#coffencing

Coffencing — an ancient and mysterious combat style that requires the Coffencers to strike their opponents in an attempt to have them spill their cup of coffee while carefully balancing a mug of their own. Coffence’s silly concept had the potential to make a charming and fun fighting game, but the final product is a disappointing mess.

Coffee Brawling

In Coffence, a player’s health bar is represented by how many drops are left in their coffee cup. By attacking another player’s cup, coffee will fly out of it, but the attacked player can jump, slide, and extend their mug in an attempt to catch these drops. Unfortunately, players have a limited number of commands in Coffence, and what's worse is that all six fighters have the same moveset. The only difference between the playable characters are slight tweaks in their stats. Additionally, you can't map the inputs to different buttons, which is frustrating because it's poorly configured as it is.

A Campaign Faster Than Light

There are five playable campaigns in Coffence. Each one takes about five minutes, and upon completion you get a fighter, adding up to a total of six playable characters. But because the game’s single-player component can be completed in less than thirty minutes, it’s irresponsible to recommend this game to anyone who plans to play it alone.

This is especially true when considering how unpopulated the online community is. I was searching for an online match for thirty minutes straight and never found a single opponent.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone would bother playing Coffence for more than an hour unless they have a friend who also owns the game.

Poor Optimization

I was baffled when I didn’t see the option to turn on windowed mode in Coffence’s video settings. My confusion grew exponentially when I forced it into windowed mode, and the game would no longer accept my input commands. I proceeded to close Coffence, and for some reason, the strumming of the in-game guitars continued to surge through my headphones. By investigating my Steam library, I noticed that the client still believed the game was running. I brought up task manager and carefully scanned all of my open applications to see if Coffence was hiding somewhere. Yet, the game was nowhere to be found, adding even more confusion to my confusion. My last resort was to force quit Steam altogether, and thankfully, this worked. In conclusion, Coffence is simply poorly optimized.

Additionally, Coffence’s graphics engine is a mess. When the game’s camera jumps to a specific area, a large number of assets fail to fully load in. This is evident in the very first screen of the game when the player is shown a coffee shop with tables, chairs, and colorful umbrellas with blurred textures that eventually become more defined overtime. This issue also appears when the game goes into a victory screen. The camera quickly shifts to the characters posing, but they’re not in their positions by the time it gets there, so fighters are often glitching around on the screen for a split-second.

The Few Redeeming Qualities

Coffence does a couple of things right: Its soundtrack and the graphical design of its arenas.

The menu music is especially lovely, as it immediately wrapped me up in the strumming of acoustic guitars. And when the soundtrack is coupled with gorgeous sakura trees in a lush green landscape, it’s quite a pleasant experience.

However, the same can't be said for the character design, as each one suffers from visibly low quality textures on their face.

Verdict

Even with the few aspects I did like, Coffence is a mess. Paying $14.99 for six playable characters with the same moveset, a single-player experience that can be completed in thirty minutes, and a desolate online community is not worth it.

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Score

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Good Bad Certain Stages Look Nice Poor Optimization The Soundtrack Character's Aren't Unique Overpriced Very Short Campaign Nonexistent Online Community Low Quality Character Textures

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- 2/10 -

Developer Sweet Bandit Studios

Publisher Sweet Bandit Studios

Price $14.99