Fight’N Rage
Good game overall, takes a lot of things from classics maybe to the point where it starts hurting the game own identity.
Gameplay is a mix of classic beat-em-up with a few mechanics from fighting games, most enemies are archetypes you will recognize if you’ve played SoR1-3 and Final Fight, also features branching levels.
Has a fairly spiky difficulty curve (some level branches in particular are much harder) and has a really high difficulty ceiling (less so than say SoR2 but not by much), lower difficulties accessible enough for most to have some fun (especially easy mode which is almost insultingly easy), difficulty curve turns to a cliff once you start looking past hard mode which means most won’t ever see the last two difficulty levels.
– Real player with 159.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Beat 'em up 2D Games.
Being a child of the 80’s and 90’s, there was no shortage of beat em‘ up games. Titles such as Streets of Rage, Final Fight, and Double Dragon were all the rage and kept you entertained for hours on end. Sadly, the current gaming landscape is nearly devoid of games such as these. Outside of a few gems that are still years old, beat em’ ups are pretty much dead. Thankfully, Indie developers don’t know this and are still cranking them out. This is where Fight’N Rage comes in!
I only recently heard about Fight’N Rage, and that was only due to me looking at another game – which I won’t mention. Instead, I began to see comments about a little-known game in development. One that had quite the following. My interest piqued, I started to search for the game and found little information. Buried beneath dead websites and Reddit posts, I found the name of the developer and the title – Fight’N Rage. A game that inspired by countless Beat ’em up titles from the past and puts a spin on it. There are references to those games littered everywhere as well.
– Real player with 57.8 hrs in game
Bud Spencer & Terence Hill - Slaps And Beans
Bud Spencer and Terence Hill are movie actors fomous in the 70-80s for their roles in action-comedy movies.
Slaps & Beans is a tribute to the duo. The game tries (and somewhat succeeds) to transfer the atmosphere and the comedy of the movies in a videogame’s world.
The game is a scrolling beat' em up: a genre that allows a digital representation of the unusual comical fight style of Bud & Terence.
The graphic style is a well realized pixel-art, full of details and references to the movies. This style enforces that sense of retro which is appropriate in a product inspired by 70-80s' characters.
– Real player with 27.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Beat 'em up Adventure Games.
In the discussion thread belonging to this game somebody started to rage asking why oh why we have to accept such games when Street Rage 4 is already out. For the answer head over to the wiki for Carlo Pedersoli and Mario Girotti and check what they accomplished under the nicknames of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. They had their own movies but the majority of the viewers like (and watch up to this date) the journeys they made as a duo.
Now, Slaps And Beans is an homage. Interestingly, it has its own story but each stage makes you recognise one or several of the duo’s films. In a nutshell, our heroes participate in a movie shoot and when trying to pick up their money for the job they find themselves in the middle of a kidnapping. Terence is immediately concerned about the well-being of the kidnapped lady while Bud only agrees to the rescue as he firmly believes their money is, too, kidnapped.
– Real player with 13.3 hrs in game
Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle
i bought this mainly for online coop but overall i enjoyed my experience.
what i liked
-collection of great games.
-2 player online coop plays has no lag, feels smooth like local coop in my opinion.
-drop in/drop out feature lets players connect midgame, you don’t have stay in a lobby doing nothing while waiting for online player to join, you can play the game while waiting and don’t have to restart from level 1 when someone joins.
-options to adjust game difficulty and ### of lives/continues.
– Real player with 71.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Beat 'em up Arcade Games.
Rather than reviewing each of the games in this collection, this will be a brief overview of the bundle itself. I’ve only played few credits as of writing this, but it seems to be sufficient for a general feel of the collection. If my opinion changes I’ll modify this review as needed.
This is a collection of seven arcade beat ‘em ups: Final Fight, Captain Commando, The King of Dragons, Knights of the Round, Warriors of Fate, Armored Warriors, and Battle Circuit. The Japanese and international versions of each game are available. The inclusion of Armored Warriors and Battle Circuit is particularly nice as I believe this is the first official release of those games outside of arcades.
– Real player with 38.3 hrs in game
River City Girls
TL;DR if you don’t want my extensive review;
+Presentation is gorgeous
+Gameplay feels right and responsive
+Combos are fun to explore and execute (speaking of non light-spam combos)
+Several playtroughs feel rewarding and I enjoyed beating the game 100%
-Entering an area, light attacks, and picking up an item are all mapped to X. Will be awkward to get used to at first, but didn’t feel clunky for me after a while
-Game’s story is rather short (this does make repeated playtroughs more bearable and fast-paced however, so it’s usually a minus sometimes a plus)
– Real player with 22.9 hrs in game
No one kidnaps our boyfriends!
The beat ‘em up genre is one genre that I barely stick my hand into. I guess none of them really caught my eye lately and I never was interested in them as a kid (well except the Scott Pilgrim game, but I was late on that front) nor were any of my old friends. I do vaguely remember playing one in an arcade, but that’s it. I never really thought about beat ‘em ups unless someone else brought them up. However, once I saw the trailer of River City Girls it immediately caught my eye. Despite (obviously) not ever playing a River City title before, I just had to play River City Girls.
– Real player with 21.1 hrs in game
The TakeOver
This is an excerpt of my review published in the latest issue of Mega Visions Magazine, located here :
Perhaps looking back at how fans of the series have kept interest alive in Streets of Rage through mods, hacks and fan games, it shouldn’t be too surprising that a single fan has taken it upon himself to develop a next-generation 3D Streets of Rage spiritual successor that he’s always longed for.
That game is called The TakeOver and is being developed almost singlehandedly by an indie developer named Antonis Pelekanos (aka Pelikan13). Prior to The TakeOver, Pelekanos was developing ‘90s Arcade Racer that was funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign before publisher Nicalis purchased the rights to the game. Since then, Pelekanos has turned his full focus on The TakeOver and has consistently released frequent updates to the game with the final release expected in the coming months.
– Real player with 401.4 hrs in game
“OK, look. You’re…Well, you’re not like me. I mean, you’re not… human. I mean, you’re human, but you just… you’re not real. You’re not, like, a real person. Like me. You’re clones. You’re copies of people out here in the world.”
~The Island (2005)
Painfully obvious Final Fight / Streets of Rage rip-off. On UNITY. End of the story. No, seriously. That’s pretty much everything you should know about this game. It’s a clone of those good ol’ beat ‘em ups with close to nothing special about it. Which means that $19.99 / £15.99 is a bit too much. Back in the days? I would be like “Yeah, right… Give me a proper new game, or GTFO”. Nowadays, though? I don’t think we can be picky. Just because a lot of old genres are dead now and we rarely get high quality games in them. And this one? There’s quite a lot of good about it.
– Real player with 37.5 hrs in game
Shank 2
Short version:
Pros:
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Enjoyable campaign
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Satisfying, brutal combat
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Challenging
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Good amount of content
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Lots of unlockables
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Survival co-op
Cons:
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You can get stun-locked during combat
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No campaign co-op
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Sometimes controls feel a tad unresponsive
“Long” version:
Shank 2 is a 2D beat-‘em-up developed and published by Klei Entertainment.
This is the studio that gave us Mark of the Ninja so I was super excited to try this out.
You play as Shank and you must save your mentor Elena from some bad guys.
– Real player with 22.5 hrs in game
Interestingly enough, I ended up picking up Shank 2 before the original. Don’t ask why, I honestly don’t remember other than it was somewhat of an impulse buy as I loved the demo. If you’ve played the original Shank, you know what you’re getting into. If you haven’t, Shank is a grind house style 2D action game where you shoot, slash, and sometimes shank your way through waves of enemies. The artwork is all 2D in a hand drawn style and looks beautiful. Excellent character animations (especially death animations) really bring the game to life. While the original Shank was relatively bare bones in terms of level presentation Shank 2 has a lot going on in these levels. It’s not exactly Rayman Origins but it does look pretty great.
– Real player with 22.5 hrs in game
Foul Play
So after checking the game and playing it completely,I think I can give a fair review of this game.
First of all, what you should expect when you play Foul Play:
You should like beat-em-ups with 2d sprites and all the cons that come with it (bad lineup,more “That should have hit”-moments).
You should like the general idea of a game having a theatre-like feeling.
However, you should not expect a hard game when playing. Elaboration on why later on.
Story: You control Sebastian Dashforth,who combined with his assistant Scampwick Steerpipe is presenting his life as a daemonologist on stage, re-enacting the main events of Dashforth’s last 20 years. Not fearing to go into hand-on-hand combat he and Scampwick are fighting themselves through an lost city of egypt, cursed villages, underwater cities and a london in control of a cult.Fairly generous with the humor and honest (though you may not thank him for it) he will keep you interested to keep playing for a while.
– Real player with 24.3 hrs in game
Lot’s of fun and action to be had with this enjoyable side-scrolling beat’em up!
Developed by Mediatonic and The Irregular Corporation, this game was released in 2013 and published by Devolver Digital. Devolver Digital has published games such as Shadow Warrior 2, Hotline Miami and Broforce. The developers have produced less well-known games to date.
The game is full of action. You can achieve combo multipliers of over 300+. That’s a lot of consecutive hits!
You can only play as one character. You are basically an actor on stage with an audience. The more combo’s and more hits you make on your enemies, the more your audience approval goes up and the quicker you can get the audience to fully approve your performance, the quicker you can unlock youir special move and unleash a lot of hits.
– Real player with 15.4 hrs in game
Sacred Citadel
With Sacred Citadel there’s a lot of fun to be had or at least enough here to distract you.
A pitfall of this game is the intermittent platforming sections. The game figures your level time into the level completion screen. This means you run almost everywhere while navigating screen to screen. I always felt as if I was flying into holes on accident and that it really broke up the flow of the game to slow down and carefully jump across smaller gaps. As someone who quite enjoys platformers this behavior could’ve been cleaned up a bit even though this is mainly a brawler style game.
– Real player with 51.3 hrs in game
There is a review says it dont save local co-op, that is untrue. It does save it but in a weird way. i at first i thought it didn’t aswell (because of that uninformed review), but it does I’ll explain how it works. This may confuse you but it is just a strange way of saving. Ok in local co-op you enter lets say you and other players, your name will be your steam name the person that joins you will be player 1 and 3rd person player 2. As you progress through co-op local play your progress is saved to a file, but player 1 & 2 saves to a separate file specific to each person. So now lets say you playing solo sp when you go in you’ll see what ever char you used leveled up to w/e you got in co-op, but the chars player 1 & 2 leveled up will not be leveled up, reason is as I explained above the progress is saved but for each separate name in its own file. So progress does save in local co-op just only way player 1 & 2 levels up and progresses is when they are being used in co-op. In vice versus case what ever char you, your steam name progresses in sp will not be usable for player 1 & 2 because like i said your save file and progress is specific to your name.
– Real player with 19.3 hrs in game
Dusty Revenge:Co-Op Edition
Dusty REvenge: co-op i’ll start off with the bad. P.S. This is my first review.
Cons.
This game has alot of problems from the Shaky cam; to the framerate dorp when your playing with another person, and finally the voice acting.
Last but not least the fact that you need to download openAL just to get the sound working.
But strangely i have to recommend this game if you can get passed that like i did.
Pros
The Combat is really good but not too easy where it’s just buttion mashing.
The cutscenes and art in the levels look really well done.
– Real player with 40.9 hrs in game
I’ll start by stating that this game is truly addictive and captivating.
Why?
I believe many of those who have tried this game had realized that the combo system is pretty well thought out.
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The number of variations it has is amazing - For each level your character gains, there would be roughly 3 moves to play around with.
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It easy to pick up - a leveling system was cleverly put in place so that players get to master their current moves and think of ways to use them before leveling up.
The SUPPORT in this game isn’t anything like a cheap bomb clearing the entire screen of enemies. It allows an alternative way to play this game with clever obstacles that require you to use them. Trust me, if you play hard you would definitely use them pretty often.
– Real player with 13.9 hrs in game
5 Force Fighters
]Overview
5 Force Fighters is a fast-paced, indie fighting game with flashy combos and a combat system that boasts universal offensive and defensive options. A cast of 5 teens, each gifted with elemental forces, who know nothing of each other, find themselves with a common goal – to stop Ken Sangre from enacting his tyranny.
Combat Features
4 Buttons for Fighting - Weak/Light, Chargeable/Heavy, Force, and Grabs.
Super Force Meter - This meter allows for super moves to be achieved. They are extremely crushing to your opponent.
Potential Meter - Use the unique Potential Force meter to trigger a burst that will send your opponent flying – then you can activate a special power. You can choose 1 out of 5 of these potential forces at any moment.
Critical Counter - This can be used only when blocking. If timed perfectly, you’ll avoid your opponent’s attack and do a counterattack that gives you the advantage by applying hitstun to your opponent.
Chargeables - This has a three level system (lvl 0, lvl 1, and lvl 2). By holding the direction of your choosing, and the chargeable button, the power of this move increases with each level, causing devastating damage.
Force Moves - These can be cancelled into most moves at the cost of meter. This is a flexible combo tool – the bread and butter of 5FF. If you think it will land, it probably will. Some Force attacks can be further enhanced by burning even more meter.
Rollback Netcode - Rollback netcode will provide a very smooth online gameplay experience.
Game Modes
Local and Online play - Fight someone right next to you, or a person across the globe.
Training Mode - Improve your combo game with a little bit of practice.
Story Mode - Follow the stories of Cocoa, Pebbles, Blaine, Pomme, and Stralechi as their reasons for fighting change to meet the ever evolving chaos incited by the Bloodless.
Challenge Mode - HAVE FUN PLAYING MINI GAMES. OR ELSE.