Double Dragon: Neon
PC/Steam Review
This game really brings me back to my childhood. First level is basically a recreation of the first level in the original Double Dragon. The original theme music has been remastered, even adding a guitar solo in it. You can customize your moves & even upgrade them if you find tapes to do it & mythril to upgrade those moves. The graphics are EXCELLENT in comparison to the old 8-bit graphics you used to have on old console systems, even better than the 16-bit graphics on SNES; they are cell-shaded however, which I was never a fan of, but I think they did well with them in this game. This is not the same game that you would have played during your childhood however, there is plenty of suggestive content that you may not what your children playing this game.
The game has been turned into a bit of a spoof if you consider the original developers had this game as a no nonsense beatdown:
The main enemy in the game happens to be a bit of a ripoff of Skeletor from He-Man with a high-pitched voice you get from a lot of Japanese lowlifes wearing facepaint (I'm sure we've all seen some anime with emperor villains in this type of attire). He's no pushover, but the comments that he's making throughout the game just has me shaking my head.
Another thing that seems to be odd is that special moves appear to be granted through cassette tapes which are dropped from enemies as you defeat them or by buying them; I can't argue with the fact that this allows you to customize your fighting experience, but the fact that these are granted through songs just seems a little ridiculous to me.
The mythril concept is another concept taken from other games that just doesn't seem right in this type of game, but it does give a means of upgrade...
The game does seem a bit slow compared to what I remember in older games. Seems they turned down the speed on the game to make the animations more realistic & fluent.
There are a few things that just puts me off on the game & I can't really say I expect they'll be fixed:
Just another game that does not except game input from any gamepad other than XBOX controllers. And this game is not easy to play using the keyboard, so the lack of proper gamepad support puts a HUGE dent in the playability of the game.
The game has some SERIOUS performance issues after you've played a few levels, the lag actually gets to the point that it reminds me of some flash games where they were not optimized for the Flash Player or have too many elements on the screen at the same time. I am hoping this will be fixed in the future, because this is one thing that is going to get people to stop playing the game pretty quickly.
