Right out of the gate, Double Dragon 4 has to contend with its own legacy. The NES Double Dragons are beloved, but in retrospect there are parts of them that don't hold up. As adaptations of quarter-munching arcade games, there's a certain sense of unfairness to them; waves of powerful enemies that eventually feel like they're countering your every move before you can even make it, limited lives/continues... and the platforming. Good god, the platforming. Being NES games, they used both face buttons for punching and kicking. To jump, you needed to press both at once. This was awkward enough, but then the platforming just got obscene as it went on. It's the one flaw in the otherwise very good Double Dragon 2, and it all but ruins the latter half of the original game for me. 3 is light on the platforming elements but manages to be tricky due to only having one life per character, and many have railed against it for that. With all that in mind, Double Dragon 4 manages to have its cake and eat it too. There are platforming elements, but they're few and far between this time. It's not nearly as obnoxious as the NES games, but it's still possible to cheaply lose a life to it. The biggest saving grace comes with modernization; at last, you have a dedicated jump button. It alleviates a lot of the headache, but the ability to hit punch and kick at the same time to jump is also there if you're some sort of purist. The buttons are mappable to whatever you'd prefer, and you have three "extra" attacks as well; a headbutt, a roundhouse kick, and an elbow backwards. The "How To Play" section in the config menu shows you all of these moves and the input commands for a few very powerful attacks that will save your skin throughout this game... but who will you use them on?
Why, who else? A medley of maladjusted misfits marching to make melee! It should be noted that Double Dragon 4 has three main game modes. The one you'll likely be spending the most time with is the story mode. There are small cutscenes in between each stage, which Double Dragon 2 also did, but the story is hardly there. Your girlfriend got kidnapped by ruffians led by the Okuda sisters, who want to... something. There really isn't much here beyond the flimsy "GET YOUR GIRL BACK" plot that has driven every other game in this series, so Double Dragon 4 sticks to tradition on that front for better or for worse. The real meat of the game is running through the stages and beating the holy hell out of everyone who tries to get in your way. The effectiveness of this can vary, and throughout 12 stages of it you'll see the entire spread of it. Regular street thugs, buff fighters, karate men, sumo wrestlers and ninjas... you have quite a lot of enemy types to deal with, and quite a few at once this time as well! With no sprite limitations, Double Dragon 4 is free to hurl as many as six or seven enemies at you in one go. This can be painful, considering that you have three lives and five credits. This cannot be changed in any way, and that's unfortunate. All you have to fight back are the moves at your disposal, and maybe a weapon on the ground if you're in a stage with them. These are helpful, but there's nothing here that hasn't already been in a Double Dragon game. Knives, chains, bats, boxes... it's effective, but all the same. The moves you can use appear to be the same, but at a closer glance there are some newer and effective ones. The all-powerful Cyclone Kick from the NES games is back, but its power level seems to be downgraded in Double Dragon 4. It's still a useful way of knocking down foes surrounding you, but for my money the best new move is this strange corkscrew somersault you can perform. By pressing the headbutt extra attack and then the kick right after, you launch forward at an angle and send enemies flying. It seems to do more damage than a Cyclone Kick, and I managed to clear the game rather easily using it.
What, then, once you clear the game? There's not too much else. A first playthrough is somewhere in the ballpark of an hour; I clocked 50 minutes on my first run, and cleared the game on my second once I learned about the corkscrew somersault and made things far easier on myself. With no difficulty selection, things might seem to be a bit short. Double Dragon 4 attempts to make up for this by adding in some extra modes; a 2-player duel option in which you fight as any of the enemy characters you've unlocked by clearing the story mode, and a Tower mode which is essentially a survival gauntlet against waves of enemies. Progress in Tower mode unlocks the enemy characters for the story mode, and I can see that offering some replayability if you're so inclined. If that's not your cup of tea, then Double Dragon 4's playable offerings may be somewhat slim. Double Dragon veterans will likely be able to plow through the story mode in no time flat, but the less experienced may spend some time struggling with it and increasing their play time at the cost of added frustration. Presentation-wise... well, someone sure likes Double Dragon 2! That game's graphical style is 100% what Double Dragon 4 is going for, but with some twists. The backgrounds are a little more detailed, but it gives everything this strange sort of fangame-ish feel rather than an evolution of an NES classic unburdened by the limitations of the old grey box. You can choose between retro-styled Double Dragon chiptunes or an updated soundtrack, and it's nice to have the option. Certainly, the game seems to be missing a few of those; in addition to no difficulty selection, there's no real way to resize the window other than making the whole thing full screen. It was sized well enough for me personally, but it could be an issue for others.
That's Double Dragon 4. It's... confusing, to say the least. If we're being technical, Super Double Dragon was Double Dragon 4. This game sort of feels like a fourth NES game in the series, but it really amounts to giving the "best" game in the series most of the attention, with some scattered nods here and there to the other two NES games. It's perfectly playable and all, but it doesn't particularly aspire to be a complete masterpiece. It's okay, which is fitting to its legacy because that's what the NES trilogy was to me; just okay. At $7 USD for a 2-hour game with some glimmers of replay value, one could do a lot worse... but one could do better as well, if we're being honest. If you have the money to spare and Double Dragon 2 was a nostalgic favorite of yours on the NES, it's worth a look. Other than that, it's just sort of there and average and fine. A decent way to get your beat-em-up fix, if nothing else, but I'm sorry to say that there's not too much else going on under the hood of this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment