River City Girls

First and foremost, I like the game. The art style is great. The music is good, with some classic revamped tunes from the original NES River City Ransom. The moves and combos are pretty good and are aquired through progression. The story and banter between the characters is great, although sometimes is is overlayed with the action which doesn't always fit the scene. With all that being said, the game is plagued by a serious issue right from the start... Controls hurt the game in a big way. Upon fresh install, Xbox 360 controllers work...for second player only! First player must use the keyboard, and the key mappings for the keyboard are terrible. To make matters worse, there is no in-game configuration to change key mappings or controller configuration. You must install a mod or use other third-party software to make the game playable. Being released at the tail end of 2019, there is no excuse not to have this functionality built into the game...period! I could overlook some of the other minor issues in the game if the control situation wasn't an issue. Things like the high price tag, inescapable combos, death tax, poor enemy variety, and the first boss is something that will drive a lot of players away from the game. All the minor nitpicks I could overlook if the controls were configurable. Using the mod to reclaim control configuration will prevent Galaxy from launching the game properly, which may not be a big deal to those who don't use Galaxy, but I like to use it to manage offline-installer downloads and track in-game time. Overall, the game is good, and I would rate it 4 or 5 stars, but the lack of pc control configuration spoils some enjoyment for me. It may be fixed in a future patch, but I will not hold my breath for it. People have been griping about this issue since it's launch on steam over half a year ago. Buy if it appeals to you, but be prepared to have to fiddle with it to make it work the way a modern game should and deal with the consequences.

1) Doesn't allow remapping controls without a third party patch (which has its own issues, such as being stuck on a black screen when launching the game). 2) Doesn't recognize Xbox 360 controllers at all 3) Does recognize Xbox One controllers, but can only be used for the second player, the first player MUST use the keyboard. I had to use joytokey to be able to use a gamepad with it as a single player, with time spent guessing the correct button mapping (so that they correspond to buttons displayed in the help notifications in game, since they are explained nowhere). It is unacceptable in 2020 to not handle gamepads properly.

The game has incredible graphics, good retro gameplay, and a chilling soundtrack. But, it has its problems, some bugs and lack of polish. The main bug for me was the recruit character, where in the school part, whenever I called him the game bugged and kept crashing. The only way I found to resolve this was to avoid calling the recruit as much as possible until I left school.

even with team damage off, can still take out your teammate with trash cans.

TO BE FAIR I only played about 20 minutes, it took me FOREEVER to get the controller working. I ahd to disable every other input device and har dwire my wireless controller to get this to work. Then it just felt like Been there done that for the game loop, I got bored and I don't have the motivation to perform surgery on my computer every time I want this game to work.