Month: February 2018

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Them’s Fightin’ Herds is available now for PC on Steam and Humble Bundle

Finally, after a long and storied development period, Mane6’s Them’s Fightin’ Herds has finally been released.

And to think that the game almost never happened! Originally started as a popular fan game based on Hasbro’s My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the game was hit with a cease and desist order from said company. The project got a shot in the arm, however, thanks to Friendship is Magic producer Lauren Faust — who offered to help the team create an original cast and setting for the game. On top of this, Lab Zero provided a free license to use the engine for Skullgirls via a stretch goal on the latter’s DLC crowdfund campaign.

Now, almost half a decade since then, Them’s Fightin’ Herds is finally available for purchase.

Them’s Fightin’ Herds tells the story of a tournament (natch) between the “Key Seekers” of various tribes from the realm of Fœnum. These Key Seekers are looking for the a magical key that will once again lock away the Predators that are threatening the tribes of Fœnum. The winner of this competition will become the Key Keeper, who will face the champion of the Predators.

The game itself launches with six characters: Arizona the cow, Velvet the reindeer, Paprika the alpaca, Oleander the unicorn, Pom the sheep, and Tianhuo the longma (a winged, draconic horse from Chinese mythology). These characters are controlled via four-button control scheme with 3 normal attack buttons (light, medium, heavy) and a fourth “magic” button. The latter can act similarly to the “meter burn” button in NetherRealm Studios games, allowing for powered up versions of the characters’ special moves.

Online play for Them’s Fightin’ Herds is handled by the vaunted GGPO rollback netcode. The implementation of this in Skullgirls (whose engine this game uses) is still to this day one of the best implementations of online play in any fighter, so it stands to reason that this’ll be the case here as well. To this, the game adds a new visual lobby where you can hang around in locations in Fœnum, using customizable avatars.

For those interested, Them’s Fightin’ Herds can now be purchased via both Steam and Humble Bundle.

Source: Mane6 (Twitter)