Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons Review

ign.com:

Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons teaches an important lesson: when a strange man walks into your office carrying one of your friends, tells you he’s the new mayor, and that he needs your help to bring peace back to your fallen city, don’t believe him. It also teaches that melding roguelike elements and tag-team combat (a la Marvel vs Capcom) can make for a great foundation for an otherwise old-school side-scrolling beat 'em up. Of course, without being particularly remarkable in any other way, and occasionally just straight-up bad, there may not be much more to learn that other recent games couldn’t also teach you more effectively.

Compared to the likes of Streets of Rage 4 and River City Girls 2, DDG’s combat is very simple in execution. You won't have to be familiar with platform fighters like Super Smash Bros to find the single-button combos and direction-plus-button special moves that games like it made popular to be very comfortable. Canceling normal attacks into big special moves feels great, and I liked the extremely generous windows you’re given to juggle enemies. This is fine on its own but the true depth lies in the tag system, which allows you to pick a pair of characters to clobber the streets with instead of just one.

The variety of fighters available to unlock and choose from is remarkable, less because there are 14 of them and more because they are all meaningfully distinct from one another. Boss characters can be unlocked for your use, and retain all of their unique actions that they used against you. Only a handful of characters can wield dropped enemy weapons; some can alley-oop enemies into their own air attacks; some can pick up objects in a room and bash heads with them.

If there’s any