River City Melee Mach!! is the latest release in the Kunio-kun series of games by Arc System Works. Longtime fans of the franchise will immediately recognize the old-school NES style graphics in this new, large-scale brawler that pits four players against each other. With a broad range of single player stories and great local co-op play, River City Melee Mach!! lo🦩oks to be a great addition to any Nintendo Switch library, so long as you don’t care much for online play.
Simple Combat That Anyone Can Pick Up
At its core, the fighting mechanics of River City Melee Mach!! remain as simple and straightforward as other games in the series. Characters can punch, kick, or jump in a way that closely resembles the early Double Dragon games, and there are alsꦬo special moves that can be used.
Combat takes place in distinct battlegrounds with a random assortment of 🌺weapons that litter the ground, and there is often an edge where players can accidentally fall, or be thrown from, losing them the round automatically. While weapons are powerful for up-close use, they can also be thrown from varying distances, effectively allowing for safe poking without the risk of being hit.
Fans of the series will feel right at home with the massive roster of more than 180 characters and 250 special moves spread out over 30 different teams. New players who are not familiar with the🐻 series will easily pick up the combat and be able to start playing right away with friends.
As one would expect from the series, the single-player campaig💯n takes players thr🎃ough the story for their chosen school, which offers a lot of content to clear through. With that in mind, the nature of the story mode is always the same: watch a few cutscenes that lead to a brawl. Winning leads to the next series of cutscenes and the next brawl.
Local Co-op Is Fantastic
Playing locally with friends is a ton of fun. Players can choose between the standard Battle Royal where the winner🔥 is the last person standing in a free-for-all brawl, or face off in a Tag Match. Change Match provides a unique challenge by throwing wave after wave of opponents endlessly at players, challenging them to coordinate and use special moves effectively.
Online Mode Needs Work
Playing online with friends is also a lot of fun, however,꧂ there seem to be several problems that need to be addressed regarding connectivity when a player disconnects unint🌃entionally or intentionally.
Although the game appeared to have a decent number of online rooms for players to join, crashes occurred often. The image below shows a fight where Player One suddenly vanished, most likely from a disconnect, which then had the effect of freezing the game👍 and kicking everyon♋e else out of the match.
Technical issues also persisted if a player quit in the middle of a match, prompting a message to appear saying that a player had left the match, ending the game early for everyone else. After a short while, the remaining players would p🅠roceed to the next round, and in the character select screen, one could see if a player ♉had been replaced by a CPU controlled opponent.
All attempts to play with strangers resulted in similar outcomes, with the best-case scenarios being a noticeable amount of input lag that made the game awkward ꦚto play, along with the freezing and cancelling of matches mentioned above. This was tested over a number of days, and the issue remained a constant thorn while other titles on the Switch continued to work without issue when played online. Hopefully, this is something on the radar of the developers, because if not, there is little use for the online portion of the game, which should be one of the most important featjures🍸 for long-term replayability.
Still A Fun Time
River City Melee Mach!! offers players exactly what one would expect in the long line of Kunio-kun games, and is easy for new players to pick up and learn in no time. As a party game, the free-for-all b❀rawl action and large roster of fighters are sure to ente𒅌rtain players for quite some time, and the single-player content can keep a player busy with the storylines for each of the thirty schools.
The only problem with the title right now falls to the issues of the Online Battle. If the issues presented above are not addressed, one cannot expect to use this feature at🅰 all, which is a shame, because play♏ing against other people is perhaps the most fun part of this game, especially for newcomers to the series who may not care for the story.
A Nintendo Switch copy of River City Melee Mach!! was purchased by TheGamer for this review. River City Melee Mach!! is available now for the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nintendo Switch, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation 4, and PC.
River City Melee Mach!!
- Top Critic Avg: 70/100
