Welcome to our review of the latest entry in the Kunio series, where the girls try to figure out who nabbed their boyfriends, River City Girls!
Someone’s getting River City’s biggest beatdown when these girls find whoever nabbed their boyfriends!
There’s trouble once again on the mean streets of River City, but this time the boys are in over their heads! In this all-new entry in the legendary beat-’em-up series, hot-blooded heroes Kunio and Riki have been captured, leaving it to their hard-hitting girlfriends, Kyoko and Misako, to serve up some payback. As you punch and kick your way across town – either solo or with a friend in local co-op – you’ll gain new skills, chow down on power-ups, wield an assortment of weapons, and unleash an arsenal of combos, throws, and special attacks that will leave the bad guys crying for mama – all in outrageous 16-bit style! The awesome action is punctuated by manga story panels, anime cutscenes, and an epic synth-pop soundtrack. It’s an old-school rumble for a new generation!
The Kunio series has been around for ages and is usually named among the best of the best in this beat em up genre. Though this is not your typical linear brawler, no, this is mostly a “screen” based brawler where you go around on a map like world to find out where and what to do, facing enemies along the way and big-time bosses all round. All-clad in your typical old school Japanese high school/manga attire and well, I must say I loved the feeling I had while playing this game.
River City Girls is filled with a lot of fun items to pick up and use to beat up your enemies and at the same time, it helps beat the repetitive nature of a beat em up game like this. Because and let us be honest here, this is by far the biggest threat this genre has, being too repetitive. Despite having it all in your hands, you do get to learn new and better attacks as you advance, but in the end, you are only limited by the means of your attacks.
What I did like, there is only a smaller amount of backtracking really. With the layout of the world as it is presented, it becomes quite clear that you do need to go back at times, but it is kept within reason and will not feel like for example a Metroid game.
Graphically, I must say I love the “new but old feeling” River City Girls has. Those 16-bit sprites sure do the trick, but it just feels modern when playing. Though this might be due to the number of options given, like picking up that trash can and hitting that stuck up girl in the face or using a bat to hit a young hoodlum. River City Girls has it all.
In conclusion, River City Girls is actually quite fun, it has some smart antics going around and the storyline does its very best to keep you going. It may not be the most renewing game, but the repetitiveness of the genre is yours to break and once you look past that, you are left with a fun game!
