There’s retro and there’s nostalgia. Unfortunately, Double Dragon IV doesn’t capitalize well on either.
The original NES Double Dragon was an infinitely replayable game. I recall spending hours and hours at friends’ homes as we made our way through the brawler, each time trying to best our speed runs. There were plenty of issues, both technical and by design, but it was charming enough that those actually added to the experience. As kids, managing the screen flicker was a part of the challenge, and knowing that poor hit detection meant we couldn’t just button mash made us arguably better at setting up strategies. Our nostalgia for the game remains so not because of perfect design but because those issues somehow enhanced it. This was the NES, of course, so we know it wasn’t a technical marvel.
Double Dragon IV tries to copy all of those things, from screen flicker to bad jumping to slow attacks, but tries to do it because it thinks that’s what we wanted all along.
Hey, it’s not. We dealt with those things because we had to, not because we wanted to. Modern consoles are powerful enough that these issues don’t exist.
And yet here we are, with a retro game that tries to purposefully make us hate it.
Double Dragon IV is a frustrating game. It’s not difficult because of level design or hordes of enemies, but because it relies on cheap tricks to slow us down. Jumps don’t land like we think they will, kicks and punches can be impossible to target, and enemies are wildly varied in power without rhyme or reason. Recovering from a knockdown is infuriatingly long, and gives enemies the opportunity to set up for another attack before we’ve even moved. Billy and Jimmy are depressingly slow in movement, especially compared to other enemies and modern fighting games.
It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no need to copy the bad parts of a game just because we think it’ll somehow make a modern one true to form. The “classic” technical issues could have been a selectable menu item, just in case some of us wanted to give it a try for the five minutes before we gave up.
For what it’s worth, at least we can continue the game from where we left off, selecting the last chapter we’ve completed from the main menu. I sure wouldn’t want to replay it from the beginning every time my lives & Continues ran out. The included tower mode is perhaps the only redeeming factor, since it lets us try out the different playable characters we’ve unlocked in the campaign against waves of enemies.
Double Dragon IV is a bad game, and it makes me sad. If it avoided the gimmicks and aimed to improve on the technical and design issues that forced the original to be what it had to be, there could be some salvageable gaming. The problems haven’t aged well, and the gimmicks make it feel more like sour grapes rather than red wine. It’s best to stick to last gen’s Double Dragon Neon and Double Dragon II on the NES Classic Mini for our Billy and Jimmy brawling.
This review is based on a PSN code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher.
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