I have been on a tear playing arcade beat em up games on my emulator and for the most part I have been enjoying them. I enjoyed this one too, but this one started out really cool, but just kind of wore down by the end. I hate when you can lift stuff and chunk it and collect weapons, but this whole ability becomes minimized as the game progresses and never usually plays a part in the last fight at all. Still, I enjoyed going through the game as Flame and I will definitely play through again as the other two characters at some point.
The story, people in a room smoking plan to fight crime and are surprisingly the good guys. They are going to release three cool fighters to sweep the city and rid it of crime. Meanwhile, a madman apparently prepares to drop a bomb on the city, this is kind of left out of the narrative leaving me to think this game would have benefited from some cut scenes.
The game play is pretty standard stuff as think Final Fight, but the attacks are not as cool, but you get to pick up a few more things in this one to use as weapons. The game has a bit of a science fiction flair as some of the enemies are robots, some are underground creatures and the last boss is a super enhanced soldier. The game play is pretty fair, I played through using only 22 coins, which is only 5.50, with some practice I could probably get that down a bit, but not too much, the standard enemies are very fair, but some of the bosses are very cheap!
So, this one is not going to change the world, but it works. I like this type of game and I usually enjoy beat em ups more when doing the arcade version because the ports to consoles always have limited continues. If this one had more weapons and stuff for the last couple of levels it would have been more fun, but as it is, it was a pretty cool time.
