Duels of Fortune is a free-to-play 2.5D fighting game created by Cosmic Hat Games, with its first early access version releasing in August 2022. The game has simple inputs and a wide variety of single player content.
This game contains examples of:
- Arrange Mode: Mission Mode has a wide variety of matches with unique challenges or conditions, although some of the missions just have you facing an SNK Boss.
- Battle in the Rain: “Acid Rain” is a mission where the fighters will take continuous damage from the titular rain unless they’re under the two umbrellas that move across the map.
- Big Head Mode: An option in the Extras menu.
- Charge-Input Special: Unusually for a game with very few motion inputs, Doodle has these for his Molten Doughnut and Fractured Haymaker specials.
- Christmas Episode: The Night Before Crimbo has Callowman collecting presents while fending off an angry gingerbread man. Beating it unlocks said gingerbread man as an alternate costume for Doodle, as well as the Crimbo variant of the Meteor Shower Town stage.
- Version 0.1.1 released on December 22, 2022 and added several additional Christmas-themed missions and costumes.
- David Versus Goliath: The “Giant Battle” mission has Clyde fighting a giant Red.
- Defeat Means Playable: Applies to the boss characters, as well as some of the alternate costumes for characters.
- Dem Bones: Skeletons are quite prominent characters in the game, with two of them, Sir Rattlebone and Captain Shiverskull, being playable characters, and a third, Mr. Withers, serving as an Assist Character for Sylvan.
- Everyone Is a Super: 35 years before the game’s events, a cure to a deadly virus that spread across the globe ended up awakening the souls of humanity, resulting in almost everyone in the present day having a superpower called an “aspect”.
- Evil Knockoff: This is the modus operandi of the id, who can transform into whoever they eat the emotional energy of. The most prominent id is Black Heart, who fed off Clyde’s hatred for his father.
- Gravity Screw: The story to the first mission, Zero Gravity, is that the Azu-Corps HQ’s artificial gravity systems were sabotaged, so Clyde must defeat the culprit behind it. In gameplay, the player has to fight an opponent while experiencing a decreased gravitational pull.
- Guest Fighter: Version 0.3.0 mainly serves as a collaboration with Schwarzerblitz, adding that game's protagonist Mystery Johnson as a full-fledged playable character and its antagonist Donner Misterkay as a secret boss. The Evilobster is also playable, albeit as a Moveset Clone of Baron, and Clyde gets an outfit based on Renzo Rubecca (a Call-Back to Renzo getting a free DLC outfit based on Clyde). Even before this update, the Haemophages appeared as Mooks in one of the minigames.
- Version 0.4.0 added Ember from Hyper Team Recon to the game.
- One of Shoto Kanji’s alternate costumes is Shoto Goto from HYPERFIGHT.
- To some extent of the word “guest”, several characters in the game were lifted from some of co-developer Ben “Toast Hatter” Soars’ previous games.
- Halloween Episode: Version 0.0.3 released in late October 2022, featuring several spooky new missions, A Frankenstein-themed costume for Callowman, and a Halloween-themed variant of the Dasteel Workshop stage called the Dasteel Laboratory.
- Joke Character: “Reverse Horde” has the player controlling generic skeleton Mooks to try and defeat Sir Rattlebone. They are all slow, can’t crouch, die really quickly, and have 4-5 attacks each. Luckily, you have five lives to beat Rattlebone.
- Version 0.3.0 added a sequel mission to Reverse Horde focusing on the Haemophages, who are slightly faster but have even less attacks
- As for actual characters, Guy was added in Version 0.1.0 to serve as one of these, although he’s still leagues above the aforementioned mooks.
- Moveset Clone: Several characters, such as Shin and Ricky Travis, exist exclusively as alternate skins for existing characters.
- Non-Standard Game Over: Doing nothing for around 25 seconds as Doodle will cause him to get bored and leave. Notably, this causes the big “KO” or “Time Up” at the end of a match to be replaced with the message “Where did he go...?”, with the victory icon being a hand Flipping the Bird.
- Not Just a Tournament: Sylvan started the titular tournament as part of an elaborate money-making scheme, and it’s implied that his intentions run deeper than that.
- Platform Fighter: The name of one of the missions, where there are platforms scattered across the stage.
- Secret Character: ERROR can be played as if you hold Start while over the Random option. Additionally, you can unlock the various boss characters by beating them.
- SNK Boss: There are a lot of these, with not only designated boss characters, but a “Boss Mode” for each character that further buffs them. In addition, setting the AI difficulty level to Insane causes their animations to play twice as fast, making many moves impossible to see coming.
- Soul Power: Aspects are basically this. Red’s Soul Force deserves special mention for letting him manifest his soul as physical shapes.
- Strong Flesh, Weak Steel: The theme of the "Meat Vs. Metal" mission, where Baron must defeat a powerful robot using his Muscle Form.
- Super Mode: Several characters have one of these, such as Doodle’s Ultimate Mode, Rattlebone’s Chivalrous Spirit, and Sylvan’s Full House Mode.
- You Mean "Xmas": People in the Duels of Fortune world celebrate Crimbo, which is basically just Christmas with a different name.
