RIVER CITY GIRLS Is a Riot
I love River City Girls. I figured that I would enjoy the game after watching the first trailer for it, but I have loved it so much more than I thought I would. This game has beautiful art, a classic genre, a fun story, great music, and ridiculously fun characters. If you enjoy any of those things, I would recommend this game.
The story is very simple, Riki and Kunio from River City have been kidnapped and their girlfriends, Kyoko and Misako, go on a rampage trying to find them. While the story is simple, the voice actors and writers bring each of these characters to life and had me and my wife laughing on multiple occasions.
The game plays like most other River City games. It’s a side scrolling beat ‘em up so there’s nothing new or special there. There are also shops all over the town for you to purchase items and new attacks. This is where I voice my first complaint. When you go into a shop to buy something, you have no idea what an item does until you buy it. This means that you may end up wasting a bunch of hard-earned cash just to learn what items do. Luckily, once you purchase an item, it will tell you what it does on subsequent visits.
As far as controls go, I got the PC version, and I never recommend using a keyboard for beat ‘em ups. That holds true for River City Girls. If you’re going to play this on PC, get a controller. It makes everything so much easier.
As far as mechanics, I’ll admit that I’m not super familiar with other River City titles, but this one at least has a mechanic where you can sometimes recruit enemies to fight with you. This is really cool even though I’m terrible at remembering to use this. I also like that you can purchase new attacks and shake things up, but there’s a small caveat to that. In order to revive your fallen friend (if that ever happens), you have to attack their corpse with a heavy attack. The problem I have is that you have to use a neutral heavy attack, and if you accidentally are pressing a direction used to trigger one of your attacks, it can make it hard to revive your friend. The final mechanic that drives me a little insane is that even though friendly fire is turned off, if you throw a weapon, it will still hurt your ally in coop mode. I do like how you can eventually pick up your enemies, though, and use them to beat up other bad guys. That’s fun.
Overall, River City Girls is just a fun game. I don’t know that I would say that it is revolutionary in any way, but it’s a lot of fun and only $30. It features couch coop so that you can take the fun up another level with a friend. I highly recommend this game from WayForward which is out now.
