One Finger Death Punch

“*Fight using only the left and right mouse buttons. When you fight, your cursor can be anywhere on the screen.*”
―Sensei
***One Finger Death Punch*** is a beat 'em up video game developed and produced by Canadian indie studio Silver Dollar Games. This game originally released for Xbox 360 on June 24, 2013 and Microsoft Windows on March 3, 2014, then it was ported for Android on March 25, 2015 and iOS on June 12, 2015.

## Gameplay

*One Finger Death Punch* is a fast-paced indie beat 'em up video game where players must survive round of enemies in many different stages using the left and right mouse button (or keyboard keys as alternatives). Players press either left or right mouse button, corresponding to which side of their character the enemies are currently on. By the end of the round, you will be rewarded with a medal on how many misses you've earned.

There are three difficulty modes in both story mode and survival mode: Student, Master, and Grandmaster. These difficulties have an effect on how many enemies there are in each stage, the speed of each round, and number of hit-points that the player has.

There are a few versions of the survival mode within *One Finger Death Punch*. Plain survival mode will place the player in an endless Mob Round with some of the other unique gameplay sections randomly occurring, such as a Light Sword section. Blind survival mode makes it so the player cannot see the bar underneath enemies indicating how many times they must be hit and in what order, nor the indication of when they are in range. The player can only rely their reaction time and the color of the enemies, with prompts appearing only for enemies that require a special combination of button presses. There is also a third, secret survival mode, which is the plain survival mode crossed over with Silver Dollar Games' *No Luca No*, where the player must push away a cat named Luca from the center of the screen using the mouse cursor as Luca appears from the left and right side of the screen, blocking the view. When the green bar is full, players will enter the Light Sword or Nunchaku bonus round where they can kill enemies and restore health. Get hit four times and the bonus round will be over and it's back to Mob Round.

## Reception

*One Finger Death Punch* received positive reviews from critics, praising its simple controls, large amount of content and its visual style. However, critics picked up on the game's repetitive nature. Erwan Lafleuriel from Gameblog commented on *One Finger Death Punch*'s simple controls by saying that the game was "Easy to learn, but challenging enough to pass many levels with honours". Hooked Gamers' Matt Porter said that people "could even play One Finger Death Punch with one finger", he concluded the review commenting about the simplistic game mechanics with "The depth behind the simplistic control scheme is impressive up to a point, until it all starts to get a bit samey".

## Sequels

Following the success of *One Finger Death Punch*, Silver Dollar Games announced on Facebook on March 3, 2018, quote, "One Finger Death Punch 2 coming when it's ready." The sequel *One Finger Death Punch 2* was released on April 15, 2019 for PC and September 30, 2020 for PlayStation 4.

## References

1. ↑ *PC version:* Introduction when the game is loading