Other fighting games be warned, Divekick is here to make the whole lot of you irrelevant. This trailer, showing Iron Galaxy’s Dave Lang posing as a trampoline mo-cap drill instructor is all you’ll need to see before making your mind up about going pro-level with this game.
For the uninformed, Divekick is an upcoming fighting game where your only commands are jumping and then following that jump up with a freefalling kick toward your opponent. That’s it. If you hit them once the round is over. The rest of the game is dressing on top of that. You can pick characters with different speeds, maximum heights or falling arcs and then deck them out in different costumes, but largely you’ll only need to be aware of two mechanics.
This trailer, released earlier, tries to show off the tone that the game’s going for, which is one of loving understanding of the genre’s pitfalls turned into biting sarcasm and ridiculousness.
The thing about Divekick is, even though it’s being pitched as somewhat of a parody of the fighting game scene, it’s legitimately one of the most interesting that’s been pitched in years. Distilling an entire genre down to one move and then still adding ludicrous amounts of complexity on top is silly, but it’s a knowing silliness that has resulted in something magical.
We said a similar thing about the trailer for Saints Row 4 last week. Only a team of geniuses could pull off something this stupid. God bless you, Divekick.