I’ll be honest, before reviewing Rushing Beat X: Return of Brawl Brothers I hadn’t heard of the Rushing Beat series. If, like me, you’re unfamiliar with these games, there were three Rushing Beat titles released in the early 1990’s. Rushing Beat X: Return of Brawl Brothers is both a revival and a sequel, carrying on the narrative of the original games, continuing the iconic brawling, and bringing the series kicking and punching into the modern era.
Where the previous games were classic 2D side-scrolling beat em’ ups, Rushing Beat X: Return of Brawl Brothers adds a third dimension, bringing newfound depth to the environments and characters. While it looks pretty good, there is an issue with depth perception when trying to line up your character with enemies, especially things like flying drones, though this is something you can level at most entries in the genre. Combat in Rushing Beat X: Return of Brawl Brothers is great when it comes together, but there are times when it feels sluggish or set up so you barely get started after respawning. For example, after respawning, you can pick where to drop your character on the screen, but there’s barely any time before you may get hit, with too short a window of invulnerability.
Some enemy types also give no quarter, with your own attacks being ignored, and the enemies able to punish you with their own. Enemy intelligence varies a great deal throughout the game, and at first I thought it could be down to difficulty. After trying the game on both normal and difficult, though, I found that enemies behaved the same. Some would come for you while others would wander aimlessly until you hit them or moved into their line of sight. So many times, they would just wander off screen, including bosses, so you just have to wait for them to walk back into view to hit them. Overall, combat is simplistic with one main button to attack, another to grab, and another to jump. The controls have been further simplified as well, so you can also just hold down the attack button to get a combo going. While I died a lot due to enemy crowding, most of the time I found the game straightforward with no real challenge, no matter what difficulty setting I was playing on.
Each character has their own style, with movement and attack speeds varying across the roster. I favoured the faster-moving characters like Kahlua, Kazan and Rick, over the stronger but slower Bild and Lord J. Wendy Milan’s fighting style didn’t really gel with me at all, though others may like her pro wrestling-based attacks. The best character is unlocked after you complete the story, but can only be used outside of the main story campaign, and that character is the only one I managed to land 100 hit combos with, as I could never quite nail it with the others. All characters can pick up and use weapons in the environment to add further variety, and you can stack them instead of using them straight away, aside from a few exceptions. Having those weapons on hand really does help when the screen gets overcrowded with enemies. Food also stacks, and you can combine them to make combo meals that fill your health and Rushing Beat meter, but you can also buy meal combos and weapons at checkpoints, though the prices are expensive. Rushing Beat can be used in two ways. When it fills, your character will enter a stronger state meaning they hit harder while the meter depletes. At any point in this state, you can choose to activate a super-strong combo, though doing so will, in turn, fully deplete the bar.
Rushing Beat X: Return of Brawl Brothers campaign features nine stages, most featuring a sub-boss and a main boss to beat. Generally, it takes a couple of hours to clear the main story once, but if you want to see every character’s ending, you will need to complete the final mission with that character. Story-wise, there’s plenty of dialogue to recap the events that have led up to the story here, though the story itself is pretty lacklustre and doesn’t have a truly satisfying ending. That said, I did like some of the music in the game, with levels often accompanied by decent tunes.
One bugbear for me was that when you died, before you could respawn, a massive game over screen would present itself with the option to quit or continue. Select continue, you can pick which character to respawn as and carry on from where you left off. It’s a waste of time when a simpler solution would be to die, pick the character you want to respawn as and respawn without having to see game over come up, because the game is not over.
