Some great ideas, but it ends up just being repetitive.
The story is pretty thin. Street gangs have taken over Paris and the cops finally just say "Screw it." and send in American gangs to fight the Paris gangs. That's about it. It has two different story modes, one where you just take everybody out. And another where you befriend the bosses and they fight for you. But neither of them last very long, and once you get good at the game you'll probably beat able to beat each one in no time whatsoever. There's the typical Survival mode where you just fight wave after wave of enemies on one life bar (that get replenished a little bit after each wave). And an up to 4 player Versus match.
Thankfully, they give you little training videos on the main menu to kinda show you what to do, and to show off the combo system in the game where you can get some pretty insane stuff going.
The graphics are the first thing you're going to really notice about this game, and while they are good … they're not without their problems. The characters are large and highly detailed with lots of different animations going, and they all look great. The characters scale very good, and the backgrounds look awesome. But, the animation doesn't flow. At all. You'll especially notice this in the walking animation, but it haunts everything. The graphical effects are good for fireballs and whatnot.
But with all the enemies and bosses in the game, it's the same 4 guys for ALL of them. Just different colors (which are horribly done) and sizes. Some of the bosses are as big as the entire screen, other enemies are only about as big as your shoe. But they all look exactly the same in the end. So there isn't a whole lot of variety and it gets real old to be beating up the same boring looking guys. Yeah, you do the same thing in beat 'em ups like Streets of Rage, but the enemies are a hell of a lot more interesting.
You get different characters to fight with as you play through the game, and they do have different strengths and weaknesses. But the unlockable ones are just the same boring palette swaps you're gonna see everywhere in the game. And it takes so damn long to unlock everything, I got bored and quit trying.
The music is actually really good with a decent variety in styles and tracks and they all sound great. The sound effects themselves are unfortunately not so lucky. Especially when the characters talk. They only have a few little quotes or grunts that you'll hear a LOT. And it gets tiresome. A little more variety would've helped immensely. But the music is pretty damn good.
The gameplay, the game uses this weird multiple planes idea. Normally in a fighter like TMNT, The Punisher, Streets of Rage, Final Fight, etc you move independently all over the screen. In this game however, you dash in between the planes. Which is a huge irritation and really tends to get in the way. There are 3 basic attacks you can do, and a combo system. The attacks don't really feel like they land though. You basically move through the entire game beating the crap out of everything in site, and this game can UNLOAD the enemies onto the screen without even a hiccup. And there are little bonus areas to break it up where it sticks you in a room full of enemies with, for example, infinite Fury. Which is a meter that builds up as you attack. It goes up to three levels, where you can unleash a super move of sorts. In one of the bonus areas, you get infinite Fury where you just unload on a room full of enemies that look the exact same. Other times, the game will move faster, or you'll be moon jumping. But the enemies never actually attack back, they just stand around saying "Come on!" and "Get him!" over and over and over.
All in all, it tries to reinvent the wheel a little bit, and goes back to the days of the old beat 'em up arcades while adding something modern. But the "multiple planes" system is a terrible idea and more annoying than anything. Free movement is much much better. The game is entirely too short and kinda forces you to play it over and over just to unlock all the characters and difficulty levels. Having a 4 player Versus match is a cool idea, but the game isn't good enough to back it up. And the fact that they don't run … they walk with their broken walk animation entirely too slow, or you can hold down the R trigger and do a ridiculous looking slide.
One really high point for this game though (once you go through and unlock the stuff after numerous annoying playthroughs) is that you can configure the HELL out of the game outside of the default difficulty settings. You can adjust how many credits you have, enemy life which you can make almost as hard as you want. Enemy aggressiveness, enemy count, Fury, players speed, gravity and friendly fire. Unlocking them is annoying as all hell, but they do significantly change the game.
6.0 – The game is only priced at 240 points ($3), and for the price for all it's faults it's definitely worth it. I got some fun out of it, and I still play it from time to time, the multiple plane system of playing is irritating as hell, and the bosses are brain dead. But you get kinda used to it after a while. The ending for the mode of play where you befriend the gang bosses is pretty funny and actually made me chuckle.