I know it's in bad taste to speak ill of the delisted, and maybe if you have enough local friends and family to sit through this with you, you'll have a better time. But for me as a solo player who has played the original River City Ransom and the Game Boy Advance remake, this game turned out to be a frustrating disappointment.
River City Underground commits the greatest mistake that a brawler can make. It simply isn't fun to fight the enemies.
Imagine if you were playing Final Fight, but every single enemy is Rolento. Or imagine that you're playing a Spider-man game, but in reverse. You're not Spider-man. Not Peter, not Miles, not Gwen, or Ben or Mayday, or Miguel, you get the point. You're some poor purse snatcher trying to fight off six Spider-people at the same time. For 15 hours.
The game has a good variety of enemies with their own particular quirks, but they all use the same core tactics. Staying out of the player's attack range, using long distance ranged and rush-in attacks and sucker punching the player from behind whenever they're trying to fight someone else. This is somewhat bearable early on when you believe that leveling up and buying more moves will make things better, but it doesn't. The enemies simply become more annoying in response to you advancing.
You'll try to chase down a gas canister throwing SWAT officer, only for them to block, or jump, or dodge out of the way when you go for the attack. You try to grab them, but the animation for it is so slow that they have all the time in the world to escape, and now you're wide open because whiffing a grab stuns you for a second. Good god, the knockdowns and status effects take forever to recover from. Whoops, I just got frozen into a block of ice by one of the nerds! Time to go downstairs and get a drink! (And the worst part is that there are ways to break out of the stunned state, but the game itself neither indicates this nor tells you how.)
It feels like the designer thought that they could advance the genre by making it play more like a traditional 1-v-1 fighting game, but the end result is that the biggest threat isn't being beaten down by the enemies. It's throwing your hands up and rage quitting because you're tired of the enemies constantly reading your inputs, with their stupid hanky panky keep-away ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
I played Glen the shotoclone and Alex. They both have nice, varied movesets that are unique. But in the end, it ends up being a waste of effort because you'll only focus on the few bread and butter combos that stand a chance of hitting anyone. You'll sweat more fighting the overtuned trash mobs than you will fighting the bosses, so much so that the boss fights are all complete jokes compared to fighting the regulars.
I could understand if only the luchadors, the SWAT team, and/or the late game enemies were hard to keep up with, but when everyone is making you whiff and blocking you and counter-attacking you, it eventually just eats away at your desire to keep playing, even if you're not actually losing.
I loved exploring the map and its varied urban environments. How it’s based on the original, bringing back and updating all of the locations from the NES game, while expanding on it with entirely new districts to explore and fight through. I liked how the story builds itself specifically off of the Americanized River City Ransom, versus other sequels that focus more on the Japanese Kunio continuity.
I liked the pixel art and how it evokes the look of the original NES games, even if it had a slight air of indie inexperience to it. Having 11 playable characters is great, and it’s fun to unlock their unique abilities during a playthrough. I liked all the nods and references to other games and pop culture strewn throughout River City. The soundtrack is decent enough, if not particularly great. Some of the jokes even managed to land with me.
I can tell that the game was made by fans who cared for what they were making, but it's all for nothing when actually playing the game becomes so miserable.
Sorry, Underground. I tried to love you as much as I could, but in the end, you didn't love me back.
It's not you, it's me... and by "me," I mean you. It's 100% you.
Not Recommended.
