Flash fighting game Filosofighters recasts the world's greatest minds as, well, fighting game characters. You pick your philosopher and battle through the history of thought, culminating - appropriately enough - in a showdown with yourself. Beats fighting syphillis, I guess. Its educational overtones are unlikely to have much impact unless you can read Portuguese, but all you really need to know is that arrow keys control movement, X is kick, and C is punch.
It's the special moves that make it. Plato drops a cave on people; Rousseau expresses his idea of the 'natural man' by ripping his clothes off; Machiavelli summons help in the form of ninja Cesare Borgia. Watching Nietzsche use his 'god is dead' special to drop an enormous bearded corpse on St Augustine was the moment that Filosofighters started to make sense to me - if 'sense' is the right word. There are mis-steps, though: it's a shame that the devs couldn't come up with a more imaginative power for Simone de Beauvoir than 'throwing a bra'.
It struggles in other areas, too. The frame rate is choppy and the AI is very rudimentary. Even on the highest difficulty, it's pretty hard to lose when you figure the special moves out. Not one to approach as a serious fighting game, then, but in terms of telling some high-brow jokes in a spectacularly low-brow way, it's a fun surprise.
Joining in 2011, Chris made his start with PC Gamer turning beautiful trees into magazines, first as a writer and later as deputy editor. Once PCG's reluctant MMO champion , his discovery of Dota 2 in 2012 led him to much darker, stranger places. In 2015, Chris became the editor of PC Gamer Pro, overseeing our online coverage of competitive gaming and esports. He left in 2017, and can be now found making games and recording the Crate & Crowbar podcast.
