Way of the Passive Fist is a mostly standard beat 'em up, with the twist that you can't attack. Combat relies on parrying or dodging attacks to wear down enemies, then just poking them to death, reflecting attacks back at foes and building up meter for super attacks.

To get the lesser stuff out of the way, this is a fairly pretty game. Sprites are big, detailed and easy to read (this is obviously important), backgrounds look great and there's a good variety of locations you'll be parrying your way through. The story's set dressing, just two or three sentences per level, and you're not meant to think about it too much, but for what it's worth I thought it was neat, the post-apocalyptic desert sci-fi setting is quite cool. Music's good too.

I thought Passive Fist was probably going to end up feeling really clunky or repetitive, but the devs clearly put a lot of effort into this idea and all of the obvious issues that a beat 'em up where you can't attack would have. For starters, difficult is very customizable, you can tweak many different parameters like enemy number, damage, how strict parry timing is, and so on. Once you do get into combat, enemies take turns attacking you, which is a godsend and essentially turns this into a rhythm game, with enemies having tough but repeating patterns. You could accuse it of being repetitive, but the combat was really fun all the way through, despite its length of around 4 h, pretty long for a beat 'em up.

You build up meter to use super moves, but the game is really strict with it. One single whiffed action or hit taken cancels both your combo and your super bar immediately. This is particularly relevant when it comes to defeating robots or bosses that can only be harmed with the supers, and it can end up being pretty aggravating to get hit out of it repeatedly. I think it works though, if a game's gonna be about parrying there's gonna have to be various ways to test it, and that's a fair one. On that topic, you earn skills and HP by leveling up, with XP being equal to your ranking (repeating an encounter only grants you EXP equal to how much higher your score is than your previous record), encouraging you to go for gold medals on encounters. Good stuff.

It's not perfect, eh. Here's a couple of issues:
-Stage... 4 I think? The cave one, it has a constant hazard of big rocks falling at all times, it's RNG and it will hit you out of combos all the time. By far the worst gimmick in the game.
-Most bosses are an exception to the rule of only one character being able to attack at once. They will happily run around and interrupt your attempts to parry their summons, which is frustrating because a single hit means you start over from 0 super meter, and you can only hurt them with super moves.
-There's a robot that shoots roundabout projectiles and the only way to destroy it is to build up meter, but all it does is punch once or the above projectile, meaning that building meter is tedious and annoying against them. There's one specific encounter in the campaign where it's three of them and a dark enemy (below) and it's awful.
-Shadow Enemies, which I think were added in a patch, are invincible until alone and have an unblockable, undodgeable, undashable attack, which means that the counterplay is essentially just "run around hoping they don't hit you and that you can take out every other enemy fast enough". Very annoying.

The game received a free DLC update a few months after release, which added a new campaign and a roguelike mode. I have yet to try those (EDIT: The first boss was poorly rebalanced and I didn't want to get frustrated so I just quit), but given how cheap the game goes for I think even just the main campaign is more than worth it.

Beat em up style game where you are unable to do normal attacks and instead have to parry and dodge enemy blows to either tire them out until you can push them over, can grab and throw back enemy throwing weapons, or until you build up a combo allowing you to perform a powerful attack. Allows you to change five different options for custom difficulty. Decent enemy variety with some needing to be defeated in certain ways or more easily beaten in certain ways but the palette swaps to show different attack patterns can make it more difficult to remember what they do. Enemy grabs are a little off hit detection wise. Crowd of enemies on screen can make it hard to see who is doing what, even on the normal enemy number setting, enemies attack you one at a time but might all move together with larger ones mostly concealing the smaller. Most of the levels are fairly dull with you just walking through similar areas until you move into a wave based enemy section. Base gameplay is good but can become simple and repetitive fast, like many beat em ups, but this one lacking the characters, co-op, variety of moves, or more interesting levels of the better beat em ups.