat as you can get. You always know exactly what you did wrong and the other player did right to get you.
