Even in its compromised home console format, few would disagree that Final Fight was the king of Super Nintendo brawlers.
But the 16-bit system was bursting with beat-’em-ups, and we’ll always harbour a fondness for Jaleco’s kooky 1992 effort, Rival Turf – or Rushing Beat, as it was known in Japan.
The title spawned two sequels – Brawl Brothers and The Peace Keepers – and now more than 30 years later, the series is back to stand on the shoulders of other belt scrolling revivals, like Streets of Rage 4.
Right off the bat, this sequel plunges you into the off-kilter insanity the Jaleco originals were renowned for, pitting you against reanimated corpses and vomiting frogs.
The plot is paper thin, but it leans heavily into the narratives of the original games, even regularly flashing up screenshots from the SNES releases to remind you of what happened.
Both Jack Flack and Oozie Nelson return, except they retain their original Japanese names of Rick Norton and Douglas Bild here. They’re joined by some of the characters from the abovementioned sequels, including Lord J and Wendy Milan.
Each fighter handles slightly differently and has an impressive array of moves, ranging from grabs, stomps, throws, and combos.
The game actually feels surprisingly fluid, and there’s a greater degree of depth than you may expect, ranging from cancels through to counters.
It looks flashy too with tons of comic book-style effects making the combat feel exaggerated. But movement on the ground can feel stiff, and later levels lean a bit too heavily into annoying gimmicks, like lasers and land mines.
We encountered some crashes in the last stage which set back our progress a few times, and the final boss is an exercise in frustration. But overall the action is frantic, and crucially it feels a lot more technical than some of its contemporaries, like Marvel Cosmic Invasion et al.
While the presentation is mixed and the game does ultimately run out of ideas, we actually do recommend this to beat-’em-up fans. There’s more depth to the combat than we anticipated, and there’s an air of weirdness to the whole endeavour that helps it to stand out.
