New school version of River City Ransom, Double Dragon, Streets of Rage and other venerable beatemups. Simply awesome.
If you've played River City Ransom, this is essentially a modern day version, a side scroller beatemup in its purest form. You get to punch, kick, jump, jump kick, throw, strike with any numerous items that you can find in your romp through Toronto and more. You earn new techniques like back strike, slide kicks, etc which is textbook Double Dragon style, lending some growth and additional tactics to your repertoire as you proceed. Just like River City Ransom, your enemies drop coins and the food you eat and CDs and clothes you buy influence your statistics, and are permanent bonuses to your statistics. Your life grows with food eaten, and you gain extra lives (necessary for single player mode, this game is pull your hair out and throw the controller across the room hard solo, a bit easier due to the ability to revive coop players, although that requires a lot of button mashing and no enemy interruption).
The gameplay is pretty simple, you beat the crap out of various enemies using the mechanics described above, while avoiding some pitfalls and traps thrown in for good measure. The enemies can range from common thugs to emo kids who flick their hair to regain life to giant hipsters who have a nasty habit of kicking you while they are on their back. The variety of enemy tactics (not including the bosses) are extremely varied, and depending on how many number of players are logged in (you can have up to 4 using the characters Scott, Ramona, Kim and Stills), the number of enemies on screen can range from none to well over a dozen, breaking the mold of River City Ransom's 2 on 2 limit. The bosses are clever in that they require different tactics to defeat and all put up a good fight (The last boss is one of those multipart doozies that you think never ends). Again, if you want an old school 8 bit style challenge, this game has it.
The music is a retro 8 bit chipset soundtrack that is best described as NES music in HD and totally fits the "HD 8 bit graphics". Actually I'd say its closer to 16 bit due to the color pallete onscreen being significantly higher than anything the NES was capable of but... you know. Basically you will be feasting your eyes on wide color spectrum high animation frame rate 8 bit style sprite graphics. Heck, there is even a "Subspace highway" which is a tribute to the minus world of Super Mario Bros fame which has intentional distortions and weird coding signatures as part of the graphics. Anyone who has a working NES and had to blow on the game cartridge has seen these before and will wonder what is going on. Clever nostalgic tricks like that will bring you back and make you appreciate the developer's understanding of gaming culture and the classics while keeping the gameplay modernized yet honoring the beatemup gameplay style.
Basically, if you're like me, and want a beatemup like I've been clamoring about for the past decade, you owe it to yourself to pick up this game and play with your friends (or alone if you don't have any). The biggest problem is that there is no online coop, although there is something satisfying about playing through the game grabbing up coins and stomping foes into the ground with a friend in the same room. And to think, gaming was "antisocial" back in the day.
Good :
+ The graphics for the style they are presented in are flawless retro sprite graphics with high quality animations and colors.
+ The gameplay is highly polished 2D side scrolling beatemup in the oldest school sense, yet retains a high level of playability. 3D be damned.
+ Remember kids, 8 Bit chipset and midi tunes are classics.
+ You will appreciate all of the gaming culture references... assuming you have at least gone through high school or college.
+ COOP!!!! Wooo!
+ Challenging gameplay for those that want it.
+ At 9.99$ or less (I've seen it on sale twice I believe for less between the time of release and the time of writing this), it is quite a steal.
Bad :
- Very challenging gameplay to those that don't.
- Coop online is not an option
- Some of the old school throwbacks and references actually include an intentionally slow loading screen to get to your menu... That kind of irked me a little bit.