A good introduction to the world of Beat'em ups

User Rating: 6 | Final Fight ARC

Ah Final Fight, one of the most infamous beat’em ups for their stance on Poison’s sex. While the game itself certainly doesn’t address Poison’s identity as a man or woman, it does make a point that kicking gang violence in the is at least fun. Aside from the usual routine of someone or something getting captured and the good guys having to stop it; Final Fight differs itself from other beat’em ups by being fast paced and including awesome moves from the start. Final Fight really doesn’t take long to get to the feature with the whole game taking course over about 6 stages.Some of the bosses aren’t really note worthy either, but the final boss really throws you for a loop compared to the rest of the game. All in all, Final Fight knows that beat’em ups are supposed to be fast paced, and maintain a difficult challenge throughout. It’s a short ride, only about an hour worth of your time, but its intense throughout.

The game is constantly throwing enemies at you and different obstacles to always keep you on your toes. Thankfully to combat this, Final Fight gives you the ability to sacrifice some health for more powerful moves. These special abilities give a nice balance between abuse and necessity as making the right call on using these abilities can mean the different from a little health to being out a life. On top of these special abilities for crowd control, are the more common weapons found in beat’em ups. These weapons don’t exactly have a time limit on how long they can used for however, and as long as you don’t get hit, you can constantly use them against any and all enemies. This makes for another instance that high skill gets high reward in Final Fight as taking a metal pipe half way through the game is doable, but extremely hard. And that is what helps seperate Final Fight from a lot of other beat’em ups, rewarding a player for skill rather than feeding coins to the machine. However sometimes it just feels like this game just wants you dead, and dying seems to be all, but inevitable. Going through this game on without continues seems more likely for any given player though especially comparing Final Fight to most beat’em ups. Either way, Final Fight is a good beat’em up jam packed with some good music and graphics from from the ’80s.

Final Thoughts:

Final Fight is one of those few beat’em ups that makes you feel like you can become really good at, and feels like it actually gives you a fair chance throughout, even when its more likely just trying to eat your non-existent quarters up. Of course its also jam packed with music and graphical goodness from the late ’80s, but in a lot of ways its still a bit in the past, although still fun for a quick playthrough.