The era of the arcade brawler game such as Streets of Rage is all but dead and gone, which is a shame because they were extremely fun to play. Never fear though as one man called Shawn Alexander Allen has set up a Kickstarter campaign to bring this genre into the limelight: Treachery in Beatdown City.
Treachery in Beatdown City takes us back to the 90s arcades and fellow old-school brawlers like Double Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Guardian Heroes. Alexander has stated on his Kickstarter page: “When setting out to create a new game in the genre we wanted to take the things we loved, and build on that.” He also noted that he “noticed when studying the greats that there are problems too, like brain dead enemies, overpowered moves, and gameplay that tends to favour dominant strategies that break the fun.” So Alexander has really studied the entire genre and seems determined to reinvent the way people play side scrolling beat-’em-ups.
The story of Treachery in Beatdown City is your typical over-the-top 90s action tale. It’s 20XX and the world is in danger; the US President Barak Orama (nice original name there) travels to East Fulton to attend a summit at the UN, but is kidnapped during his speech. A group calling itself the Ninja Dragon Terrorist organization takes responsibility for the kidnapping, and wants $1 trillion for the safe return of the president. The corrupt billionaire mayor of East Fulton, Mike Moneybags, won’t let the police investigate unless the government pays the city billions of dollars in relief and the chief of police, Antonio Santiago, calls his daughter and two friends to investigate. He needs to find out whats going on, although in the back of his mind, something about all of this just isn’t right.
There are twenty-six enemy types and they break down in to five different classes including grapplers, grunts, sneaky, support characters and giant enemies. But they not only look different, they each walk differently and all have their own unique ways of attacking. The only repetition in attacks is that there are only so many ways that a person can throw a punch. Enemies range from fast and agile to slow and extremely powerful; some will charge at you and others will play keep away.
The deadline for this project to get funded is 15 March 2014 and it has already received over $12,000 of its $50,000 target. Head on over to Kickstarter right now to back this great, nostalgic campaign and help bring back a genre that has long been forgotten.
