Good afternoon, brawlers! Today’s article we’ll be looking at the demo for City of Rampage, an upcoming 2D side-scrolling, beat em up being developed by Zhengis Tasbolatov. This game is inspired by Comix Zone and Streets of Rage, providing a handful of attacks and defensive options as a result. How does the game hold up so far? Let’s get into it, you can also check out our run of the full demo in the video above!
In the current demo, you can play through 2 levels. These include 5 enemies and 2 bosses. You have 4 primary buttons: Attack, Jump, Megacrash, and Parry.
Holding down during an attack will give you low attacks, and of course, you have your running and jumping attacks. With the Parry button, you also have the ability to roll by pressing down and sliding by pressing forward.
Finally, the Megacrash comes in two flavors, a neutral double kick, and a flying double kick. There are also some secret attacks hidden in the move set for you to discover!
Praises
The very beautiful comic book art style and chill tunes, while not entirely unique to the genre, give the game a relaxed feel as you cave your enemies heads in.
The range of attacks and defensive mechanics combined with the enemy ai have a lot of potential, and with some fine tuning will contribute to making this a repeated play!
Critiques
While the animation does a great job conveying a motion comic feel, the way attacks land and motion of the characters feel a bit slippery in some areas, stiff in other.
Things like the running, sliding, and rolling will have you moving a bit too much and can be hard to adjust to. The jumping arc could also use some tightening up. The hitpause is where things feel a bit stiff. There’s a lot of pause, but the impact in the animations themselves doesn’t match up.
The audio could also use a bit of work. The sound is very loud with some clips, not as loud with others, and the death cries repeat whenever you juggle enemies.
As mentioned above, the systems in this game have a lot of potential with some tweaks we would like to present here:
- When it comes to the Defense mechanics, the slide and roll seem to overlap in usage, the slide ducking under attacks, and the roll being used to avoid grabs. It really feels like the rolling could do both things, and the animation would fit better for those usages compared to the slide.
- Parrying feels a bit off. There’s a timing to it where it’ll count as a perfect parry or a block, which is a good thing to build on, but the feedback for both seems a bit negligible. Some visual tweaks could help this, maybe higher hit stun when getting a perfect parry.
- The high low game is lacking, which is important for games that are strictly 2d plane. Low attacks don’t have a lot of purpose at the moment due to how much more powerful a lot of the Hero’s other attacks are. Maybe a crouching ability with additional attacks would help this.
- Speaking of those attacks, the running uppercut and jumping forward is extremely powerful and practically beats everything. The only enemy that combats this so far are the muscle shirt enemies.
- Juggling could be omitted from the game for tighter combat. However, if kept, it would benefit from some limitations, like only allowing one juggle point from each attack (see Ninja Saviors) and not allowing enemies to juggle you.
- The enemies could use more dynamic patterns in their ai. At the moment, it feels like the difficulty leans heavily on high damage and instances like being juggled to death as opposed to checkmate situations.
- Starting with the muscle shirts, they could have a blocking ability that signals he will counter with his uppercut. This would give low attacks some more usage. Instead of i-frames on his uppercut, the animation could be a bit faster but easy to counter with a well timed a jump in attack or low dodge. His 1-2 combo could also be a normal attack for him when he’s just walking up.
- The Knife enemies only use their knife throw twice at a time. Maybe this could be reset when they’re knocked down. It seems like this enemy could benefit from the back roll the hoodies have.
- Speaking of the hoodies, I think their attacks are great but too predictable, nothing that needs drastic changing, but maybe when they’re running at you, they can switch up between the flying knee and rolling punch.
- The ladies could also stand to be a bit more evasive, maybe quicker in their movements. I could see this enemy being utilized to trip you up by stunning you at the wrong time while fighting other enemies.
- The first stage boss doesn’t really need to be difficult as it is the first boss, but maybe things like his headbutt could knock down. The lariat he uses could be a get off of me attack or even a momentum based attack that forces you to use the roll ability. The grab ability would be the scariest thing he can do and could be triggered after he blocks a few attacks.
- The second stage boss would benefit more from the combat being tightened up as mentioned above, but I also think there’s instances where he attacks too much. Even in the video above, he continues to attack when you’re not even in front of him. The haymaker seems unnecessary at the end of his grab attack and combo and could instead be a running attack. To be honest, I hope this guy becomes playable in the future, heh heh.
Closing Thoughts
City of Rampage is a breath of fresh air. While the game could use a lot of tweaks, it does feel like something that could be a unique experience.
At it’s best it has the potential to be a 2d Sifu, and if it leans a bit on its comix zone influence with better high low game and dynamic enemy patterns it can become an instant classic in my book.
You can try City of Rampage yourself and find the developer at the links below. Stay Tuned for more BEAT EM UP ACTION!
-Mr.Din
Check out City of Rampage and play the demo on Steam!