River City Super Sports Challenge ~All Stars Special~ Reviews

BeatEmUps (brawler) = KungFuMaster -> RiverCity (Kunio-kun) -> DoubleDragon

I was wondering why the direct sequel to River City Ransom never came to the west. If I recall the original for this was a Japan exclusive on the NES (Or Famicom if you're a stickler.) This could have used more polish when "remaking" it, my main issues with this game being (especially the first thing in this list): -Randomized Stat Gains: The single player campaign uses Random Number Generation for your created characters stats, these let you move faster, hit harder, not die better, etc. These are assigned usually after you clear a round in the area of 4-12 sport events with the first round being unusually merciful on you needing only one race, don't get used to this. There are times when doing everything right will get you only a single point of endurance, to counter this middle finger the game gave you for playing well, you will be forced to Alt+F4 the game to redo the round you just did for no apparent reason, which is pretty much awful game design. You're going to be needing those stats and not just for the achievement, because most of your opponents have better stats and moves than you do, I found it more difficult earlier on for this reason since you start at literally nothing for stats. Supposedly your chances of good stat gains increase from using only your own created character and coming in first for every event against these generally more powerful than you opponents, however even succeeding at doing this will not guarantee the best stat gains, good job, back to start for you unless you want to potentially softlock yourself because the RNG said so. This means the main gameplay loop is unfortunately an exercise in suffering as you're essentially going against 3 teams of 6 characters each for several events with a single character, and if you succeed despite this the game still won't guarantee good stat rolls. Did I mention your character also won't heal between events unless you stumble across a healing drink, likely sacrificing your lead briefly so you don't die? The devs clearly wanted to punish the player for some reason. They also made sure to give you a minor penalty to your award score for doing this if you don't use your teammates, which is another unusually counter-intuitive thing to punish the player for playing this game. As of this review the site that gave you the listing for the sets of stats you can gain between rounds is gone, so now you don't even know if you got the "good set of stats" or not. An example of stat sets I grabbed from a poster in the forums, I'm unsure of the accuracy of this. I wound up with different stats when I was playing on hard so there may be different stat sets depending on difficulty as well: After Round 1 "130.1.1.1.1.4.4.3 150.2.2.3.3.6.6.5 160.2.2.5.5.7.7.6" After Round 2 "180.3.3.6.6.9.9.8 190.3.3.6.6.10.9.9 190.6.6.6.6.10.9.9 " If someone has the data on this and sees this review, feel free to put up a guide with all the numbers involved. -Crashing. In my experience this will rarely happen when you're winning in the single player campaign. Like the above problem wasn't bad enough. -The steam cloud doesn't seem to work. TL;DR: Only buy if you're a hardcore Kunio fan and are well aware you'll be restarting the game to play the same rounds over and over, not for playing poorly, but more for when the game gives you awful stat gains.