Look at that word play! I’m proud of that one. Self-praise over. Foul Play is a game that recently came out on PS Plus for free for subscribers. I’ve never heard of this game but I thought a free game to play is always welcome. Especially since it seemed to be a co-op beat’em up, which I thought would great to play with my partner. So, we loaded the game and went to the character select screen and clicked start game. Now usually a game would then load and a fun time would be had by all. Bizarrely we were met with an error message. The message states ‘Your connection to the other player was dropped’. OK, no issue, maybe a controller was low on battery or resetting the game would fix it. No and nope. So I went sleuthing online! Much to my joy I found threads with my very issue. To my dismay though, they are unresolved. The kicker though is that these threads are from 2016!
Yup, 2 years old and still a problem. Apparently it’s an issue with the EU/UK versions of the game but couch co-op play or online play are unplayable in a co-op brawler. Now, single player still works apparently but a brawler is not very fun in single player in my opinion. Most games are more fun with friends but side scrolling beat’em ups especially. Think of the glory days of Streets of Rage and Golden Axe. Or the classic arcade cabinets of The Simpsons and X-Men. Always better with friends. So I found it shocking that this issue has A. NOT been resolved in 2 years and B. Has been released on PS Plus as a broken game. I wanted to see what has been done to fix this and a post on the Playstation Trophies board. All credit goes to this user for doing the leg work so here is his post:
The co-op is still broken. I have been in contact with Playstation and they will not do anything unless I get Devolver to admit the game doesn’t work. After an initial “We’ve passed the note onto the developer Mediatonic to see if they have any updates coming on their end. Thanks for reaching out!” from Devolver over 3 months ago they now ignore my emails when asking for an update.
So, not only has the developer not fixed the game, but according to this user, the publisher has flat out stopped replying to the inquest. And I usually like Devolver as a publisher and the kind of games they go for but this is a shoddy move and someone should be accountable. If you release a game you are responsible for keeping that game working at least for several years after release. Fair play to No Man’s Sky’s developer Hello Games, on release they were bombarded with hate but they’ve made big changes to the game recently apparently. Whereas Batman Arkham Origins developer WB Games Montreal, refused to fix game breaking bugs and gameplay issues and instead focused on future DLC. Perhaps Mediatonic has no plans to return to Foul Play but if that’s the case, don’t allow your game to be released on PS Plus. Not only do you cheat people out of a game but you make yourselves look bad to people who had no knowledge of this issue. Myself included, Foul Play wasn’t even on my radar but now I know the name of a developer to be wary of in the future. Surely they must have been alerted that their game would be on PS Plus and an error message stopping co-op play surely can’t be that hard to fix? But maybe they are too busy or just don’t care. A shame but that game won’t be played until fixed in many people’s homes.
Game Time 