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[i]Just Beat Em Up: World of Fury[/i] is side-scrolling action game with a retro arcade feel, featuring three different playable characters, nine chapters, in eight unique bosses. It can be played with a friend in co-op mode, and really works at mimicking the traditional arcade and early console beat-em up games.
The three different characters offer three different playing styles, with each having his/her strengths and weaknesses.
Enemies show up on each section of each stage, and you have to fight your way through each batch of enemies before your able to move on.
One of the stresses from the early arcade games had to do with timing issues and needing to make it past every part of a stage before the timer runs out. In this game there is no timer for each section, as long as you survive.
The most important part when evaluating these games has to do with the fluidity of combat. There are a lot of choppy breaks within the combat, and this may detract some players as a result. The combat does have a continual counter for hit combos, and fortunately there are no timers for these combinations. As long as you stay safe and do not get hit by enemy, the hit counter will continue to climb.
As you go through combat, you accumulate fury, and when this bar is raised to a maximum, you can unleash a powerful attack, and while your fury he is still lasting, you do have seemingly faster attacks and deal more damage.
The graphics are pixelated, the animations are not too exciting. The sprites seem to have very simple action frames, but it does have enough transitional frames to make it look like a early arcade game. The overall artwork could be better, and enemies do get a bit repetitive. It would be nice to have more dynamic designs in the enemies. It does get boring after hacking through 50 enemies to all look identical within the same level. (Of course there are different enemies on each level, and a unique boss as well, but the same enemy does repeat many times over each level.)
Overall, the game has the look from the 80s, and gameplay feel that seems to combine several features from [i]Golden Axe[/i] and [i]Streets of Rage[/i]. With the amount of pixel blurring, you really get the feel that you are playing in an arcade. This brought back some good memories, and I think the price is reasonable as well at $6.99 USD. I think if you are looking for that old school retro game feel, this has pretty much everything you are looking for. If you still have those older games and want to compare them with this, I would still stick with the older classics.
Here’s my gameplay video with one of the characters through the first 3+ stages and some silly deaths:
https://youtu.be/DQzIrL2fpXw
[quote]I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.[/quote]
