The same night I tried River City Girls for the first time, I gave this a short run. 20 hours later I have finished this, and I'm working on unlocking everything. River City Girls, I'm 4 bosses in and really just want it to end already.

First off, the quality doesn't even compare in the gameplay department. RCRU has unbelievable depth with the combo routes and moves each character gets. There's a total of 10 story playable characters, each with a distinct fighting style and different focus on how they beat down the opposition. I started with Bruno, the luchador style fighter. At the beginning, fighting can be limited, but as soon as you buy more moves, you begin opening up wild new combo routes and fun attacks. The game's built-in movelist is kind of useless, but you can find helpful ones in the Steam Community Guides that help break down how to use each move. Once I got more of Bruno's moves unlocked, I was launching opponents with blade kick, juggling with hits, and finishing with either an aerial Shooting Star drop or the absolute wild reverse rolling aerial throw. Everything feels satisfying to land, even if some characters definitely are weaker than others. Provie and Glen both have great movesets, Provie's offering crazy mobility and group damage when her specials are unlocked. I've been beating up Randy and Andy in the tutorial as everyone just to grind out levels and money to do NG+ and Fungondo (Nintendo hard) runs with full movesets. Some characters are easily worse than others, but at the end of the day, play what you have fun with, you'll succeed if you're good enough at it. Wish I had some bros to play 4 player co-op with, but the one I'm playing RCG with got filtered early on and doesn't want to try it anymore.

The music is very enjoyable, and even had to be rewritten entirely due to some DMCA drama. You can find the files online for the old music if you like, but I've come to enjoy the current soundtrack more. The title screen theme, tutorial act theme, Cyndi's theme, and the A&R Auto hideout themes in particular are some of my favorites.

Graphically, the game evokes improved-NES style art, which is nice. Not complex, and due to simplicity, makes it easy to make characters to fight against...and fight as, in the Arena mode. The animations for each character, even the enemies, are detailed and expressive. The weird Roids jocks constantly hip thrusting and smugly elbow dropping on you gives you a sense of how they behave, and it's a nice touch. Nerds try to tackle you and land face first, Vixens get assistance from others they call in to launch them forward for a dash attack, Warlocks channel their weird dark magic before firing it off, the Rich Kids literally punch you with money trails... It's good for how simple the artstyle is.

As for the difficulty...the game pulls no punches. As you progress through the game, the AI generally begins to improve and become intelligent. At the start, the enemies will walk into your punches and specials, and typically won't attack as much. Later on, they begin to back up out of your attack range and force you to approach or begin to pincer you, and by the end, if you try to be reckless, they'll whiff punish you, hard. If you don't know how the block button works by the end of act 2, you're gonna learn if you expect to finish the game. The strongest healing item gives you back 40 stamina, which with a max level 40 Bruno was somewhere around 533 max, so healing is less effective than not getting hit a lot to begin with. I was getting admittedly frustrated with the final area at the end of act 3, and the final boss, but despite that, still felt pretty satisfied and elated when I finally started busting their chins open on the pavement consistently. I felt like I improved, which is kind of rare in beat 'em ups as the AI either is dumb as bricks by default or cheats a'la Konami beat 'em ups.

The plot's as barebones as you'd expect for River City Ransom. It's there to give you purpose to punching stuff, but does give a lot of nice nods to the original game and some other Kunio-franchise games. It does get kind of dumb by the end of Act 3, though. Have fun bringing milk home.

The game is kind of...devoid of dev assistance or post-launch stuff, which bums me out. A glitch used to exist at launch that let you play Story mode as any of the Arena characters, which, while they were more limited in moves and stats, still was something fun to play with, that the devs had mentioned they wanted to include as a real feature before patching it out. Mod support was also planned, but at some point both just disappeared into the aether, probably due to River City Girls. I am gonna mess about with a friend and try to make a CheatEngine cheat table to let one pick whoever they want to play as through the story, if possible... I know you can still bring OG Alex and Ryan into the story mode, though if you change characters you lose the ability to pick them again. That enough points to, hopefully, just needing to poke around at memory addresses to change character freely.

All in all, if you consider yourself anything of a Beat 'em Up fan, you should play this game. It's rough around the edges, certainly, as it seems to be both Conatus's first and only game, and has some NES era game design choices both as a joke and a gimmick, but that doesn't stop the game from shining when it counts.

P.S.: I mentioned River City Girls as it, unfortunately, seems to be the future of the River City games (though man I really hope after Provie and some of the other RCRU crew, and a horribly bastardized Paul, showed up in RCG2, we get another look into the Western River City and its 80s-90s aesthetic and gameplay) and if you intend on playing it, play it first. The AI in RCG is pretty mindless and a lot of the best options for combat tend to be to juggle with some weak attacks, combo in a strong or special, stomp until restand, block retaliation attack, and repeat. They also like to block, and unlike in this game where blocking is both limited by your/your opponent's energy stat, and breakable with grabs, there's no guardbreaks in RCG. Not that I've found yet, anyway. What I'm saying is, it's way less fun to play after RCRU... and you'll probably hit the special button when trying to pick up weapons enough times to become detrimental and annoying. Dedicated grab button and strong attacks being on charge inputs really makes a world of difference.