Epic Boss Fighter is a top-down Run-and-Gun Boss Game, made by EntertainmentForge in Adobe Flash and released
on March 5th, 2014. As its title suggests, the game consists of nothing but your character battling huge bosses on foot in order to protect the Earth.
A second game followed on January 3rd, 2015 with 3 modes and 20 bosses.
These games provide examples of:
- Anti-Frustration Features: Insane mode in the sequel gives you a boss selector. Seeing as this mode is Harder Than Hard, having to beat three bosses in a row without dying to unlock the next boss you haven't yet beaten would simply be too frustrating for many players.
- Attack Drone:
- You can buy up to three. The sequel gives you a MUCH larger variety throughout the game.
- The new type is the cutter line, with drones that circle quickly around you, deal high collision damage to enemies, recover quickly, often have a higher travel radius, and can ignore bullets. This is in addition to the standard gunner drones.
- Asteroids Monster: The 14th boss in the sequel is a large bacteria that splits into smaller copies of itself as it takes damage.
- Attack Its Weak Point: The later bosses have glowing red spots, although they still take damage elsewhere. The final boss has its eye instead, which you have to hit to hurt it.
- Blob Monster: The last boss is one of these, although he also has claws and a giant eye.
- Bullet Hell: The second game especially. It even suggests that you have a one-pixel hitbox!
- Cooldown: The special abilities naturally have these, but the second game devotes a stat to reducing their duration for more frequent ability use.
- Critical Hit: The sequel has the Lucky Strike chance which affects how often shots deal double damage.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: Each bullet does a small amount of damage relative to the bosses' health bars, but said damage can be dealt quite rapidly.
- Disc-One Final Boss: Played twice in the sequel. Boss 15, the giant eagle, is this for Normal mode and boss 18, yet another giant robot, is this for Hard mode.
- Endless Game: Endless Mode, unlocked by beating the game, not only lasts endlessly, but also ramps up the health and damage of the earlier bosses to match the final boss.
- Equipment-Based Progression: Zig-zagged; the sequel has you spend money on increasingly strong armors, accessories, Attack Drone, and even consumable items, to get stronger. All of these do this by granting stat upgrades.
- Flunky Boss: The first, third, and last bosses are helped by bugs. The sequel also has a few such bosses.
- Go for the Eye: The last boss's weak spots are in its eyes.
- Harder Than Hard: Endless Mode (Insane) keeps the Final Boss-level stats of Endless Mode, but also increases the enemy speed and damage up to eleven. The sequel's Insane mode is similar, but grants even stronger equipment and features two extra-difficult bosses at the end...
- Improbable Weapon User: Going into battle without a suit leaves thrown fruits as your method of attack.
- Instant-Win Condition: Even if you die right before landing the killing blow to a boss, it still counts as beating it even though you go right back to the lab afterwards.
- Limit Break:
- You can get a temporary shield ability early on, but buying the Robot Suit unlocks the ability to replace said shield with a Smart Bomb.
- The various suits in the sequel provide a wider variety of these abilities. Stronger suits tend to posses more potent versions of pre-existing abilities.
- Macross Missile Massacre: The second game's Rocket Storm ability launches a large swarm of rockets, befitting its name quite well. This ability is best used with a large lead and/or on a large target, as it takes about a second for each rocket to fly forward once launched.
- New Game Plus: Hard and Insane mode in the sequel serve as this, but each unlocks new bosses.
- Playing with Fire: The second game has an ability called Dancing Fire, which generates a controllable circle of flames that disappears quickly when it does damage. This ability temporarily immobilizes you, but also doubles as a shield ability to compensate for this.
- Post-End Game Content: Endless mode in the first game upgrades all bosses to a specific level, gives you a random boss each round, and upgrades their health each round as well. This has an Insane mode that naturally ups the difficulty.
- Regenerating Health: Certain pieces of equipment in the sequel restore a bit of health every 20 seconds.
- Rock Monster: The seventh boss is a monster made of rocks that throws rocks and makes monoliths come out of the ground.
- Smart Bomb: You can buy a Smart Bomb as an ability for the Robot Suit.
- Spam Attack: The player's gun in both games can shoot bullets increasingly fast as upgraded, and can even shoot multiple bullets at once! Secondary bullets each deal only 20% of the damage of the primary stream, at least in the second game.
- True Final Boss: The sequel's 20th boss, the Kraken, can only be fought in Insane mode.
- Unobtainium: Final Tech gear late into Insane mode.
- Wave-Motion Gun: The sequel has an ability called "Line Blast" on some suits. Overlapping with Playing with Fire, an endgame Insane-mode suit has the powerful Fire Blast ability, which does massive damage and destroys enemy bullets in its wake.
- Zerg Rush: The third boss consists of this, as enemies constantly come from holes in the ground. The actual boss simply appears as an eye in one of the holes.
