Them's Fightin' Herds has left Early Access

Forged in the fires of a cease-and-desist letter from Hasbro, Them's Fightin' Herds was once a My Little Pony fangame called Fighting is Magic. Developers Mane6 revived it with help from publisher Humble Bundle and the cartoon's creator Lauren Faust, who designed a new cast of four-legged fighters for it including a reindeer, an alpaca, and a dark-magic unicorn who wields the power of the Unicornomicon. Which is nice.

After two years in Early Access, Them's Fightin' Herds entered full release with a fancy 1.0 launch trailer as seen above. More than just a side-on fighter, it contains a story mode (releasing episodically), an online lobby in the style of a JRPG overworld, a multiplayer dungeon crawl mode called the "salt mines", and some pretty complete-looking tutorial and training modes.

That's enough bells-and-whistles to start a very specific band, while the fighting game at its core promises a deep system involving magic and super attacks, "juggle decay" to de-incentivize infinite combos, and GGPO netcode to reduce input delay.

Them's Fightin' Herds is available on the Humble Store and Steam.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.