River City Girls

When is saw pictures and videos of River City Girls, I thought the game was only Final fight/Street of rage/Double dragon spirited game. After doing some research, i realized that the game is part of Kunio-kun series. I played Renegade aka Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun and Target: Renegade on commodre 64, long time ago. Let talk about River City girls! The game have beautiful indie-style pixel-art graphics and excellent music tracks. Story is OK and it have some plot twists. I love Misakos and Kyokos dialogue, attitude and charisma. I sometimes laughed at their funny dialogue. Misako and Kyoko have different movelist and fight style, which encourages you to try both characters. Game have problems: One is control issue. It is 2019 and some game developers doesn´t allow players to customize keybindings. I can not play this game with default keybindings. Game supports Xbox one controller but i don´t use that controller. I am used to using a DualShock game controllers. Only way to get PS3 (with Brook) controller to work with game, i have to use Xpadder emulator. Playing game with dualshock, movements and actions are smooth and easy. Another problem is blocking. You can not break enemy combo moves and block middle of enemy combo move. Also boss specialmoves are unblockable. Players have to anticipate and evade some enemy moves. Players, who like classic beat 'em ups, I recommend playing this game.

RCG is an old school beat'em up. Sadly, the game does not live up to its great visuals (the animated cutscenes are amazing), and is instead a painful slog at best and a frustrating mess at worst. The gameplay suffers from several issues: your attacks have pathetic hitboxes (especially bad on the z-axis, missing enemies that are just a step behind or in front of you), slow recovery (even the light attacks are really slow, especially if blocked or missed) and you can't cancel out of the animations (no dodge option at all, by the way). The aggressive AI which can juggle you, rush you with quick attack having no build up as well as having much better hitboxes than you, makes for agonizing encounters. Since enemies are also random, and spawn infinitely, there is no design at all to the fights, and you can dominate one moment and suffer defeat the next in the same area, even against very similar groups. Another thing which slows down the combat is that a lot of the attacks make enemies fall, and it takes them a while to get back up (presumably to allow you to stomp on them or pick them up to use as weapons, both unwieldy and not very useful). Special moves are also weak, and you'll find yourself needing to down individual enemies 3 to 4 times at minimum, further dragging the fights. The assists you can unlock by accepting the surrendering enemies in your "team" are mostly useless as well. They are good for defense in theory, but timing them or having them guard your back is next to impossible. The game isn't difficult, it just has zero flow. Certain bosses do absurd damage and can stun-lock/juggle you for WAY too long, however. The writing is weak. It starts funny enough, but the jokes get worse soon, the dialogues become slow and do little to progress the story, and you can't speed up individual lines (you can only skip the entire cutscene). You also need to hold down the button to skip, which is slow and unnecessary. Not recommended for anyone, really.

gameplaywise this does not beat "Fight'N'Rage which is also available on GOG. The graphics and music are awesome. Combos are fun, but u got to unlock them and it it is not as intuitive. The bosses can be really hard. You have to learn their patterns in Order to beat them. That being said the checkpoints before boss fights are kinda annoying. You have to walk a little to the boss room again and the damn dialogue starts again. The Game is awesome and fun especially due to the presentation. But if you just care about the actual gameplay I'd recommend Fight'N'Rage over this one here.

"River City Girls" has a long and complicated lineage, one older players may remember from "River City Ransom" on the NES, or "Renegade","Super Dodge Ball" or other arcade games. There are a ton of in-jokes for players of many of the decades of games Tecnos had a hand in, including characters from the Double Dragon games putting in appearances. If you spent a lot of your youth in arcades or in front of a console, you may get more out of the experience. The underlying game is a side-scrolling brawler in a similar vein to "Final Fight" or "Streets of Rage". In terms of the audio-visual, the game is a treat. The pixel art is lovingly crafted and animated; colorful, expressive, and fluid, with exaggerated character bursting from every frame. The music has a very eighties-synth vibe with a breathy female lead vocal; the voice work has a gleeful cartoon exuberance, and the sound FX offer a knowing wink at 8- and 16-bit styles. The gameplay is, sadly, only okay. There's an ability to recruit followers by sparing a begging final enemies, but most of my attempts to use them ended with them getting knocked out before they actually performed their move. There's a block button and "special" attacks with their own meter, but I got through most of the game without using them, and trying to block part of a combo is so hit-or-miss that it's basically a last resort. Weapons are nice, but they radically narrow your moves, denying you access to things like ground stomp. You can pick up downed foes and hit other foes with them, which never stops being funny, but becomes all but necessary in high-population fights. Purchasing and consume food from inventory mid-fight makes the first boss (before you encounter stores) the hardest in the game. Grabbing a foe or weapon by accident and leaving yourself vulnerable is a real problem. A lore-heavy in-joke makes the ending a big anticlimax. It's never hard enough to really frustrate, but it doesn't flow like, say, SOR4. Call it 3 1/2 *.