Seeing Double! Revenge Of The Wounded Dragons Review

Revenge of the Wounded Dragons? More like Revenge of Double Dragon. Artificial Mind & Movement's new side-scrolling beat-'em-up is a love letter to the original kung-fu fighter from 1987,right down to the Karate Kid-style brother protagonists in cheesy red and blue fighting togs. And like all good mash notes, this one includes a little bit of creativity: the developers have added some platform jumping, minigames, and basic puzzles to all of the punching-people-out stuff. So even though this downloadable game may be aimed straight at your nostalgia gene, it mixes in enough innovation to hold your interest through the moments that your brain tells you that you've done all this before

Pipes, baseball bats, sacks of rice, fish--just about anything can be used as a weapon in Revenge of the Wounded Dragons.

The fundamentals haven't budged an inch, though. This is a straight reworking of Double Dragon and its dozens of imitators. You take on the role of one of two kung-fu-fighting brothers who are off on a quest in the breezy, six-chapter Story mode, which is playable alone or cooperatively with a buddy on the same system (there is no online support for multiplayer).

The goal of your wandering-around beatdowns--drumroll please--is to rescue a pretty girl and avenge the murder of your sensei. It's hard to tell who's who at the start--whether the girl is your sister or some sort of love interest, or whether the old guy is your grandpa or some kind of martial arts master--because there is no narration, and the cheesy comic-book cutscenes fly by too fast to figure everything out. But you don't really need to know any of the finer details beyond the time-honored beat-'em-up cliches. There are bad guys. They have your girl. You need to beat the hell out of them while grooving to awesome '70s-style kung-fu funk to get her back.

The action is fast and furious, although brawling is on the simple side. You can kill most enemy goons with basic button-mashing punches, messing around only occasionally with kicking or ducking to wallop the heck out of the groins of guys who know how to protect their faces but not the more tender portions of their anatomy. While you can pull off combos, most are simple punch and kick variations that come up routinely in the course of button mashing. Scraps are just long enough to get your blood pumping without stretching into boring, please-die-soon territory. Controls are good and fluid for the most part, only feeling a touch stiff in spots when climbing ladders or leaping to grab ledges. The only minor irritation when punching it out is the lengthy pause when you get knocked down. This delay is long enough to allow baddies to get in close and then hammer you again as soon as you stagger to your feet, unless you immediately leap out of harm's way.

 

Over all not bad giving it 7/10 Gamersathome score.

 

Review By: Mitch Parker