Most of us out there know exactly what a brawler is. It’s not quite a fighting game, but it also kinda is, and you’ve definitely played one of two before. Ever play Streets of Rage? Well there you go. If you haven’t played that, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a more recent example, and a great game to boot. Not a single person with permanent, button-shaped indentions on their thumbs could ever forget beating your way through the streets, stringing together sick combos, and throwing trashcans at people’s shiny noggins. Well what I’m about to talk about is completely, 100% different.
Treachery in Beatdown City is what the developers are calling a “Tactical Brawler” wherein you basically walk up to an enemy, open a menu, and choose which attacks to use, and in what order, making it much easier to carefully plan out what you want to accomplish with a combo, but in many ways completely changing what type of game it is at its core. Beatdown City was made by long-time fans and critics of the genre, and it looks like they got tire of it, so they made it an RPG.
I don’t mean to knock the game, it looks like it will be a fun and fresh take on RPG dynamics, but it really doesn’t seem to have much more in common with its roots other than aesthetics. Most of the sprites are fine, but the character portraits are a curious callback to the weird faces of the game’s ancestors. While Beatdown City does seem like a great idea, it looks like it’ll be a struggle for it to meet its lofty $50,000 funding goal, but if these next couple of weeks are very good to this game, we may be seeing it sooner than we think.
Would you like to talk about it? Hit me up at Shawn At Nuchallenger Dot Com. It’s just weird to make a speculation when you could talk to the developer about it.
[…] brawler. The update contains video showing about 30 minutes worth of gameplay footage. Just how exactly does a genre mixing RPG infused tactical brawler work? Check out the update for yourself and find […]