The Warriors: Street Brawl Review

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It’s been a magical mid-year, hasn’t it?  Xbox Live’s savvy Winter/Summer of Arcade has had us downloading some top class titles direct to our consoles, and we’ve been happily surprised by each offering.  Games like Shadow Complex and ‘Splosion Man showed us that simply because a game doesn’t make a full retail release, doesn’t mean it isn’t well worth our time.

Well it was fun while it lasted, but prepare to go flocking back to the original stigma of distrust we all held for XBLA.  Morbid curiosity had me spend the points to buy Arcade’s latest offering, The Warriors: Street Brawl, and sheer bloody-minded-ness was all that allowed me to finish it.

Now before anyone gets confused, no, this is not a re-release of Rockstar Games’ The Warriors, which was actually a rather well constructed and respectful tribute to the film.  No, this is a side-scrolling co-op beat-em-up that somehow manages to be devoid of anything resembling the original movie’s charm or style.  What’s even more bizarre is that it’s licenced by Paramount.  Maybe they just saw their chance to wring a few more dollars out of the franchise and went for it.  Street Brawl was developed by CTXM, a no-name studio who, if this is the best of what they can offer, hopefully remain as little known as they are.

So what in particular raises my ire so high about this game?  Let us count the ways.

The cramped sections of the game are atrocious to maneuver in

To begin with, this game has horrific gameplay, which is unfortunate considering I’m actually quite the fan of beat-em-ups.   Players control their Warrior of choice along a series of side-scrolling environments.  You can play the game co-op with friends or via Xbox Live, or you can add one to three extra AI controller Warriors.  If you actually want much hope of surviving, you’ll want a full four players, because (as I discovered) attempting to play this game alone is an exercise in futility.  Even on the easiest difficulty, you’ll be sucker punched so many times you won’t be able to count, and when you run out of lives, choosing to continue sets you back at the beginning of the round with no lives spare.  This means, if you’re intent of playing this game solo, you’ll quite often have to magically finish a whole round without dying, a feat akin to putting on a pair of your own underpants with your teeth.  It’s frustrating, humiliating and leaves you with an unpleasant aftertaste.

Playing with a friend is the way to go.  The AI is rather dense, and doesn’t quite realise when you’re attempting to move forward through the level.  Because of this, not only will progressing through a round be rage buildingly stop/start, you’ll also end up constantly getting your teeth kicked in by enemies moving in from off screen.

The controls of Street Brawl are clunky.  To begin with, even though the game works off a series of kicks and punches, all the combos appear to meld into one, which gets hellishly repetitive.  Once you begin a combo it’s sometimes difficult to stop, which frequently ends up with you being bopped into the dirt.  The power bonus (called “The Rage”) is built up over a long period of time by landing combos, and once activated gives a slight strength bonus that lasts only a few seconds.  More often than not you’ll be using your Rage meter to activate your character’s special move, which does minimal damage but can help you get out of a beatdown if you’re surrounded.  It also looks fucking ridiculous, which is fun.  Swan does a leaping spin kick that would make Billy Elliot envious, while Cochise drops to the floor for a little bit of Zoolander-esque breakdance fighting.

If you think these first two pictures look the same, just wait until you play the game

It’s also quite often difficult to be exactly sure of what you’re hitting, as the game’s targeting is very sloppy.  Quite often you’ll find yourself getting kicked in the back when coming out of a block, because the game locks you into a direction as soon as you hold down the block button.  Similarly, you’ll frequently find yourself pummeling the empty air over a downed enemy because the game doesn’t acknowledge you’re trying to hit them on the ground.

Like a lot of beat-em-ups, Street Brawl allows you to pick up weapons along the way to help you survive.  These range from the quite useful baseball bat or length of wood to the uselessly short-ranged knife and kind of absurd whip.  To top that, there’s also the mysteriously game breaking molotov cocktail that, when thrown, will send everyone in it’s blast radius running around on fire, decimate the game’s frame rate and leave the supposedly killed enemies standing up idle.  Bizarre.

What really made me disappointed with this game, horrific gameplay aside, is that it really has little or nothing to do with the film.  It’s essentially like they’ve taken Double Dragon, put it in 3D and then dropped a Warriors skin over it.  To begin with, none of the film’s footage has been licenced into Street Brawl, so the storyline is delivered in eerily quiet comic-style video.  Now this is something that could have worked out alright, as anyone who has seen The Warriors knows that it’s scene changes are portrayed like a comic.  But the in-game cartoons are dull, devoid of colour and doesn’t inspire a shred of interest from the player.  To compound the problem, it would appear that to save costs, CTXM only bothered to licence two 3-second sound bites from the movie, probably just so they had something to add over the top of their pre-release publicity.  While I admired the acting in David Patrick Kelly’s beautifully threatening “Come out to play-eay!”, this game leans on it too heavily, even when it’s not really called for.  If you leave the game paused for a length of time, the sound clip will just be repeated over and over in what I assume the developers thought was the height of comedy.

HYPER-REALISTIC NEXT GEN GRAPHICS

The game also does nothing to make use of the fantastic world the film creates.  You’ll only meet five gangs all up during the game.  The Rouges, the Furies, the Turnbull A.Cs, the Hi-Hats and the Lizzies.  Now out of the  thirteen other known gangs in The Warriors, why the fuck are the Lizzies apparently such a force to be reckoned with?  The film has them seduce the Warriors and try to kill them, certainly, but they never put an army out on the street to try and fist-fight.  It’s like the development team learned all they needed to know to make this game by watching the cinematic trailer for The Warriors, then just sat back and tried to remember how to code a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game.

They’ve also made no effort to sculpt the game’s art style to fit the film’s world, either.  Apparently all the gangs enjoy being modern-day bucaneers on the side, as many of the extra points you gain are through picking up items like stacks of gold coins, bars of gold bullion and oversized “green gems”.  Maybe they all just bopped through the Waterfront Privateers or something, who the fuck knows, but it looks just plain stupid.  Oh, and kids, for reference, you should never eat a whole uncooked chicken you just kicked out of a garbage can, no matter what Uncle Ajax tells you.

The Verdict:

Pros: It has co-op.

Cons: Multiplayer is cluttered and difficult to co-ordinate.  Story mode is devoid of story.  Challenge mode is unreasonably challenging.  Any shred of the film’s brilliance has been removed and replaced with a second rate recycled Golden Axe clone.

Overall: Honestly folks, while originally I was looking forward to maybe playing a couple of games of this over Live just for fun, I was so utterly repulsed by the entire game by the time that I finished it that I never want to touch it again.  This game gains a begrudging 0.5 out of 5, if only for the fact that it does actively promote co-op play.  Just a useless effort making a title to squeeze a few more dollars from an otherwise brilliant franchise.  Pitiful.