Them's Fightin' Herds

Nothing about the cover art prepares you for what’s underneath. A cow in a cowboy hat. A lamb flanked by dogs. Pastel palettes, big expressive eyes, animation that looks lifted from a Saturday morning block. Every visual signal says this is a party game. Every visual signal is wrong.

Them’s Fightin’ Herds is a serious competitive 2D fighter, and its history explains a lot about why. Mane6 started this as a My Little Pony fan project called Fighting is Magic, ate a Hasbro cease-and-desist, and then did something almost nobody in that position does: they kept going. Lauren Faust — the cartoon producer behind Friendship is Magic and a veteran of The Powerpuff Girls — designed an entirely original cast of ungulates so the team could own its own IP outright. Crowdfunding followed, then Early Access, then a full release in 2020 and a Nintendo Switch port after that.

That long gestation is the thing to hold in your head, because it accounts for both the highs and the disappointments. The combat engine has the polish of something obsessed over for the better part of a decade. The content around it has the thinness of a small studio that ran out of runway before it ran out of ambition.

Market-wise, it sits in a strange and mostly unoccupied lane. It is not chasing Street Fighter 6‘s budget or Guilty Gear Strive‘s spectacle. It is a small-roster indie fighter competing in a genre where roster size is the loudest number on the box. Its pitch is different: an approachable execution barrier, dependable online play, and a teaching suite that treats a newcomer like a person worth investing in rather than a lapsed sale. Steam users have rated it Very Positive, a fair reflection of a game that does a few things well and asks you to accept the rest.

• Four-Button Combat with a Magic Layer: Light, medium, heavy, and magic. That’s it. The magic button is per-character and does the heavy conceptual lifting — Arizona’s lasso, projectile zoning, install-style buffs — so characters diverge sharply in strategy without diverging in input complexity.
• GGPO Rollback Netcode with Crossplay: Not a bolted-on afterthought. Rollback was architectural from early on rather than added later, which is what makes distant matches viable.
• Juggle Decay: A systemic anti-infinite rule. Combo scaling and gravity ramp aggressively as a juggle extends, so touch-of-death loops simply cannot exist. Damage comes from reads, not from memorizing a 40-hit route.
• The Pixel Lobby: Online matchmaking wrapped in a 16-bit social hub where your customizable sprite wanders, unlocks accessories, plays arcade cabinets, and bumps into other players to issue challenges.
• The Tutorial and Trials Suite: Dozens of lessons covering not just this game’s systems but the genre’s — blockstun, frame advantage, okizeme, neutral. Per-character combo trials and a training room with full replay tooling round it out.
• Dynamic Battle Music: The track shifts based on the matchup, blending both characters’ themes. A small touch that works.

The Gameplay Loop

Fighting games have a dirty secret: most of them are terrible at teaching you to play them. The tutorial shows you a quarter-circle, the arcade ladder throws you at a boss, and then you’re online getting perfect-round’d by someone who’s been playing since 2016. Onboarding friction in this genre isn’t a UX inconvenience; it’s the primary reason the audience stays small.

Mane6’s answer is a thorough teaching architecture that goes further than most big-budget fighters manage. The tutorial doesn’t just explain inputs — it explains concepts, then quizzes you on them under pressure. It teaches you why you’re getting hit, which is the actual skill. Someone who finishes this tutorial understands blockstrings and pressure resets well enough to take that knowledge to any fighter. That’s a real contribution to the genre, not just to this product.

The four-button layout is the second half of that thesis. By stripping the command list down and pushing character identity into the magic mechanic rather than into input complexity, the game moves the difficulty from your hands to your head. You are not failing because you dropped a 236236C. You are failing because you pressed a button at the wrong range. That is a much more instructive kind of losing.

Which brings us to juggle decay, the design decision worth dwelling on. In a lot of fighters, the reward for winning neutral once is a lengthy, largely non-interactive combo you learned from a YouTube video. Here, extending a juggle costs you rapidly diminishing returns. Combos stay short and punchy. Matches become a rhythm of repeated interactions rather than a single mistake followed by ninety seconds of watching. It compresses the gap between an experienced player and a competent one without lowering the skill ceiling — the ceiling just relocates to spacing, conversion choice, and meter management, where it belongs.

Does the streamlining cost anything? Yes. Players coming from anime fighters will find the movement options comparatively grounded and the offense less baroque. There’s no air-dash-cancel labyrinth to master. If your pleasure in the genre comes from executional flex — from the fact that your combo is hard and looks it — this will feel restrained.

The Interface and the Social Layer

The Pixel Lobby is a divisive piece of the package, and we side with it. Menu-based matchmaking is efficient and socially dead. Here you’re a sprite in a shared retro town, walking past other players, seeing who’s idling at which cabinet, unlocking cosmetics with in-game currency earned from play. It’s skeuomorphism with a purpose: it reconstructs the arcade’s social texture, which is the thing the genre actually lost.

The cost is friction. Walking to a match is slower than clicking “find match,” and when the lobby population thins, the town starts to feel like an abandoned mall. That’s not a design flaw so much as a design bet — the lobby is spectacular when populated and melancholy when it isn’t.

Single-Player: The Broken Promise

Story Mode is where this review turns critical. What’s there is ambitious for an indie fighter: an episodic campaign with an explorable overworld, NPC dialogue, minigames, combat gauntlets, and boss encounters — a structure closer to a light action-RPG than an arcade ladder. What’s there is also not what was pitched, and it is not finished. It covers a fraction of the intended arc. Mane6 subsequently wound down development after the Season 1 Pass, shipping a modding mode as a parting gift to the community.

To be fair about the constraints — a small studio, a decade of legal and financial turbulence, an ambitious scope. The honest outcome for someone buying this today is this: if you are here primarily for single-player content, you will feel short-changed. The campaign ends mid-sentence. The small base roster, expanded slowly through paid DLC, is small by any standard. Both facts are permanent now, not “coming soon.”

Faust’s art direction is the reason this game got a second life, and it earns that. The animation is hand-drawn, generously framed, and full of personality — characters emote between exchanges, idle animations have comic timing, and hit reactions are designed to read clearly at speed. Readability is the underrated achievement here: in a busy screen full of projectiles and pastel effects, the game keeps your opponent’s state legible. That’s a competitive requirement disguised as a stylistic choice.

The UI is clean and functional if unglamorous — health bars, magic meter, and combo counters are legible at a glance, which is all that’s required. Menus are serviceable rather than elegant.

A 2D fighter of this scope is light on hardware, and the engine is modest by modern standards; rollback keeps online play honest. Frame rate matters more in this genre than in most, and the game’s modest engine leaves plenty of headroom.

The dynamic music deserves its own mention. Themes blend based on the matchup, so a mirror match and a cross-species fight sound meaningfully different. It’s the kind of detail that only exists when a team loves the thing they’re building.

Steam is the version to get. The fuller matchmaking pool, mod support after Mane6 opened that door, and access to the Pixel Lobby at its most populated make it the stronger choice. If you have the choice, choose this.

Nintendo Switch is a real port with real trade-offs. The art style scales down gracefully to handheld, and this is not a title that needed 4K to land. But the port makes visual concessions next to PC, and the more serious issue is structural: the console matchmaking pool is smaller, and crossplay’s benefit depends on who else is online at your hour. Off-peak, in a smaller region, you will wait. Rollback saves the matches you do find; it can’t manufacture opponents.

There’s also the input question. The four-button layout is friendlier to a Joy-Con or Pro Controller than a six-button traditional fighter would be — this is one of the rare fighters where the default console pad isn’t actively working against you. Still, a proper d-pad or arcade stick lifts the ceiling noticeably.

Them’s Fightin’ Herds is a better fighting game than it is a product, and both halves of that sentence matter.

The engine is strong. The teaching suite is a real gift to a genre that has spent thirty years being bad at welcoming people. The netcode is what every fighter should have shipped with years ago. When you’re in a match — reading a jump, converting a stray hit, managing your magic meter while the music swells into a blend of both themes — this is a genuinely strong competitive game wearing a disguise that keeps people from taking it seriously.

The package around it is compromised by circumstances that were mostly not the team’s fault and are entirely the buyer’s problem. A small base roster. A campaign that stops mid-story. A studio that has moved on. The Very Positive Steam rating reflects this split: people like what it does and resent what it never became.

Buy it for the combat, the tutorial, and the local multiplayer. Go in knowing the story mode is a fragment and the online population depends on your timezone and platform. On those terms, at $19.99, it’s a smart fighting game purchase for the right player.