Double Dragon IV

I came into Double Dragon IV the way most people come into a nostalgia project: cautiously optimistic, willing to give it room to be janky, ready to call it a love letter rather than a lazy port. What I found was a game that takes that goodwill and fumbles it by faithfully recreating not just the highs of NES Double Dragon but every single design flaw that should have stayed buried in 1989. The combat is pure old-school side-scroll brawling. Billy and Jimmy Lee work through 12 stages against returning enemies like Abobo, Williams, and Linda, with a basic toolkit of punches, kicks, grabs, and a handful of shoulder-button specials mapped to each character. The moveset has marginally more variety than the NES originals, but the absence of a block button is a genuine problem in 2024. Enemies will swarm you in groups of up to eight, and without any defensive option, the fastest way through is to let yourself get knocked down and spam the rising super-uppercut to clear space. That is not a fun loop after the third stage. The AI does not help: enemies stall in place, rubber-band track you with no spatial awareness, and occasionally just stand there waiting for input. The platforming sections - yes, there are platforming sections, bolted on for no defensible reason - use characters who control like trucks on ice, and a single missed jump resets progress. Once you finish story mode (budget somewhere between 30 minutes and a few hours depending on how many credits you burn), the game opens up a 100-floor Tower Mode with no continues, plus a local 1v1 Duel mode with an expanding roster of unlockable characters including the villains you just punched through. Tower Mode is legitimately the most interesting thing here: each unlocked enemy comes with their own moveset, and cycling through Abobo or Linda with their ranged and power-move tools adds a layer of character variety the campaign completely lacks. If there is a reason to stick around past the initial run, it is grinding Tower floors to unlock new fighters. The Duel mode, however, is as thin as it looks. The combat system is not deep enough to support competitive play, and without online matchmaking the mode is a couch-only novelty. No online multiplayer of any kind is available on PC, which is a real miss for a game that is clearly built around two people. Audio is the genuine bright spot. The soundtrack pulls directly from the NES originals with clean 8-bit fidelity, and a remastered option exists if you want something with more body. The visuals are a deliberate NES recreation, with sprites partly inherited from Double Dragon II. The result is a game that looks more authentic than it plays: backgrounds occasionally clash with the sprite palette, and the UI leaves large empty black bars framing the action. It feels like a project built by a five-person team on a tight timeline, because it was. Arc System Works had the right instinct to bring original series talent back for this, but faithfulness to a flawed template is not the same as quality. Bottom line for people like me who care about systems: there is no TTK calculation to do here, no netcode to measure, no ranked ladder, no ranked anything. This is a local co-op brawler with shallow mechanics, a campaign short enough to finish before a pizza arrives, and a Metacritic score of 50 that is honestly fair. If you owned a NES and have a spare controller, it is a passable 90-minute couch session. Everyone else should look at Double Dragon Neon first.

Fred · Scout Team

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