River City Ransom: Underground

[munchiaz]

has anyone gotten there backed code. Since i basically paid for it years ago, would be nice to have that and not pay again

 

[Fygee]

I went ahead and bought it last night and gave it a go. There's a lot to like, but at certain times its too old school for its own good. Note that this is only having played it for three hours, so there's still a lot of content to get through.

Pros:

Combat feels retro, but modern at the same time. Fights are smooth, hit detection looks to be spot on.

The graphics are well done and true to the NES style while also, as with the combat, adding some nice modern touches.

Chiptune music is great.

Big character roster with characters that look and feel different from each other.

The XP leveling system is as good as its ever been. You have to level each character seperately, but I dig that as it incentivises you do have a main character, and properly learn the others from the ground up.

The storyline premise is suitably goofy and not serious, but still provides a good reason for things to happen why they're happening.

A certain Double Dragon character has an amazing cameo. Lots of other great cameos and references there too. Make sure to read the text of the defeated enemies for some great ones. I especially like the nerd bad guys' quotes.

Cons:

The game needs to do a much better job of explaining things. Its easy to get lost on what you're doing or supposed to be doing, and its not good enough at the "show, don't tell" method of teaching you or informing you of things to make up for the lack of literal explanation. Don't expect much in the way of hand holding outside of the very beginning of the game.

The move lists need some work. They're not the best as telling you exactly what inputs you need to do to perform them.

Jump moves feel stiff with overly specific timing to perform them. Seems like you can only pull them off when you hit punch/kick/special as you're going up and not down.

There's a mechanic involving the police that isn't explained at all, and creates a situation where you get absolutely swamped. There's also points where a police vehicle will come out of nowhere and literally run you over in one shot, killing you and forcing you to respawn with half of your money gone.

You start out with no special moves, which makes combat overly grindy and button mashy until you do.

Holy shit its hard. Too hard in ways that I would deem as unfair. One notable example is a respawn area where you're immediately swamped with enemies before you even have a chance to move.

Anyways, going to put some good time into this over the weekend and I'll have more impressions then.

 

[munchiaz]

I went ahead and bought it last night and gave it a go. There's a lot to like, but at certain times its too old school for its own good. Note that this is only having played it for three hours, so there's still a lot of content to get through.

Pros:

Combat feels retro, but modern at the same time. Fights are smooth, hit detection looks to be spot on.

The graphics are well done and true to the NES style while also, as with the combat, adding some nice modern touches.

Chiptune music is great.

Big character roster with characters that look and feel different from each other.

The XP leveling system is as good as its ever been. You have to level each character seperately, but I dig that as it incentivises you do have a main character, and properly learn the others from the ground up.

The storyline premise is suitably goofy and not serious, but still provides a good reason for things to happen why they're happening.

A certain Double Dragon character has an amazing cameo. Lots of other great cameos and references there too. Make sure to read the text of the defeated enemies for some great ones. I especially like the nerd bad guys' quotes.

Cons:

The game needs to do a much better job of explaining things. Its easy to get lost on what you're doing or supposed to be doing, and its not good enough at the "show, don't tell" method of teaching you or informing you of things to make up for the lack of literal explanation. Don't expect much in the way of hand holding outside of the very beginning of the game.

The move lists need some work. They're not the best as telling you exactly what inputs you need to do to perform them.

Jump moves feel stiff with overly specific timing to perform them. Seems like you can only pull them off when you hit punch/kick/special as you're going up and not down.

There's a mechanic involving the police that isn't explained at all, and creates a situation where you get absolutely swamped. There's also points where a police vehicle will come out of nowhere and literally run you over in one shot, killing you and forcing you to respawn with half of your money gone.

You start out with no special moves, which makes combat overly grindy and button mashy until you do.

Holy shit its hard. Too hard in ways that I would deem as unfair. One notable example is a respawn area where you're immediately swamped with enemies before you even have a chance to move.

Anyways, going to put some good time into this over the weekend and I'll have more impressions then.

Thanks for the write up. I wanna play, but still have yet to get my reward

edit: NVM, they just sent it to a different email. I will play this weekend

 

[smokehouse]

That sucks to hear the difficulty is amped up a bit too much...

 

[k'_127]

I went ahead and bought it last night and gave it a go. There's a lot to like, but at certain times its too old school for its own good. Note that this is only having played it for three hours, so there's still a lot of content to get through.

Pros:

Combat feels retro, but modern at the same time. Fights are smooth, hit detection looks to be spot on.

The graphics are well done and true to the NES style while also, as with the combat, adding some nice modern touches.

Chiptune music is great.

Big character roster with characters that look and feel different from each other.

The XP leveling system is as good as its ever been. You have to level each character seperately, but I dig that as it incentivises you do have a main character, and properly learn the others from the ground up.

The storyline premise is suitably goofy and not serious, but still provides a good reason for things to happen why they're happening.

A certain Double Dragon character has an amazing cameo. Lots of other great cameos and references there too. Make sure to read the text of the defeated enemies for some great ones. I especially like the nerd bad guys' quotes.

Cons:

The game needs to do a much better job of explaining things. Its easy to get lost on what you're doing or supposed to be doing, and its not good enough at the "show, don't tell" method of teaching you or informing you of things to make up for the lack of literal explanation. Don't expect much in the way of hand holding outside of the very beginning of the game.

The move lists need some work. They're not the best as telling you exactly what inputs you need to do to perform them.

Jump moves feel stiff with overly specific timing to perform them. Seems like you can only pull them off when you hit punch/kick/special as you're going up and not down.

There's a mechanic involving the police that isn't explained at all, and creates a situation where you get absolutely swamped. There's also points where a police vehicle will come out of nowhere and literally run you over in one shot, killing you and forcing you to respawn with half of your money gone.

You start out with no special moves, which makes combat overly grindy and button mashy until you do.

Holy shit its hard. Too hard in ways that I would deem as unfair. One notable example is a respawn area where you're immediately swamped with enemies before you even have a chance to move.

Anyways, going to put some good time into this over the weekend and I'll have more impressions then.

Thanks for the impressions. Sounds very interesting. Hoping for a console release soon.

 

[Electric Grave]

That sucks to hear the difficulty is amped up a bit too much...

You can always go with a nice relaxing JAYHARRPEEGEEE that holds your hand faithfully and makes you feel special, lol.

I'm excited for this, I have yet to try the 3DS recent release, would like to check that out as well.

 

[Fygee]

Some more quick observations. First, the bad.

My biggest complaint right now is the terribly monotonous grind if you want to get any low level character up to a useable status.

The way the game works, leveling up only raises your stat level cap. It doesn't provide you with the actual boost to your stat. You can only acquire this by eating different types food or reading different kinds of books, fairly similar to the original RCR. However, in this game where you have a bunch of different characters, its absolutely brutal. You're going to die a lot, which means half of your money disappears each time, making it very difficult to make any headway. You can grind in front of one particular mall that has cheap food to boost STR (your basic move damage) and ATK (your special move damage), but it takes forever and gets boring really fast.

Once you have some stats, you then have to grind to get some special moves, as combat without them is very difficult. This ranges from easy to hard as hell, and some characters like Provie have their main special move be oddly expensive.

Adding to all that, as you get to the second and third part of the game, the enemies gain increased damage and HP. This makes it even more difficult to build up any character outside of your main.

The easy fix for this would be to have your money shared across your characters, so that you could make some good coin with you main, and use that to beef up the others. Alas, money is seperate for all characters.

The other thing I really dislike is the police mechanic. If you "break the law" by vandalising property or attacking a civilian, your police meter will go up. This will spawn police enemies that are tough and annoying to beat, and you earn no money from. The more you break the law, the more of them will spawn. This will often happen on accident as civilians love to run into the middle of your fight, causing you to hit them. Sometimes they'll spawn with a cop car that plows through the side of the screen and nails you before you have a chance to react. If you hit a police officer on the ground, it will raise the police meter even more. Eventually, and easily, you'll have the screen swarming with cops, and they will spawn on every screen until you lower your police meter by hiding in a garbage dumpster (only after you've defeated all the enemies on the screen), or hide in a hideout. More often than not, these options are not that accessible. I like the idea they had for it, but the execution is just really frustrating.

There's a quest from hell involving bringing a milk bottle from your town to Cindy in "Cashington". If you get hit, even just ones, you drop it and it breaks. You have to traverse a lot of screens without getting hit. Normally this isn't a problem as when your character is running, the enemies will very rarely be able to hit you. However, you run significantly slower with it, making it extremely frustrating and requiring luck to make it. Right now this quest is getting tons of complaints from players, and rightly so.

The move list does a terrible job of explaining how to perform them. I touched on this before, but its all the more frustrating when you get a lot more of them. Thankfully there's guides on Steam that are much more helpful.

As for the good...

When playing my main character, I have a blast. I have a good load out of special moves and stats, and you really feel like you're kicking some major butt without it becoming too easy. My main is Greg who has moves deliberally ripped off from Ryu. Tossing hadokens at enemies is just awesome. This is when the game is at its best.

Enemy variety kicks up a bit after the first Act. You get to beat up a bunch of rich preppies with popped polo collars who drop more money than other enemies. That, in and of itself, is satisfying.

There's a lot of funny text with some good retro references during storyline bits, and when enemies are defeated. Just be sure to keep on eye on them as you're likely to miss them when things get crazy.

As of yet, I haven't experienced any bugs or crashes.

My recommendation would be to pick it up as long as you can deal with the above frustrations. Supposedly they're working on fixing them in future patches, so that's good. You may want to wait until they do. Its not perfect, but its fun, and will scratch the itch we've had for a long time waiting for a new RCR.

 

[Kid Panda]

That sucks to hear the difficulty is amped up a bit too much...

Actually the difficulty isn't much far off of the nes original. Enemies do take too much of a beating at first but that tapers off later in the game when you start getting moves.

 

[Dr Shroom]

http://www.oneangrygamer.net/2017/0...dmcad-by-alex-mauer-removed-from-steam/35161/

tl;dr removed from steam due to autism and possibly tranny brain problems

 

[Pasky]

Game is absolute shit anyways.

 

[k'_127]

Based on that story, I think it will be brought back shortly.

 

[k'_127]

http://www.siliconera.com/2017/07/19/river-city-ransom-underground-getting-new-soundtrack/

The studio is commissioning another OST and apparently planned console ports prior to the DMCA claims.