At the intersection of sports gaming and combat gaming lies Windjammers 2, a retro-style arcade masterpiece that’s easy to pick up, but hard to master. Too bad the online community isn’t bigger, but maybe that’s a blessing in disguise.
In overhead view, in arenas resembling tennis courts (one of which represents our Olympic Stadium!), two players face off in a wild Frisbee duel. The goal ? Send the disc into the area behind our opponent. In addition to the directional pad, four buttons are used to make the disc fly (to throw or lob), to throw in a direction or to jump. The proposal is excessively simple, very square, but oh so captivating.
Ten characters are at our disposal, each with their strengths and weaknesses. The challenge is to harness their full potential. Because if Windjammers 2 looks like a sports game, it has the essence of a fighting game. A game easy to approach, but whose learning ceiling is almost infinite.
This is the first title entirely designed by the French Dotemu, a studio specializing in the emulation of old platforms. The team had also worked with SNK to adapt the original version of Windjammers to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. It was therefore fully equipped to faithfully modernize this Neo-Geo arcade classic.
Instead of a pixelated look that sometimes scales poorly to different resolutions and screen ratios, Dotemu decided to switch to completely hand-drawn and animated visuals. A comic book look that responds perfectly to the command in a game of reflexes: the action is magnificent, but still easily readable. And what about the very rock soundtrack, which rocks?
Yes Windjammers 2 shines the most on TV, when playing side by side with someone, the online game mode is very well done. Thanks to the system of rollback frames, in the manner of the excellent Guilty Gear: Strive, you can easily face people on the other side of the world without having to deal with the delays inherent in an Internet connection. For example, we played without any problem against a Japanese opponent.
At the time these lines were written, about thirty players were connected to Dotemu’s PC servers, servers shared by players on Xbox. This is little.
On the other hand, as we often face the same people during an evening, we saw the advantage of finding in this community the feeling that we have when we enter an arcade. There are those players at our level, there are those who we mop the floor with and there are those controller pros who intimidate us a little. Silent rivalries are settling online to which we quickly become addicted, as long as we have a competitive streak.
When is a tournament in Montreal? We will be there.