River City Ransom: Underground (2017)

I held off for years, then finally got together with friends and bought it together. River City Ransom! Group beat-em-up online! Well, we had a decent first session, getting moves and finding our way.

Next week we logged back in, and my characters level had saved, but no one else's had. The multiplayer is broken and Steam community posts indicate this - there used to be some complex workaround, but a final game update has made it unusable - only the hosting player makes any progress.

This is extremely disappointing. To spend all this time and money making a game - the Abobo in jokes, the appeal to 30s gamers familiar with the original - and then to leave it broken is just inexcusable.

Rating: 5/10

I'm not an authority on this game because I didn't get very far. My opinions are probably very ignorant on it right now. I'm only reviewing it because I did play it for a few hours and I will never go back to it because other games came along. But I was really excited for this. They may have updated it since I played it too so maybe they fixed some of the issues because it was a technical mess at launch.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't really disappointed. Now, I will fully admit that part of it is probably my brother and I sucking at it. We had a really hard time getting started, getting money (because you lose so much when you die).

I had issues with some of their design choices though, most notably introducing cops ala GTA into it. It was neat seeing the news ticker talk about people smashing things in an arcade, but then the cops showed up and you would just rush to a safe place to get rid of them. Meh, it killed the flow for me really bad.

I don't have real intelligent opinions on it, maybe the game would grow on me if I played it more. I guess what it comes down to is just the fact that I can go back and play the original River City Ransom even today and have a blast right from the beginning, and yet in the few hours I spent with this I was just frustrated. My 5 reflects that I'm on the fence about it.