Sadak Fury is a bike race and a bike fight game, and fights are where most of our playtest notes come from. The latest round of changes reworked fights in a few important ways, so here is the full picture.
The moves
You steer with one thumb and fight with the other. By default the throttle is automatic, so your fighting thumb is free to attack, kick, brake and burn nitro. Attacks aim at the nearest rider, on either side of you.
- Punch. Quick, and it hits the rider. Punch a rider in the middle of his swing and you snatch his weapon from his hand.
- Backhand. For the rider just behind you, trying to sneak past.
- Kick. Slower, and only when you're level with him. A kick mostly hits his bike and shoves it a couple of metres sideways, into traffic, a wall, water or off the road.
- Weapon swing. With a weapon in hand, the attack swings it, until it breaks.
The kick has its own story. In an early version, kicks and punches did the same thing, and a playtester said it plainly: "hand and leg have the same effect, everyone will use only the hand." So the kick became the bike-shover. Punches knock riders down. Kicks send bikes into buses.
How many hits
Here's how it works now:
- Two weapon hits knock any rider off his bike, cops included.
- Three punches or kicks do the same.
- Kabir, the courier with extra stamina, takes one more.
Damage only starts to heal after 15 seconds without a hit, so a rider who just took two punches is in real danger.
Knockouts count even when traffic does the work. If you hit a rider and he crashes into a bus, a wall, a train or water within three seconds, that's your knockout. Every knockout you score also tops up your nitro tank by a quarter, so one good fight sets up the next overtake.
Crashing and getting back up
When you go down, it's a cartoon crash. The bike tips over and slides, you land a few metres away, get up, run back and climb on. The whole thing costs four or five seconds, which is a lot in a race and not the end of it.
Ride over a fallen bike and you get a small hop, a jolt of the camera and some lost speed. It never crashes you.
The weapons
Weapons break after a number of hits, and they're only visible during a swing, so you're never quite sure what a rival is holding. These are the ones in the game now:
- Bamboo lathi: quick, but breaks fast.
- Umbrella: Rhea's. Now and then it pops open in a rider's face and blinds him for a moment.
- Cycle chain: Raghav's, with the longest reach.
- Cricket bat: Tony's. It dents bikes and shoves them.
- Hockey stick: Gurjot's. Sometimes it hooks the handlebar, and the bike wobbles.
- Iron rod: Kabir's. It lasts the longest and wrecks bikes.
- Police lathi: every cop carries one, and so does Vikram.
You unlock weapons as you climb the leagues. You can also keep a weapon you snatched by carrying it over a career finish line. Your collection lives in the Arsenal, a third garage page where each weapon spins on its own card, and you can pick the one you start every race with, except in Wi-Fi races and on police duty.
The truce
One more rule: nobody fights at a closed level crossing. When the booms are down and the train is coming, everyone waits, and nobody gets arrested either. We added it after playtests where riders got knocked off while queueing and slid under the booms. It also turned out to be a great moment of calm before everyone launches again.
Fixed: Rhea's grip
Every rider shares one set of riding animations. On some bikes that left Rhea riding with her arm stuck out sideways, like she was hailing an auto. The fix was a grip system that places every rider's hands on the actual handlebar grips of every bike, whatever its shape. It's the kind of bug you only spot by watching a playtest recording frame by frame, and it's the kind of fix that makes everything look a bit more solid.
Fair and readable
Our fifth rule says every hit has a wind-up you can see. Rivals never swing in the first few seconds after GO, and bike damage shows on the bike itself, as dust and scratches and then smoke, so you can see a rival is nearly done before you go for the last hit.
Want to see it in motion? The gameplay reel on the home page is all real fights, recorded on our test builds.
