Primal Rage is a traditional two-dimensional fighting game in which two players select characters to battle each other in one-on-one combat, or a single player is faced with a campaign of fights against the artificial intelligence (AI) over increasing difficulty.[1] The final battle of the single-player game consists of fighting all the other AI monsters with an increased power bar, made available in a minigame prior to the fight. A total of seven characters are playable. Each character has their own specialized set of three attack moves and abilities. The object is to deplete the opposing character's health meter before the player's own runs out. There are also seven different background stages where fighting takes place, each one representing one of the character's innate domains: the Cliff (Blizzard), the Hollows (Armadon), the Strip (Talon), the Cove (Sauron), the Ruins (Chaos), the Tomb (Vertigo) and the Inferno (Diablo).
During fights, human tribesmen wander nearby and worship their gods. This allows for the creatures to toss them around or devour some to regain health (eating opponents' worshipers adds a bonus to one's score, while eating one's own will penalize the player). Prior to the final battle, a minigame commences in which the player is given the chance to eat as many worshippers as possible to increase health for the endurance round. Two human-controlled characters can trigger easter egg minigames of human volleyball and bowling.
Unlike most fighting games, where the special moves are performed by moving the joystick followed by pressing one or more buttons, Primal Rage features a system where the player holds down certain buttons, then performs the joystick movements. Later revisions of the arcade game added the ability to perform special moves in the more traditional way, with motion followed by button presses, but kept the original method as well. After the opponent is defeated, a brief moment is allowed for the player to perform a finishing move to end the match in a more dramatic fashion; these are performed in a similar manner to the special moves. Although all characters feature three finishing moves, some of them were more of easter eggs than fatalities, such as Vertigo's "La Vache Qui Rit" (French for "the laughing cow"), a fatality in which Vertigo transforms her opponent into a cow, which moos and runs away.
