Plunking a quarter into 1988’s seminal arcade beat ‘em up Bad Dudes prompted the compelling, accusatory challenge: “are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?” Modernizing that essentially straightforward premise and adapting a cheeky 80s energy to 00s culture, Treachery in Beatdown City commands several tropes from the brawler genre but mashes them up with turn-based RPG mechanics. The final product—or, more specifically, unfinished product, as further content is promised in the form of free updates—is unfortunately uneven at this stage, split between a verbose swath of banter targeting the modern era and a linear sequence of fights.
Starting off in a neighborhood boxing gym and expanding into a ramble across an 8-bit looking glass refraction of NYC, players meet bare-knuckle brawler Lisa Santiago, pro wrestler-turned-community-organizer Brad Steele, and stockbroker wiz kid Bruce Maxwell. The three protagonists summon inspiration from the classic Streets of Rage and Final Fight games, and are slowly introduced throughout the first chapter, which also functions as an able tutorial for Treachery in Beatdown City’s unusual combat system. Essentially, the game may look like Double Dragon at a glance, but it’s actually a kind of beat ‘em up/RPG hybrid, closer to niche N64 title Hybrid Heaven than River City Ransom.
Treachery emphasizes spacing and patience in lieu of running in with fists blazing. Regardless of your chosen brawler, a quick button press allows you to freeze time and schedule up to three consecutive actions, so long as you have enough Fight Points (FP) and bars on your action meter. You then string together combos with strikes and grapples before backing off to recharge before returning to the fray.
The battle system and rhythm of combat is distinctive, which helps with Treachery’s solid first impression. It’s a shame that the first tutorial area (and then a healthy chunk of the nex) front-loads entirely too much information, most of which is never adequately documented or stored in a help menu. For example, Bruce possesses a character ability where he activates special buffs or debuffs by stringing certain moves together, a key detail which is easy to miss or skip through by mistake.
Counterpoint, though: the combat is way too easy or, at least, easily exploitable. Low-powered strikes build up combos which reward FP, so they’re key to initiating. However, these attacks cannot be dodged, blocked, or countered, reactions which you’ll frequently face when fighting enemies in the latter portion of the game. Fancier grapples may lead to big damage, but they are equally risky and unreliable, and can rarely be considered a smarter choice than just using the most basic strike combos ad infinitum. High-risk moves are unlocked automatically for characters at scripted points in the game (they seem to randomly remember them after certain encounters), but they’re hardly more efficient than just vertically kiting enemies while you charge up basic attacks.
Once you figure out how to navigate around fighters in the single-screen arenas—arenas which never change from their basic rectangular geometry, though they’re dressed with variety of colorful NYC-specific backdrops—you’ll only run into difficulty when fighting multiple enemies, especially when a support character continuously over-heals and buffs their compatriots. It’s strange that, even by the third hour, unlocked strikes and grapples feel meaningless, since the same basic mechanics should carry anyone through the entire experience with minimal difficulty, though status effects can further hasten each fight.
The fact that there is limited character growth here beyond automatic upgrades feels like a missed opportunity. Leveling up is such a key distinguishing factor for RPGs, and being able to mold each character’s individual attributes as the game progressed would add a lot to the experience; instead, they function as static brawler archetypes, occasionally receiving an upgrade to health or FP at specific junctures but absent of the recognizable growth seen in other RPGs.
There’s a chirpy nostalgic NES-era soundtrack throughout, as well as an energetic, colorful 8-bit art style which is keenly familiar with both the mid-80s console and NYC’s environs, which means that certain streets and obscure landmarks are easily recognizable. Beyond that, the game offers plenty of dialogue between the main characters and enemies, all of which is tempered by a somewhat tiresome fist-shaking sense of humor aiming at gentrification, racism, the nihilistic munificent ignorance of startup culture, and blank-eyed smartphone reliance, to name a few targets. That humor sadly misses much more than it lands, though it possesses a certain absurdist zeal that is hard to take too seriously, evoking both 80s arcade nonsense and the types of quips spouted by nameless townsfolk NPCs in the first Final Fantasy games. Players can skip through the dialogue if they ever want to get right to the action, but they’d be missing out on some hilariously distorted pixelated facial expressions.
Rather than an extended open area akin to the so-called “belt scrollers” which inspire it, Treachery in Beatdown City plays out in isolated static screens connected by a overworld city map. The occasional side path may lead to a few items, but the format seems like a strange choice when considering the game’s beat ‘em up DNA. It means that winning a fight requires players to always walk off-screen to return to the map view, a dynamic which slows the pace down considerably, especially after the first dozen encounters. If the game was just a fully connected open play area with encounters and enemies, the feel of navigating through a surreal NYC might have been better communicated.
As hinted at earlier, Treachery in Beatdown City is considerably short. Expect it to take a few hours to get through Chapters 0 and 1 before a sudden cliffhanger interrupts the plot and refers to the upcoming free Chapter 2 content update. You can restart with your upgraded fighters, but there isn’t even a difficulty slider or true New Game+. This is a tough pill to swallow with its $20 retail price tag, though this could be considered an investment in an incomparable experience with a warmly nostalgic art style that will probably connect vibrantly with certain players. Perhaps the combat system could evolve into something less vulnerable to weak strike exploitation and more tactically rigorous at its core with a future update; for instance, weapons don’t even appear until quite late into the game, and don’t feel fully fleshed out or viable. Still, Treachery in Beatdown City’s core notion of injecting old school beat ‘em ups with Fallout’s V.A.T.S. remains an intriguing concept worthy of further attention.
Treachery in Beatdown City releases on March 31 for PC on Steam and the Nintendo Switch eShop, retailing for $19.99 (a 25% multi-platform discount of the game runs until April 6). A digital copy for the Switch was provided to Screen Rant for purposes of review.
