One Must Fall 2197: Singularity

The game

One Must Fall 2197: Singularity is a free remake of One Must Fall 2097, the 1994 one-on-one fighting game with giant piloted robots called HARs. It's the classic rebuilt with HD art, remastered menus and a modern fight layer on top of the original combat. Every robot has punches, kicks, throws and special moves entered as joystick motions. After the last round you can finish a beaten robot with a SCRAP or a DESTRUCTION move.

Built on OpenOMF. OpenOMF's open-source engine powers every fight: its moves, damage, timing and computer opponent are the foundation of this remake. The menus are ported from their work, and our rollback netcode follows their design. LineCrush built the Unreal Engine remaster on that foundation. Thank you, OpenOMF.

macOS: The Mac version is currently single-player only. Steam online Versus, Steam overlay and Steam achievements are not available on Mac.

Modes

• Tournament: the career mode. Create a pilot, enter one of eight events and fight your way up a ranked ladder for prize money. Between fights, spend it in the mech lab on repairs, robot upgrades (arm and leg power and speed, armor, stun resistance), pilot training, paint and new robots. Losing costs you repairs.

• Arcade: pick a pilot and a robot and fight every pilot on the ladder, then Major Kreissack. Clear it to unlock your pilot's ending.

• Single Match and Versus: one fight against the computer, or two players on one PC with a keyboard or gamepads.

• Online Versus: invite a Steam friend and fight peer to peer with rollback netcode.

• Training: a dummy that never goes down. Set what it does (stand, crouch, jump, block or fight back), reset positions, and show your input history and every robot's hitboxes.

Robots and arenas

All eleven original robots are here, Jaguar, Shadow, Thorn, Pyros, Electra, Katana, Shredder, Flail, Gargoyle, Chronos and Nova, plus ten new ones with their own special moves, supers and stories: Mantis, Bulwark, Vise, Hornet, Viper, Lodestone, Glacier, Auger, Banshee and Riptide. Fight in fifteen arenas, the original five and ten new ones, each with its own hazards, from molten spears and drone raids to lightning that strikes the floor. Some robots and paint finishes are earned by playing.

Classic or modern rules

The fights run on OpenOMF's faithful recreation of the original game. On top of that, the remake adds a three-stock super meter, EX special moves, supers and counter hits. Each one can be turned off in GAMEPLAY if you want the 1994 rules. The computer opponent has seven difficulty levels, from PUNCHING BAG to ULTIMATE, and game speed has eleven settings.

Controls and extras

Play with a keyboard or a gamepad, with Xbox, PlayStation and Steam Deck button prompts and fully remappable controls. MODERN controls add a one-button SPECIAL. MOVE LIST plays every special move on a live robot as you browse it. EXTRAS has the original screens beside their HD remasters, a music player for the remastered soundtrack, every arcade ending, and your fight stats.

Thank you, OpenOMF

This remake stands on the shoulders of OpenOMF. Since 2013 the OpenOMF team has reverse-engineered One Must Fall 2097 and rebuilt it as free, open-source software, and every fight here runs on their code: the moves, the damage, the timing and the computer opponent come straight from OpenOMF, the menus around the fight are ported from their work, and our rollback netcode follows their design. Thank you to everyone who has contributed, especially katajakasa, Vagabond, Nopey, mrannanj, animehunter and LegendaryBlueShirt, and to the whole One Must Fall community, who kept this game alive for more than thirty years.

Thank you, Rob Elam

One Must Fall 2097 is Rob Elam's game: he designed, programmed, drew and animated it, and every robot, arena and move here begins with his work. Thank you to the team who made it with him at Diversions Entertainment, Ryan Elam, Josh Jensen and Kenny Chou of Renaissance, whose remastered music you hear in every fight; to the original playtesters, John Gary, Mackey McCandlish, Hans Watson, Stephen Caudill, Steven Slawin and the Epic beta-testing team, and to the Elam family; to Diversions Entertainment for releasing the game as freeware in 1999, which makes this free remake possible; to Epic MegaGames for publishing it in 1994; and to Epic Games for Unreal Engine.

Unreal port by LineCrush Games.