Red Rust
Red Rust is retro-style side-scrolling game which uniquely combines fighting mechanics with shooting mechanics. The game is heavily inspired by 8bit and 16bit hits of the 90s, but it’s being developed with the modern player in mind. Tons of great animation, hand-drawn backgrounds, variety of in-game situations and powerful soundtrack!
It’s the year 1984 and you control Agent Red (or just Red), a soviet KGB officer who has been sent to the West on a secret mission. She is an attractive but brutal and cold-hearted girl! Over the course of the game she learns to understand her own emotions and the unfamiliar world around her.
Read More: Best Beat 'em up Side Scroller Games.
Aces Wild: Manic Brawling Action!
A couple years back I was playing one of my favourite games: Street Fighter, with my friends, and I had a vision.
I saw a group of us playing a game with lots of colourful flashes, nice fast chip-tune style music, and even faster gameplay. We were all having tonnes of fun, and were really focused on the game, it looked awesome.
The image of the game was not apparent, all I saw was rainbows, and so I had no idea as to what this mystery game may be.
I searched and searched for a long time and found nothing.
– Real player with 41.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Beat 'em up Action Games.
I playtested this, bought it on Humble Store, and now am playing and loving Aces Wild on Steam. Since its Humble Store release I’ve spent dozens and dozens of hours playing, and my time with this game is far from over.
The controls are easy to pickup but are incredibly precise. You can do crazy combos and fly around the screen with your aerial-powered fighter using a minimal amount of buttons.
The game is challenging but fair. Cliche statement, yes, but true in the case of Aces Wild. Nothing that the game throws at you is outside is unbeatable if you’ve got the skill.
– Real player with 40.9 hrs in game
Fallen City Brawl
Brawl through the city in hard-hitting pixel art style inspired by arcade classics!
As a brutal battle for control of Fallen City’s criminal underworld rages, four strangers join forces to survive and reclaim the streets! With a ferocious wolf at their sides, these unlikely allies will face impossible odds. Along the way, motivations and past lives will collide, further testing their loyalty as well as their fighting skills. Only by binding together can they reach the final showdown that will decide who lives and who falls.
Inspired by arcade beat ’em ups of the late ’80s and early ’90s, Fallen City Brawl is a story of ambition and revenge told through intense side-scrolling pixel art action. Huge sprites and animated backgrounds breathe life into the dying city streets, while fighting mechanics offer uncommon depth with destructive combos, counters, air-throws, grappling, parries, special moves and “RIOT” supers! Animated cutscenes and a powerful soundtrack by famed composer Daniel Lindholm set the tone for urban mayhem, playable solo or with friends in local co-op!
Features:
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Fight through 8 stages of arcade-inspired action!
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Choose between 4 playable characters.
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Execute combos and specials with deep hand-to-hand combat mechanics.
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Pick up weapons like pipes, bats, knives, firearms, oil drums, chainsaws and more!
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Clear the screen with special attacks by upgradeable mercenary backup.
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Battle it out solo or with friends in local co-op.
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Command a wolf companion or unleash him and watch the carnage!
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Get in the mood for mayhem with a soundtrack by Daniel Lindholm.
Read More: Best Beat 'em up Side Scroller Games.
Second to Nun
Do you want to become the TOP NUN? Are you nun enough?
Second to Nun is a top-down fighting game where you fight a variety of creatures and enemies on the Island of Trials and Tribulations in your quest to become top nun! Careful not to fall or be beaten as enemies come at you from all angles, face them all and take home the thousand-coin prize!
This game is a budget-friendly pixel-art retro top-down fighting classic, easy to learn and impossible to master!
For a budget-friendly game, Second to Nun is bursting to the brim with features for you to enjoy!
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Fully Controller Compatible (and playable with Keyboard)
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Play in two different game modes, Arcade and Endless
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4 Difficulty Levels and an unlockable customisable difficulty
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36 Achievements and Leader-boards to fight for worldwide top nun
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Keep track of all your progress with a fully unlockable Monsterpedia of beasties
This game has been fully optimised to be compatible with game controllers from start to finish!
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False Positives
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Unending Dusk
Unending Dusk is a decent beat’em up if you enjoy grinding stats and finding rare attack mods. As you can see I dropped over 80 hours just to max out 2 of the 4 characters. I guess you could say that it has some roguelite elements, although there is no perma-death. The stages are randomly generated so you can run into a secret shop or a hidden area, and that is not counting the stat grind which is usually associated with the genre. For me the game managed to capture the nostalgia that I have for classic beat' em ups, despite having all those new features. In my opinion the combat, aesthetic and the controls are faithfully implemented. I play Streets of Rage (2) very often, by comparison the execution of attacks is essentially the same. Unfortunately, it has no grappling which is perhaps my biggest problem. There are definitely some modern features added to the formula such as character levels and different damage types, but overall it truly feels like a game that could be on Genesis - mainly due to aesthetic.
– Real player with 104.7 hrs in game
Unending Dusk is an old-school beat-em-up with ARPG mechanics and a pretty decent, darksynth-esque soundtrack that was admittedly rough around the edges in its early days, but regular updates have smoothed a lot of those edges and made for a compelling cooperative experience whenever I can rope friends into playing it. The developer even does double XP events on occasion. It has up to four-player online coop but regrettably no local option, an odd choice for the genre.
The time and place, a dark cyberpunk future in the last city on Earth. The titular twilight spells impending doom for the city given its reliance on solar power. A brilliant engineer has taken it upon himself to gather a band of the deadliest mercenaries, bounty hunters, soldiers and even religious fanatics he can get to find the source of the unnatural darkness and combat the strange, almost demonic invaders it brought with it.
– Real player with 101.2 hrs in game
Blade and Ham
There is a lot to like about this but the combat needs some work. Often when doing combos the character will go through the enemies making the combo miss. Weird hit detection. I guess that is why it is early access. There is a nice overworld map with some extra levels you can take on to get coins used to continue. Decent graphics and a good variety of characters. Hopefully the developer fixes the combat issues. I probably will not play anymore until it gets some patches.
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
The game has nice graphics, but in its current state, I strongly don’t recommend Blade and Ham. The game is NOT ready for release to the public. Blade and Ham has several big bugs & is very unpolished.
The game’s bugs are its biggest flaw. For example, you can’t save your progress (you start over at every new game). Plus, can’t take any pictures (doing so causes an error, the game ends, & you can’t exit the game either).
On a side note, Valve, please stop distributing crappy games that lack basic features. Such behavior just makes people want to go buy their games elsewhere, such as Epic Games. I wouldn’t even play Blade and Ham for free in its current state.
– Real player with 0.6 hrs in game
Pull Stay
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Old-school Beat ‘em up brawler as the core mechanic. You can learn a new move by smacking each enemy type accordingly.
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Silly and funny Traps: Baked fish missile, Toothpaste turret, Watermelon bazooka… and much more! Over 15 types of gadgets are ready to be unlocked by you!
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Break neighbors’ houses to collect resources. Use them to set traps or build a new room.
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You can have Susumu make power-up items for you. But be careful! When he’s goofing off, give him some loving punishment.
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Young jobless guy who is avoiding social interactions and shutting himself inside his room all day.
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In Japan, people like him are called Hikikomori(shut-in), which has become a big social problem.
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Enemies are trying to reach out to Susumu because they are worried about him, or want to mock him, or just to see him in the wild…
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When enemies reach Susumu, the game is over. I cannot explain what exactly will happen there, but I can relate to Susumu so badly because I’m also a Hikikomori. I’m making this game solo just trying to reflect my own situation with this game…
Metamorphos
It’s a nice short Souls-like game that can be finished for around an hour and a half.
Graphics are great, but somehow not too optimized even if I set the quality at its lowest. Some animations feels stiff, but this is just nit-picking on my part.
Controls felt really clunky. I don’t know if it’s just me, or the game feels unresponsive. There are times that my character just stands still no matter how much I move my analog stick. The camera moves fine, but I can’t attack nor evade. Its really annoying since this always happens when I’m battling enemies.
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
- DIFFICULTY -
🔲 My 90 year old grandma could play it
🔲 Easy
🔲 Normal
☑️ Hard
🔲 “Dark Souls”
- GRAPHICS -
🔲 “MS Paint”
🔲 Bad
🔲 Meh
🔲 Graphics don’t matter in this game
☑️ Good
🔲 Classic is always better
🔲 Beautiful
🔲 Masterpiece
- MUSIC -
🔲 Bad
☑️ Not special
🔲 Good
🔲 Beautiful
- STORY -
🔲 This game has no story
🔲 Like playing “Temple Runners” for the story
☑️ It’s there for the people who want it
🔲 Well written
🔲 Epic story
- PRICE -
🔲♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥Underpriced
☑️ Perfect price
– Real player with 1.3 hrs in game
Mighty Fight Federation
I feel like I should have spent more time with this game than I did before writing my review previously.
I have taken more time to play this on my own and at a friend’s house and I have a really different feeling right now.
Graphics -
I did have qualms on the character models and animations previously. I thought they didn’t mesh well with each other like they looked modeled with really different direction. I thought the animations were stiff and awkward.
After some time looking at everyone a little more, I do see a cohesive nature that actually does tie the majority of the cast together aesthetically, bar two. L.exe and Originelle. I think they could use some work with a re-design, but they really don’t fit.
– Real player with 7.6 hrs in game
This is a high thumbs up from me. I’ve played some matches online (with a friend who bought the game with me) and played a bit of the arcade. The online was rock solid for us, no lag or dropping out so far.
Before getting to the positives (paragraphs below, it’s been by far mostly positive), I will mention the obvious about early access titles: it’s a work in progress still and some things don’t feel quite ready yet, otherwise this would have been a final release. This is, of course, true at the time of writing this for Mighty Fight. The quit menu doesn’t always work (I used alt+F4 to exit because esc didn’t bring it up) and the arcade mode is not yet saving progress, assuming that’s intended for the final release. The online worked very well during the fights for us, but the menus weren’t clearly telling us who was selecting what character and level. Most importantly though, the Strikefist ai is way better than me, and this needs to be fixed! (/s I eventually won).
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
Raging Justice
Yet another one of those cheap and ugly beat ‘em ups you shouldn’t really care about. But let’s start with the good stuff. First of all – this game actually works. Sounds like an obvious thing, but nowadays? In Steam? That’s actually a thing to mention. Too many cheap games here were made just for quick money and, as we all know, very often such products don’t even work properly. Raging Justice does. It won’t crash on you or something like that. You want to finish it? You’ll be able to. The problem is… most likely you won’t want to. Even though this game? It does come with a couple of unique features.
– Real player with 80.8 hrs in game
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I knew exactly what to expect about this game. I was born in the 80’s. Street of Rage, Final Fight and the TMNT games are part of my DNA. This game was made practically by 2 people who I would love to have a cup of coffee with, because I feel they understand me. That they know me so well… because the game is amazing. It’s everything we, Beat-em-Ups lovers would want from a game like this. This is more than retro, this is a love letter to the genre!
– Real player with 13.3 hrs in game